No one is perfect. I certainly am not perfect, but I try my best to do no harm. It isn't easy at times, but we all must try our best to not harm any living being. This includes ourselves. I have to admit this is easier when we don't have other people around us, especially those that live backward lives. Unless we become a hermit, we have to deal with other people. Even hermits have to deal with animals and insects, so they aren't entirely free either.
We can harm others in a variety of ways, not just with violence. The golden rule applies here, treat others the way you want to be treated. You don't want to be made fun of, or hurt emotionally in anyway, so refrain from doing that to others. You don't want to be physically hurt, so don't lash out at anyone else, including animals and insects. You don't want your valuables to be stolen, so don't steal anything. You don't want to be lied to, so tell the truth. It really is that simple, and yet can be difficult to follow through with.
The problem can be that other people do not follow the golden rule, and so you incorrectly assume that you don't have to when you deal with them. In these cases, we want to prevent them from harming themselves, by harming us, so we do need to try to stop them if we can. It is best if we can do this with the intention of helping them rather than just being self concerned, but in degenerate times like we live in currently, it may be a mix of both intentions. That's alright, especially when we are just starting out to change our ways and trying our best to do no harm.
It is important not to harm any living being because we reap what we sow and this will inevitably come back at us and usually worse than what we dished out in the first place. The thing I fear the most is the negative karma that I have accumulated because I don't know how bad it is or when it will ripen on me and cause me suffering. I may not have done very bad things in this life, but I have no idea how badly I behaved in past lives and that is a frightening thought. This is the same for all of us. None of us know for sure what we have stored up in our karma storage lockers that is just waiting for all the elements to come to together to put the whammy on us.
To prevent being harmed in the future we need to stop behaving in harmful ways towards other living beings. We need to do the best we can to refrain from adding more negative actions to our karma storage. This will not clear up the negative karma that is already there, I will explain how to do that in a future podcast, but we can slow down and stop making the pile bigger. We may find that we still have negative things happening to us, but if we can try our best to deal with these things in the calmest, best manner that we are capable of, then we can help to eliminate them.
You may have heard of the saying that if someone hits you on your cheek, to turn the other cheek, so they may strike that one as well. What this means is if someone has hit you, they have freed you from that negative karma you were carrying of being hit by them. It says to turn the other cheek, so you can clear up even more of your negative karma. It is better to do that than to hit the person back. If we hit the person back we are depositing more negative karma into our savings AND we fail at clearing up the negative karma of being hit by that person, so that will remain and it will happen to us again some time in the future.
In these degenerate times, most of us would have an incredibly difficult time to not get upset at being hit by someone. Few of us would be able to gladly offer up our other cheek. While we may think it would be good to let someone hit us repeatedly so we can clear up our negative karma, it is not good for the person striking us. They will then create a mountain of negative karma from hitting us and that will harm them in the future. It is best to stop anyone from hitting you or harming you in any way, to not let them harm themselves.
If you need help changing behaviours that you have that harm others you can listen to my podcast called “Overcoming Negative Habits”. It will help you to start slowly, but steadily towards freeing yourself from harm. Changing our way of doing things and who we have around us that influence us, can take time, but it can be done and is necessary if you want to improve yourself. Giving in to our negative habits and justifying our bad behaviours can be ingrained in our psyche so could take some time to overcome. Keep chipping away at it until you get to the place you want to be.
When we tell the truth all the time, people learn that they can believe us and trust us not to lie to them. If we never steal anything, people will see their valuables are safe with us around. If we don't make fun of people or put them down, they learn that their emotional state is safe in our company. If we stop ourselves from using people to get the most we can out of them, people will like having us around. When we refrain from violence, they will be at ease because they know they will not be physically harmed. It will be easier for us to make friends and people will like us better if they know we are trustworthy to be with. People will enjoy our company more and be at peace around us.
When we stop others from treating us in negative ways, they learn they cannot get away with their bad behaviours around us and they will go else where to find someone they can treat badly. We are not responsible for their bad choices in life. We can do our best to let them know what they are doing to themselves, but we cannot force anyone to be a better person. We can only set an example for others to follow if they choose. We need to let them go, no matter how attached we are to the person and let them live their own life. We can pray for them and love them from a distance if want to care for them. Sometimes that is the best we can do for some people. Just to clarify, I am talking about adults here, not children. Children need our guidance and need to be disciplined to learn how to best behave for their own welfare. We need to set the best example we can for our children to follow.
If we can stop ourselves from causing any harm whether that is to living beings, including animals and insects, to the environment, and to the world around us, we will be making this a better place to live. We will improve our own lives and the lives of those around us. If we can stop behaving in ways that cause ourselves negative karma, then we will no longer be harming ourselves. We will feel better about ourselves. We will know we are making a difference in our life.
If you have been listening to my podcasts you will have heard me speak about the negative actions of getting rich, famous or having control over others. You may be wondering how these things harm you. All three of these things cause huge problems for our self-cherishing. The hardest thing to overcome is our self- grasping, self-cherishing minds. We put ourselves before others. We feel we are special in some way. We want all of our desires to be fulfilled. This is what imprisons us. We will never have real freedom as long as we hold onto our self-cherishing. All the things we do for selfish reasons create that mountain of negative karma we carry around with us.
Getting rich means we prevent others from living well. Getting rich makes us feel more important or more deserving than others. We may treat others badly. We may brag about how rich we are. This is very dangerous and keeps us imprisoned. We become attached to the idea of being rich. We don't want to lose any money we have. We want more and more money. We are a slave to money. We may foolishly think that we will have personal freedom, or security or all our problems will end when we get rich, but the opposite is true. You will be in more jeopardy if you are rich. More people will be after your money, after your possessions. You risk you and your family being harmed by people that want your money. You will have to pay people to look after you and your family because you will have less security. You could lose your money at any given moment because nothing is permanent. Many people commit suicide when they lose their wealth, because their attachment to the money and the status that comes with it makes the loss unbearable. If you are rich you are a slave to that money and all the trappings that come along with it. You are not a better person if you are rich. You are not special if you are wealthy. You are harming others and especially yourself.
Being famous is similar to being rich. You want to be treated special. You may even surround yourself with people that brown nose you, to keep your ego puffed out of proportion. Fame can cause us to become conceited. You may feel you are more deserving than others or more important than everyone else and this causes tremendous self-cherishing and self-grasping. If you allow your fame to feed your ego, you are imprisoned and a slave to your fame. If you think anyone is beneath you, you are a slave to your self-grasping. If you treat others poorly because you don't think they are as good as you, then you are harming others and yourself.
Having control over others is another thing that causes us great harm. Once again this puffs our ego and conceit way out of proportion. If we go so far as to become a dictator, we will be causing the most damage possible to ourselves in this manner. Having control over others may cause a person to become mean and put their own desires and wants before the needs of the people they are in charge of. This is very dangerous and causes multitudes of negative karma. The more people you have control over, the more catastrophic the effects will be for you if you treat them badly for you will have the biggest mountain of negative karma in your storage just waiting to ripen on you some time in the future.
Many people if not most people on this planet want to attain these backward things. They have no idea the damage they cause themselves. This is why being ignorant of the truth is so dangerous for them and for all of us. Most people behave in ways that are the worst for their own well being, because they think the backward ways of behaving are good for them. Most humans have how to live life completely wrong. We all do, until we learn the truth and rid ourselves of ignorance. Only by learning the truth can we understand how to stop harming ourselves and discover what real freedom is.
Please, do yourself a favour and stop causing any more harm to anything. Please stop engaging in negative karma, so you will stop harming yourself. I am planning to do a series of podcasts on karma and the effects it has on all of us in the near future.
You can listen to the full podcast here: https://youtu.be/6fRJgNOk7Dk
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