Title: FW: [globalnews] Moral Vision
Appropos to the “lurker” thread
MORAL VISION
To the man who lives for an idea, for his country, for the good of
humanity, life has an extensive meaning, and to that extent pain
becomes less important to him. To live the life of goodness is to
live the life of all. Pleasure is for one's own self, but goodness is
concerned with the happiness of all humanity and for all time. From
the point of view of the good, pleasure and pain appear in a different
meaning; so much so, that pleasure may be shunned, and pain be
courted in its place, and death itself be made welcome as giving a
higher value to life. From these higher standpoints of a man's life,
the standpoints of the good, pleasure and pain lose their absolute
value. Martyrs prove it in history, and we prove it every day in our
life in our little martyrdoms. When we take a pitcherful of water
from the sea it has its weight, but when we take a dip into the sea
itself a thousand pitchersful of water flow above our head, and we do
not feel their weight. We have to carry the pitcher of self with our
strength; and so, while on the plane of selfishness pleasure and pain
have their full weight, on the moral plane they are so much lightened
that the man who has reached it appears to us almost superhuman in his
patience under crushing trials, and his forbearance in the face of
malignant persecution.
To live in perfect goodness is to realize one's life in the
infinite. This is the most comprehensive view of life which we can
have by our inherent power of the moral vision of the wholeness of
life. And the teaching of Buddha is to cultivate this moral power to
the highest extent, to know that our field of activities is not bound
to the plane of our narrow self. This is the vision of the heavenly
kingdom of Christ. When we attain to that universal life, which is the
moral life, we become freed from bonds of pleasure and pain, and the
place vacated by our self becomes filled with an unspeakable joy which
springs from measureless love. In this state the soul's activity is
all the more heightened, only its motive power is not from desires,
but in its own joy. This is the Karma-yoga of the Gita, the way to
become one with the infinite activity by the exercise of the activity
of disinterested goodness....
Just as we find that the stronger the imagination the less is it
merely imaginary and the more is it in harmony with truth, so we see
the more vigorous our individuality the more does it widen towards the
universal. For the greatness of a personality is not in itself but in
its content, which is universal, just as the depth of a lake is
judged not by the size of its cavity but by the depth of its water.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
--
"We must stand together, the four sacred colors of humanity, as the one family that we are, in the interest of peace. We must unite the religions of the world as a spiritual force strong enough to prevail in peace. We human beings are a spiritual energy that is thousands of times stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy is the combined will of all the people with the spirit of the natural world, to be of one body, one heart, and one mind for peace."
--Leon Shenandoah, Tadadaho for the Haudenausenee (Iroquois Six Nations):
