DEC 28

Food, clothing, shelter, health, care and education are necessary to sustain one's precious human life. We need to respect each other and repect the basic needs and institutions that benefit other people. Beyond that, nothing external is worth our time, peace, energy and wisdom. The other commodities of living are mostly tools to satisfy our craving mind, worship and polish our ego and tighten our grasping. As we accumulate mundane pleasures, our craving to race after more is aggravated.

The Lalitavistara-sutra advise:
Your enjoyment of pleasures of desire,
Liking drinking salt water, will never bring satisfaction.

Rich and poor alike suffer because of external worries related to desire. Even millionaires suffer from anger, despair, depression. They can not enjoy who they are, but live only for what they are attracted to or enslaved by. It is not that making money in itself causes suffering, but handling over one's life to the tyranny of external posessions in the killer of joy and peace.
~ Tulku Thondup

The essence of spirituality is to understand life properly, to find the truth and the untruth about who we are.
All that can be found is untruth.

Fundamental knowledge is simple, but people unnecessarily become involved in external practices.
~Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meditation should be on one' own nature.
Slowly the mind will become pure, and
the formless Consciousosness will be recovered.
In this way, your true nature will be understood.
You will become convinced that whatever
exists is not separate from yourself.
~Nisargadatta Maharaj