Dear Brothers and Sisters,

A community-minded person cares about his community.

This is an idea that has probably existed in our head while we were still apes – Homo habilis, 2 million years ago, long predating Adam and Eve who were full human, Homo sapiens, 300 thousand years ago.

The community-minded idea is in our DNA a long time before we became full human, probaby while we still were some crawling fish crawling upshore in schools.

That means, community-mindedness (ý thức cộng đồng) is not something we learn. It is part of us, in our nature. And that explains very well why all the big religions and philosophies of the world focus on one fundamental point: “Love your fellow brothers and sister, all of them, leaving no one out.” And people call that “love, bác ái, từ bi, yêu người, nhân từ” – whatever the name is, it is our inherited community-mindedness. It is part of us from the primordial time.

If we live with our nature, chances are we will do well and be happy. If we live against our nature, chances are we will be miserable and fail. If your nature is music, you want to be a musician, and probably not a mathematician, a physician, or an AI engineer. No need to be Einstein to figure this out. Actually, we don’t even have to figure it out – we natually know it with experience: you have music blood, you love music and do well with music, but not other things.

That is why the most repeated advice for success is: “Do what you love, and you will be happy and successful in life.” “What you love” is usually what is in your nature, in your blood.

Same thing with loving others. All the happy and successful people I know have one thing in common: They all care about others greatly. While they still work for their job and their money, their heart and spirit are always oriented toward others: the people they serve directly as well as the people they never know and never meet. Just humans in general.

I say “happy and successful people”, meaning some people may be successful but not happy. Bank robbers are probably successful at bank robbing, but not happy in life, because deep in their heart they don’t feel good about themselves and what they do. They probably are in constant bitterness about life and people – they are simply antisocial.

Happiness and success come to people who care about others, all others, in their thinking.

If you care about only one group of people – say, either Jew or Palestinian, but not both – then probably you are now in the Israel-Palestine war. Loving one group but not other groups has the great tendency to generate wars, as we can see throughout human history.

So, for your society, your country, your world, live with the community-mindedness in your nature – love people, all of them, then you will be happy and successful, while being a spiritual force of goodness for your communities.

Living against your nature will just make you uhhappy and fail.

Wish us all keep our Boddhisattva heart.

With compassion,

Hoanh

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Trần Đình Hoành
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