Dear Brothers and Sisters,

You can try many ways to improve yourself for years and years, but if you have practiced enough of ways, you will realize that the best way for you to be doing well, physically and spiritually, is non-grasping onto yourself. As long as you still grasp onto yourself, all other spiritual ways become useless.

Not by coincident that all prominent spiritual schools focus on teaching the people not to focus on themselves. They all understand that the main cause of sufferings, pains, sins and stupidities is that one attaches to oneself.

The Buddhists focus on non-attachment, with self-attachment (one attaching to oneself) the ultimate attachment, and non-attachment to oneself the ultimate deliverance. When Bodhisattva Avalokitasvara ( Bồ tát Quán Tự Tại aka Bồ tát Quán Thế Âm) sees that “the me” is void, s/he surpasses all sufferings, meaning s/he becomes Enlightened. This also means, when you grasp onto “the me”, “the me” overcomes you, blinds you, makes you ignorant and suffered.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant – and Islam) focus on teaching people to “summit” themselves to God, meaning “I am nothing. You are my Lord and my God. I submit myself to You. My heart, my mind, my soul, my life, all is in Your hands.” When we see we are nothing, but we are in God hands, we are delivered from the Evil One, which is the one who tempts us to commit sins and, therefore, to suffer. (The Evil One can be the black guy with horns and tail and holding a trident, or that guy may be your own weakness and ignorance. Pick your choice).

“The me” is a thick black blanket. As soon as you grasp onto it, it covers you completely and you can’t see anything else other than just bits and pieces of you. You become blind and ignorant.

Don’t grasp onto yourself.

How do you do it?

You focus on serving and loving others as the Buddha has taught. Or, you focus on God, and do what Jesus has told you to do, which is “Love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

When you focus on loving and serving others, you become “non-self” (non-attaching to yourself, vô ngã) and you are delivered from ignorance, pains and sufferings.

Just do whatever you are doing – teacher, IT engineer, doctor, nurse, dancer, musician, politician – with the understand that you live not to serve yourself but to serve the world.

Not what you do, but what you think as your fundamental purpose of living, that counts.

All these are not church talks or pagoda talks, folks. They are the secular art of living, seen through the religious language. That’s all.

Wish you all live healthy and happy.

Hoành

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Trần Đình Hoành
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