You can train yourself in this way to feel surrounded on all sides by goodness and benefit. Everything and everyone is benefiting you. The whole world becomes your personal benefactor and is part of you. You have not only been benefited in material terms. Those whose ideas you find useful, who brings out the best in you, who challenge you to grow — they are also your personal benefactors and form part of who you are.
Teaching yourself to see and feel in this way will make it much easier for you to feel close to others. It can make a tremendous contribution to your personal happiness and can certainly make you a more positive force in the interdependent world.
17th Karmapa
from the book Interconnected: Embracing Life in Our Global Society
Read a random quote or see all quotes by the 17th Karmapa.
Further quotes from the book Interconnected:
- You exist in connection with others
- Extend yourself and connect
- The opportunity to love
- Remaining indifferent to the suffering of animals
- Time to act
- Our life is like a vast net
- The air we breathe
- Extending gratitude in all directions
- The imagination to see the other as free and happy
- An important source of closeness and love
- Knowing more is not a substitute for feeling more
- Self-reliance
- The interdependence between us and the world
- Acting against self-serving impulses
- Webs of interdependence
- Noticing the collective effects of our individual actions
- Our closest and most reliable allies
- Interdependence at work
- Touching the core of our equality
- His Loneliness