Rabbi Brian's Religion-Outside-The-Box Blog: 77% Weekly

Mowing the Lawn, but Why?

2012-01-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

I had a conversation with my friend Jeremy, who is in high school. It went like this:

J: I’m saving up my money!

RB: Wonderful. What are you saving up money for?

J: I want to buy a lawn mower.

RB: Really? What do you want to buy a lawn mower for?

J: I want to start mowing people’s lawns so I can make a lot of money.

RB: That sounds great. What are you gonna do with all that money?

J: Oh, save it, and then buy something better.

RB: What are you gonna buy that’s even better than a lawn mower?

J: I don’t know... but I gotta get the lawn mower first.

RB: Jeremy, do you even like mowing lawns?

J: No.

This is a kid, so we see right through his “logic.” We know it’s absurd.

He wants to obtain a lawn mower so he can get something better than a lawn mower, but he’s not even sure what that “better” thing is yet.

From time to time, we all work towards a goal solely so we can surpass it in pursuit of a loftier goal that we can’t name.

We might not do it in such obvious ways as my friend did. But we all do it.

We all chase someone else’s dream. The iPad for example – as soon as it came out, I wanted one. I didn’t have a clue what good it would do for me, nor did I know of any part of my life that could be improved by owning one. Yet I wanted it anyhow.

The antidote to not chasing something is to sit with the desire long enough to find out what’s behind it. However, sitting is hard. It’s much easier to pony-up to the Apple store than it is to quietly observe our own greed.

The acknowledgement that we can’t ever get everything we want is an important spiritual-religious theme. It’s timeless. The proverbial itch will never be scratched. Here are four different historical re-tellings of this same concept:

· Buddhism teaches that when we create attachments to impermanent objects, there is suffering (Buddha, 5^th century B.C.E).

· In the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes teaches that as death is unavoidable, the pursuit of worldly living is vanity, mist, and vapor. All achievements and possessions are ultimately profitless, like chasing the wind (4^th century C.E.).

· Renaissance Italians in Florence, Italy, set up a giant bonfire of the vanities (1497). They believed that if they burned the objects of their desire, they would be less tempted to want them.

· Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones sang about the perennial shift from optimism to disillusionment in their song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (from the 1969 album, Let It Bleed album). The conclusion of their song seems like a fitting place to end here: “And if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.”

Spiritual-religious advice: Be incredulous about what you want, because it might not be what you really want.

LCK - Making a Good Impression

2012-01-09T04:00:00.001-08:00

Lord, I heard a mother say to her little child the other day: "Be careful what you say. I want you to make a good impression."

That is what most of us are busy trying to do each day, dear God. We are trying to make good impressions. We are trying to be so very careful because if we are not our impressions will not always be very attractive ones.

Maybe that is our problem. Maybe we are trying too hard. Maybe we impress the least when we try to impress the most.

The more careful we are at getting our impressions right the more often we end up getting them all wrong.

Please help me, Lord, to present myself as I am and not as I think someone else wants me to be. Keep me from dressing up my true self in appearances that no one who truly knows me well would recognize as being the real me. Whatever I am, on any given day, let it be honestly me not some close approximation of the real thing.

Help me to love myself as I truly am so I can put everyone who meets me at ease. Make a good impression on me, dear God, so I won't have to be so concerned with making one on everyone else.

39 Heaven on Earth

2011-12-12T04:00:00.001-08:00

Needed Now: a New Story That is Out of the Box

By: Martin Rutte

It’s time for us to step out of the box.

Why? The significant problems we’re facing aren’t being solved: wars drag on, millions suffer severe drought and famine, ice caps melt, global financial markets collapse, terrorism continues. People have lost faith in many of our institutions – schools that don’t teach, governments that can’t govern, marriages that don’t endure, religions that fail to use their moral authority to end the world’s sufferings.

Add to this the underlying belief that we as individuals can’t make any impactful difference, not just in making these situations better, but in ending them. The prevailing sense is that none of us can make a difference, that one individual can’t take on a problem—war, hunger, disease—and end it. We’re led to believe that one individual can’t take on an institution — government, the financial industry, the church—and make it work. There’s nothing we can do, the world’s problems are too overwhelming. We are blocked by hopelessness, powerlessness, and resignation.

The world’s current story is not helping the world work; it doesn’t empower us with optimism; it doesn’t cause us to engage the major sufferings and solve them. It gives us no sense that we’re moving in the right direction with a momentum that’s growing and expanding. It has run its course. It is tired and ineffective. It can, and it must change.

Hope lies in creating a new story of what it means to be human and what it means to be humanity. We need a new narrative that touches our souls and engages us to participate in creating the kind of world we long for. We need a new vision that unleashes what we already know deep in our souls about the kind of world we want, that helps set free our optimism and energy, and that supports us in taking the steps to make our vision for our world real.

At present, we know how to create Hell on Earth. Why not create its opposite? Why not create Heaven on Earth? And why wait? We can start right now. After all, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

It’s easy to begin. Here’s how:

Recall a time when you experienced Heaven on Earth.
Imagine you have a magician’s wand and can create Heaven on Earth. What is Heaven on Earth for you?
What simple, easy, concrete action will you take in the next 24 hours to help make this real?

Each of us starts by asking and answering these questions of ourselves and perhaps two others. By engaging people in creating Heaven on Earth, we help start a new, fresh, view of the world. That world becomes full of opportunities and brimming with possibility. Into this new human story we are invited to creatively contribute how we can each make a difference. The new story of Heaven on Earth provides the context, but it is you, the individual, that creates the content. If you speak to just two people today about Heaven on Earth and each of them speaks to two the next day and so on and so on, everyone on the planet can be spoken to in only 32 days!

To the skeptics who ask, “What about those for whom Heaven on Earth would be eliminating a particular race or belief, or continuing to pollute the environment?” They are the minority, the very tiny minority. Unfortunately, they are often the people who control the world’s agenda today. No more. It’s now time for the vast majority of people in the world who want a good and decent and working world to be in charge of building our new world story.

Historically, the problem with world visions is that they seek to impose their view, “Follow my way and it will all work.” But imposing a vision never works. It can’t because it removes the freedom to choose. The vision of creating Heaven on Earth is different in a very significant way. It doesn’t impose, it evokes. It evokes the global vision that already lives within each of us.

People do know the kind of world they want, but they’re overwhelmed at the thought of making it happen, or embarrassed at what people might say if they talk about it. Once people are given the opportunity to discover their own truth about the kind of world they want and feel free to talk about it a powerful transformation occurs. A part of themselves they’ve always known, but haven’t met, is revealed. And once this evoked vision of Heaven on Earth is unleashed, a simple, powerful, and effective creativity emerges that begins positively impacting the world.

We can begin to have the kind of world we long for. We can begin living a new story of what it means to be human and what it means to be humanity. We can begin creating Heaven on Earth here and now.

***

Martin Rutte is a co-author of the New York Times business best-seller, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work,’ and is Chair of the Board of the Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. He is also the founder of Project Heaven on Earth and is a management consultant specializing in corporate social responsibility and strategic visioning. He conducts Heaven on Earth workshops globally. More at: http://www.projectheavenonearth.com <http://www.projectheavenonearth> , and on Facebook at: Project Heaven on Earth.