Hi
I helped someone for close to 4 years and did
it from my heart. Now the person has disappeared and
left me in a mess. In helping this person, i lost
everything. I'm very troubled and sad and can't understand or
accept how a person could inflict such pain on others.
I'm a contracted employee in an MNC and worry about being
retrenched during economic downturn as I
have financial deadlines to meet, my own and now plus
his. The person depleted my savings and i have to
service financial committments that he took under my
name.
A Police report was lodged but the Police progress has been slow
and it's uncertain if justice will ever be served.
I believe in Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy and visited the temple
regularly and prayed for the last 4 years that this person
will have a better life. Instead, he stole everything from
me, even my sunshine.
With hard work, i could well recover from my financial
loss but how do you ever recover from emotional
loss? Sometimes i feel like giving up on life
and want to just float off my balcony.
Can anyone help?
Hi, sorry to hear of your loss.
Indeed this is a case that shows that nothing on earth is
stable, permanent, and 'ours'... not 'wealth', not even 'health',
or even 'relationships', or anything that we invest our
identifications with (as 'mine'). Nothing is permanent... we start
from nothing and we end with nothing (death), we can't bring it
over to the next life. Hence we have to practice letting go... this
is part of our practice. We have to practice letting go (everything
-- our mind, body, posessions, everything) until we are free to die
and move on without any regrets or attachment at any moments.
The only thing we can bring over to the next life are four
things... blessings (merits), wisdom, causes and conditions, and
karmic strength. Therefore practicing the dharma is important.
At the same time as you mentioned... money lost can be earned
back. At the time when you started with nothing, you didn't see it
as a problem. You just work. Similarly... don't let the current
loss obstruct you. There are many people who have lost everything
and are still quite well off later. Our moderator Thusness also
went bankrupt before, during the 1997 financial crisis... but he
did quite well years after that. But he was also grateful for the
1997 crisis because he came to know Buddhism during that time... as
he wrote in http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2007/03/thusnesss-six-stages-of-experience.html
: "I got in touch with Buddhism in
1997. Not because I wanted to find out more about the experience of
‘Presence’ but rather the teaching of impermanence syncs deeply
with what I experience in life. I am faced with the possibility of
losing all my wealth and more by financial crisis."
Also for the current crisis he also lost quite a lot of wealth
but he is again grateful because it has helped him in terms of
spirituality and cultivation.
Sometimes without these reminders, people never realise some of
the fundamental truths of life (such as suffering, impermanence,
etc...) and the need to practice the dharma... so do look into the
dharma, see how you can apply it in practice in your everyday life
and overcome your problems.
Anyway hope this helps, by Eckhart Tolle:
THE LOST RING
When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I
would
visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer. She
was a
schoolteacher in her midforties
and had been given no more than a few
months to live by her doctors. Sometimes a few words were spoken
during
those visits, but mostly we would sit together in silence, and as
we did, she
had her first glimpses of the stillness within herself that she
never knew
existed during her busy life as a schoolteacher.
One day, however, I arrived to find her in a state of great
distress and
anger. “What happened” I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary
as
well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said she was
sure it had
been stolen by the woman who came to look after her for a few hours
every
day. She said she didn’t understand how anybody could be so callous
and
heartless as to do this to her. She asked me whether she should
confront the
woman or whether it would be better to call the police immediately.
I said I
couldn’t tell her what to do, but asked her to find out how
important a ring or
anything else was at this point in her life. “You don’t
understand,” she said.
“This was my grandmother’s ring. I used to wear it every day until
I got ill
and my hands became too swollen. It’s more than just a ring to me.
How can
I not be upset?”
The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in
her
voice were indications that she had not yet become present enough
to look
within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe
them both.
Her anger and defensiveness were signs that the ego was still
speaking
through her. I said, “I am going to ask you a few questions, but
instead of
answering them now, see if you can find the answers within you. I
will pause
briefly after each question. When an answer comes, it may not
necessarily
come in the form of words.” She said she was ready to listen. I
asked: “Do
you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point,
perhaps
quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready
to let
go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you
are
become diminished by the loss?” There were a few minutes of silence
after
the last question.
When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face,
and
she seemed at peace. “The last question made me realize
something
important. First I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said,
‘Yes, of
course you have been diminished.’ Then I asked myself the question
again,
‘Has who I am become diminished?’ This time I tried to feel
rather than think the answer. And suddenly I could feel my I
Amness. I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I Am so
strongly, then who I am hasn’t been
diminished at all. I can still feel it now, something peaceful but
very alive.”
“That is the joy of Being,” I said. “You can only feel it when you
get
out of your head. Being must be felt. It can’t be thought. The ego
doesn’t
know about it because thought is what it consists of. The ring was
really in
your head as a thought that you confused with the sense of I Am.
You
thought the I Am or a part of it was in the ring.
“Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for
the
Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but
whenever
you get attached to them, you will know it’s the ego. And you are
never
really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or
‘mine’ in it.
Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who
you
are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.”
She said, “Now I understand something Jesus said that never
made
much sense to me before: ‘If someone takes your shirt, let him have
your
coat as well.’”
“That’s right,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you should never lock
your
door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of
far greater
power than defending or hanging on.”
In the last few weeks of her life as her body became weaker,
she
became more and more radiant, as if light were shining through her.
She
gave many of her possessions away, some to the woman she thought
had
stolen the ring, and with each thing she gave away, her joy
deepened. When
her mother called me to let me know she had passed away, she
also
mentioned that after her death they found her ring in the medicine
cabinet in
the bathroom. Did the woman return the ring, or had it been there
all the
time? Nobody will ever know. One thing we do know: Life will give
you
whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your
consciousness.
How do you now this is the experience you need? Because this is
the
experience you are having at this moment.
Is it wrong then to be proud of one’s possessions or to feel
resentful
toward people to have more than you? Not at all. That sense of
pride, of
needing to stand out, the apparent enhancement of one’s self
through “more
than” and diminishment through “less than” is neither right nor
wrong – it is
the ego. The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you
observe the
ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the
ego too
seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At
times you
may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for
so long?
Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are.
If you
consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more
ego.
THE ILLUSION OF OWNERSHIP
To “own” something – what does it really mean? What does it mean to
make
something “mine”? If you stand on a street in New York, point to a
huge
skyscraper and say, “That building is mine. I own it,” you are
either very
wealthy or you are delusional or a liar. In any case, you are
telling a story in
which the thought form “I” and the thought form “building” merge
into one.
That’s how the mental concept of ownership works. If everybody
agrees with
your story, there will be signed pieces of paper to certify their
agreement
with it. You are wealthy. If nobody agrees with the story, they
will send you
to a psychiatrist. You are delusional, or a compulsive liar.
It is important to recognize here that the story and the thought
forms
that make up the story, whether people agree with it or not, have
absolutely
nothing to do with who you are. Even if people agree with it, it is
ultimately
a fiction. Many people don’t realize until they are on their
deathbed and
everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to
do with who
they are. In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership
stands
revealed as ultimately meaningless. In the last moments of their
life, they
then also realize that while they were looking throughout their
lives for a
more complete sense of self, what they were really looking for,
their Being,
had actually always already been there, but had been largely
obscured by
their identification with things, which ultimately means
identification with
their mind.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, “for theirs will be
the
kingdom of heaven.”1 What does “poor in spirit” mean? No inner
baggage,
no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts
that have a
sense of self in them. And what is the “kingdom of heaven” The
simple but
profound joy of Being that is there when you let og of
identifications and so
become “poor in spirit.”
This is why renouncing all possessions has been an ancient
spiritual
practice in both East and West. Renunciation of possessions,
however, will
not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure
its survival by
finding something else to identify with, for example, a mental
image of
yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material
possessions
and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are
people who
have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some
millionaires.
If you take away one kind of identification, the ego will quickly
find another.
It ultimately doesn’t mind what it identifies with as long as it
has an identity.
Anticonsumerism
or antiprivate
ownership would be another thought form,
another mental position, that can replace identification with
possessions.
Through it you could make yourself right and others wrong. As we
shall see
later, making yourself right and others wrong is one of the
principal egoic
mind patterns, one of the main forms of unconsciousness. In other
words, the
content of the ego may change; the mind structure that keeps it
alive does
not.
One of the unconscious assumptions is that by identifying with
an
object through the fiction of ownership, the apparent solidity
and
permanency of that material object will endow your sense of self
with
greater solidity and permanency. This applies particularly to
buildings and
even more so to land since it is the only thing you think you can
own that
cannot be destroyed. The absurdity of owning something becomes even
more
apparent in the case of land. In the days of the white settlement,
the natives
of North America found ownership of land an incomprehensible
concept.
And so they lost it when the Europeans made them signs pieces of
paper that
were equally incomprehensible to them. They felt they belonged to
the land,
but the land did not belong to them.
The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I
am.
And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through
comparison. How
you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself. If everyone
lived in a
mansion or everyone was wealthy, your mansion or your wealth would
no
longer serve to enhance your sense of self. You could then move to
a simple
cabin, give up our wealth, and regain an identity by seeing
yourself and
being seen as more spiritual than others. How you are seen by
others
becomes the mirror that tells you what you are like and who you
are. The
ego’s sense of selfworth
is in most cases bound up with the worth you have
in the eyes of others. You need others to give you a sense of self,
and if you
live in a culture that to a large extent equates selfworth
with how much and
what you have, if you cannot look through this collective delusion,
you will
be condemned to chasing after things for the rest of your life in
the vain hope
of finding your worth and completion of your sense of self
there.
How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try.
It’s
impossible. Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no
longer
seek to find yourself in them. In the meantime, just be aware of
your
attachment to things. Sometimes you may not know that you are
attached to
something, which is to say, until you lose it or there is the
threat of loss. If
you then become upset, anxious, and so on, it means you are
attached. If you
are aware that you are identified with a thing, the identification
is no longer
total. “I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment.”
That’s the
beginning of the transformation of consciousness.
