The thought of the day is the concept of "Be Good, Do Good," which is a very simple and basic guideline that is excellent advice for anyone's life. However, the real trick for us humans is understanding what is good. Sure, there are obvious answers. Like if we see a starving man on the street, it would be good to go buy him a sandwich. But what if that man isn't really starving? What if he's just really skinny and very tired, and is sitting on the curb waiting for a taxi, and then by giving him the sandwich, we've made him realize that he's looking like a beggar. He might feel really offended by our action and get depressed because we thought he was a starving man.
I think most of us would say that, in this case, we really are trying to do good, so the intention is there. You might think this would never happen, but I've run across a few similar instances. I once belonged to a group that took dinner to people who were sick or who had new babies. Most of the recipients were very appreciative, but I ran into two people who seemed almost annoyed that I had intruded on them. (This was all organized through a church, so they always knew we were coming, it's not like we just popped in with an armload of KFC).
I once showed up at the door of an older woman who had fallen and broken her foot, and had to have foot surgery, and was wearing a boot. When I arrived at her door, she opened it and led me back to the kitchen so I could put away the homemade soup and yes, home-baked bread that I had made for her. She did not seem in any way happy to receive me or the food, and on the walk down the hallway she said, "So, you like to cook. Is that your problem?"
At the end of this encounter, I really questioned whether I was doing good for this person by bringing her food. She didn't seem to want it at all. My presence seemed to be an intrusion. I actually cooled a little bit on the idea of the meal delivery program, and I think this was one of the last times I did it for that group. So how do we know when we're really doing good and being good?
There are much bigger issues in front of us than delivering soup to injured seniors. And our powerful brains are so clever at rationalizing whatever our physical bodies want to do. I have heard people make very well-structured arguments about why they are right in doing things that are obviously illegal, immoral or just plain mean. How do we know if we're really doing good, or if our clever brains are lying to us?
Well, I found something that made me think a little more about this today. What I found in the Yoga Sutras: "Blessed are the pure; they shall see God." And as Swami Satchidananda goes on to explain,
That does not mean the impure cannot see God. If they work for it, they can, but their God will appear as a demon to them because of their impurity. Their vision is colored; they can't see God's our nature. They see God from the wrong angle...
But if you are really serious about this business and really want to go deep into meditation, take care to have a clean mind. Otherwise, you are not going to get it.Which kind of put these things into perspective for me. To know if we're really doing good, and to know that our decisions are based on real right-and-wrong as opposed to our clever brains' ability to rationalize anything, we have to have a purified mind. How do we get that? Well, that's the whole struggle. I think that right there is the life journey. We work at it by spending time in meditation, by being unflinchingly honest with ourselves, by asking the opinion of people whose character we trust, and by critically examining ourselves. It isn't going to happen overnight. But we keep trying. We may keep seeing God from the wrong angle, but at least we are seeing him, and hopefully with time, he'll help guide us into a purer consciousness. But that can only come if we keep working at it.
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