Seeing With The Heart
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: “I am blind, please help.” There were only a few coins in the hat.
A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.
Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?”
The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.”
What he had written was: “Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.”
Both signs told people the boy was blind. While the first sign simply said the boy was blind, the second sign pointed the fortunate ones to their positive possibilities.
Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively. Invite the people towards good with wisdom.
It is not hard to know that negativity is seen as intelligence in the world today. But, we would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to have any soulful area that is not affected…even then, there are those who take their experiences that were meant for deep soulful enlightenment as something negative.
“Some of my friends have told me that, while love and compassion are marvelous and good, they are not really very relevant. Our world, they say, is not a place where such beliefs have much influence or power. They claim that anger and hatred are so much a part of human nature that humanity will always be dominated by them. I do not agree.“ – Dalai Lama XIV
When I travelled by train from Montana to Boston, there was a great insurgence in numbers of beggars than my last trip. They are getting tricky. One man had a fake incision, in the wrong place for what he said he had had – including fake tubing in his arm. Being hit on from so many for money for a ticket, for a surgery, for food, etc., that I closed my heart and almost missed the opportunity to buy someone coffee that really needed it. My cynical heart said that it was ok to give this man something because he had been on the train since Montana and he had not eaten in those three days. I was quite sure. See…I evaluated it, I judged him, I wasn’t willing to take a chance…on a cup of coffee for goodness sakes.
Yes, we have to be careful. But to be enlightened means we have to open our eyes and know the need.
“I believe that at every level of society - familial, tribal, national and international - the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to believe in an ideology. All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities.
I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion. “– Dalai Lama XIV
http://www.dalailama.com/page.166.htm
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