Guest guest Posted November 24, 2005 Report Share Posted November 24, 2005 Namaste all. _/\_ Happy Guru-vaar and Thanksgiving day dear blessed seekers! Jaya Sri Radhey! Divine_Lovers/ Here is a good article to enjoy about 'Thanks': A Thanksgiving Test At this time of year, too many of us are grateful for the wrong things. WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY By Marc Gellman Newsweek Updated: 4:41 p.m. ET Nov. 16, 2005 Nov. 16, 2005 - Thanksgiving is not just a great holiday, it is a great test, and the test has two parts. The first part of the Thanksgiving test is making sure you actually give thanks before you chow down and then fall asleep in front of the television watching the football game. We spend hours preparing the meal and often not even a paltry minute actually saying what we are thankful for. So if you actually give thanks at Thanksgiving you have passed the first part of the test. The second part of the test, the much harder part, is to give thanks for the right things. Way too often we give thanks for things that are not true, not real, not worthy of thanks and just plain wrong. Here are two things everybody says, everybody believes and everybody gives thanks for that are, to my mind, corrosively false. 1. "Be thankful you have your health, because if you have your health you have everything." This is not true even though it was my grandma Sarah's contribution to our Thanksgiving toasts every single year. What she and we did not understand is that if you have your health and you are not loved, you have nothing! If you have your health and you are a crook you have nothing. If you have your health and you have no meaning in your life, no hope, no family, no passion, no ideals, no patriotism, no virtue you have nothing. Health is not even in the top 10 of things to be thankful for. Please do not get me wrong here. Health is definitely a good thing, but it isn't even close to being everything. Sick people can and do live profoundly meaningful lives. After all, if it is true that if you have your health you have everything, then the converse must also be true: that if you don't have your health you have nothing, and this is also clearly false. Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeves, Franz Rosenzweig and Lou Gehrig did not have their health, but as Gehrig said, "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth." If Gehrig was right, my grandma Sarah was wrong, and, let me say this plainly, my grandma was wrong. Much of my counseling is devoted to helping people cope with newly broken lives who think they have lost everything. My job is to urge them, cajole them, teach them, remind them that they still have everything they need to lead a spiritually morally and even physically fulfilling life. They may not have what they had. They may not be able to do what they once did. They may have to adjust the expectations of their lives, but they do not have to collapse in self-pity and despair over the loss of their health. I try to teach them what Henry Viscardi taught me, that the opposite of a disabled person is not a well person, but a person who is just "temporarily abled." So on this Thanksgiving please do me a favor, don't give thanks for your health. Think of absolutely anything else more important than health and give thanks for that! 2. "All I want is that my children should be happy." The next thing we wrongly give thanks for on Thanksgiving and on every other day of the year is happiness. We ask the ones we love, "Are you happy?" And if they answer yes, which they usually do just to get us out of the way of their path to the pumpkin pie, then we say, "Thank God!" Don't get me wrong. Happiness, like health, is also a good thing. It is wonderful to see happy people, and to be happy yourself, but is happiness all you really want for your children? The problem here is that many immoral, self-destructive, greedy, narcissistic, selfish, abusive, profane, people are deliriously happy, and this irrefutable fact constitutes for me the ultimate refutation of happiness as the highest human aspiration or virtue. Sadly but truly, moral lassitude and happiness can be conjoined. We all should want more for our children and more from our children than simply that they become happy selfish pigs. And conversely, many virtuous qualities like taking care of elderly parents or a chronically sick child are often accompanied by feelings of weariness, loss, sacrifice and profound sadness, and yet, these actions remain deeply remote and virtuous human achievements. Doing what you ought to do does not always make you as happy as doing what you want to do. But the point of life is to do what you ought to do, or as a great 19th-century preacher said it succinctly, "Happiness is the natural fruit of duty." Refusing to profit from a shady business deal, turning aside from sexual temptation, refusing to cheat on an important test and giving charity money that you could easily use to buy another trinket or toy for yourself--all these things are hard and sacrificial, but they are also right and holy and proper and spiritually ennobling. I never told my children Mara or Max that I wanted them to be happy. I told them I wanted them to be honest and loyal and trustworthy and kind and charitable. I told them that if possessing those virtues made them happy, then, and only then, did I want them to be happy. And I still remember what they said to me when I told them that. They patted me on the head and said to me as they left the living room, "Whatever Dad." It was a profound moment … perhaps more for me than for them. The best advice I ever received as a rabbi was from Arnold Wolf. He said if you are thinking about doing something right that might cost you money or popularity or career advancement, do it without a second thought, but if you are doing something that will bring you money and fame and career advancement think it over carefully to make sure that you are doing it because it is right and not doing it because it is advantageous. I took his advice and I have been stuck here on Long Island for 24 years. Thanks Arnold! So on this Thanksgiving, please try to give thanks for people you love who are only incidentally happy. May God grant us all a Happy Thanksgiving and may we be blessed with the wisdom to thank God for the right things. © 2005 Newsweek, Inc. © 2005 MSNBC.com URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10072760/site/newsweek/ , "Tatwamasi" <tatwamasi> wrote: > > > On this day of Thanksgiving in the US, I take this opportunity to > offer thanks to all in our group for their presence, contribution and > good energies in our satsangh. 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Guest guest Posted November 24, 2005 Report Share Posted November 24, 2005 Namste: Let me add one more thing to this Thinking, Thanking and Linking. Just like the "turkey", let "tarkaH" unite the individual "dvaita" to realize (avibhaktma vibhaktShu) the "advita" principles for prosperity. Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Yadu , pyari_h <no_reply> wrote: > > Namaste all. _/\_ > > Happy Guru-vaar and Thanksgiving day dear blessed seekers! > > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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