Imagine that every person in the world is enlightened but you. They are all your teachers, each doing just the right things to help you learn perfect patience, perfect wisdom, perfect compassion. :: Jack Kornfield
*nichole
[QUOTE=Nichole;19135]Imagine that every person in the world is enlightened but you. They are all your teachers, each doing just the right things to help you learn perfect patience, perfect wisdom, perfect compassion. :: Jack Kornfield
*nichole[/QUOTE]
Hello Nichole,
Knowing a bit about human nature, my guess is that the things are the other way around: you imagine that you are enlightened and the other peple are…
…well, not enlightened.
[quote=oak333;19157]Hello Nichole,
Knowing a bit about human nature, my guess is that the things are the other way around: you imagine that you are enlightened and the other peple are…
…well, not enlightened.[/quote]
this sounds more like it. you know what us human beings are like.
I don’t agree that it is truly human nature–I have much more faith in[B] true [/B]human nature 
as opposed to the veil of maya that we all operate under. Rather, I think this is merely a pitfall that everyone, myself included, falls into; and that pitfall is mistakenly buying the non-truth that if only everyone else was better, quieter, nicer, more polite, etc., than things would be just perfect in my world. Sound familiar? This is why Jack Kornfield is encouraging us to do the opposite–to turn our ourselves on our ear–to look at everyone around us as our teachers, as spiritual gifts that will spark precisely what we need in our lives to help us get to the essence of our nature. It is a really lovely practice that can change the dynamic of a normally difficult situation into something wonderful.
It goes hand-in-hand with a video of Pema Chodren that I posted a while back: Spiritual Troublemakers.
Namaste,
Nichole
And since you posted this video, I become curious about Pema Chodron, and I love the way she is passing on the teachings. She too is suggesting us to connect with the openess and softness of our hearts.
She says acting out and repressing what we don’t want to feel or see about ourselves are the main ways that we shield our hearts, the main ways that we never really connect with our vulnerability, our comassion, our sense of the open, fresh dimension of our being. We spend a lot of time trying to make everything solid an secure, while the ground of all our experienceis very spacious, not as solid as we tend to make it…