March 6

Today's quotation:

Perform a kind action, and you find a kind feeling growing in yourself, even if it was not there before.  As you increase the number of your kind and charitable interests, you find that the more you do for them, the more you love them.  Serve others, not because they are your friends, not because they are interesting, not because they are grateful. . . . Serve them because they are the children of your father, and therefore are all your brethren, and you will soon find that the fervent heart keeps time with the charitable hands.

W.B.O. Peabody

Today's Meditation:

One of the more fascinating dynamics of life is that we tend to be treated as we treat others.  If I treat the people I deal with as my brothers and sisters, then guess how they'll tend to treat me?  It usually won't be instantaneous, as they may be suspicious of my motives (why is he treating me so well?) or have a lot of walls up that need to be broken through, but once they realize that I really do treat others kindly, they'll treat me kindly in return.

And they really are my brothers and sisters.  Culturally, we tend to preach separation of all people rather than unity--if you aren't me, then you are separate from me.  We preach competition rather than cooperation, and we teach independence rather than interdependence.  These dangerous and destructive ways of looking at life can be overcome only if one person at a time decides to reject them and live his or her life as he or she sees fit.

It's taken me a long time to see the true unity of all human beings.  While our bodies may exist separately, our spirits--which is who we truly are--are unified; we all are children of the same Spirit.  And your belief in God or Spirit or whatever power you believe has created the universe and all of us does not need to be the same as mine, for your spirit and my spirit are kindred spirits, no matter who you are or what you do.  Kindred spirits are not limited to those who have similar interests or skills or talents--we all are kindred spirits.

Unfortunately, though, we treat our kindred spirits as if they were strangers, and we keep them at a distance as if we don't care about them.  But we must care about them, and we must show them love and kindness--if this world ever is going to become the loving place of harmony that it has the potential to be.

Questions to consider:

How many other people have you seen as true kindred spirits?

Why do we focus so much on separation and competition?

What can we do for ourselves if we want to start treating others as true brothers and sisters?

For further thought:

I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore also of humanity.   What though we have many bodies?  We have but one soul.


Mohandas Gandhi

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