Somehow every year, I feel I have gotten more and more things to be grateful for, and yes, less and less things to complain about, and to desire.
When asked what I was grateful for during Council training few weeks ago, l spontaneously thought about what supposedly Gotama Buddha once said: “Imagine a single floating ring drifting randomly in great oceans! Imagine also a blind turtle swimming about, which surfaces only once every 100 years…What do you think would that blind turtle by chance often dive right up under this randomly drifting single ring and insert its neck into this half meter wide hole? If it ever would happen at all, Sir, it would only happen after an incredibly long time!” The probability that we came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water – in the middle of that ring. On one try!
Turtle
Synchronistically enough, I recently bumped into Ali Binar‘s wonderful blog, where she made the same remarque, which I encourage you to go ahead and read and amuse yourself, while gasping for air in awe at all the amazing facts on how we came about: a “precious and rare is this human chance!” (scientists calculate the probability of your existing as you, today, at about one in 400 trillion (4×1014)!), a mind boggling! Read more here!
When I first read Gautama’s words, I pondered for a long time (as I usually do when I read or hear about such an extraordinary statement!), and I thought to myself: wow, how amazingly lucky I am to have a human body; how amazingly lucky I am to have found the dharma; how amazingly lucky I am to be healthy; to have given birth to such an extraordinary daughter, and now to have an equally extraordinary granddaughter; an awesomely wise, loving and supportive husband; to live in an amazing community with like minded spiritual people; to have a dream career and to love every minute of it. And the list goes on, and on, and on…
Now my question to you (after you presumably read Ali’s funny/fact mind blowing blog), is how do you feel about it? How do you feel about you being pretty much a miracle, and more importantly, what are you going to do with it, or with you in other words? What are you going to do with your amazingly precious human birth? One thing that came to my mind when I first read Gautama’s remarque was: live your life fully Mihaela, become fully human, realize your true nature and then help others do the same. Simple right? Easy? Maybe not so! But that doesn’t mean we would give up trying, just because we might fail over and over again, say, giving up some very deep rooted habits or conditioning that keeps us meek and insignificant, limited, from realizing our true potential. No, as a matter of fact we could become even more inspired and commited now, that we KNOW the truth: how precious and rare our human chance is!
Now go forth and feel and act like the miracle that you are!
” Everyday, think as you wake up, ‘today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’ ” Dalai Lama