Each moment leads to the other, each day to the next, each year to another and each life time to yet another. When a moment is lived without awareness, the next one is dulled and those that follow may be completely lost, and that will lead to a total waste of precious time and energy.
Start the day with the right frame of mind. Be grateful that another day is before you to learn and be gained from it. Yesterday is beyond your reach again so do not allow the unhappiness of yesterday to flow into today’s existence. Tomorrow is but a dream, so do not spend today in dream making, but live it well and live with hope. Realise the number of days, or years that have been wasted and that today is a new great opportunity for you to make good what is lost. Life is not an excuse. It must be lived with quality and with meaning. Start the Day with a determination to improve yourself and reject the idea of wasting yet another day and another opportunity.
Living with quality is to live with awareness of each act that you do, which also means that you are aware of being alive and for the purpose of attaining a clear and calm mind which is not subdued by delusions. The beginning of the day is sacred, is most important, welcome it and feel happy and grateful that there is still the possibility to make improvements for the future, to make amends for the past. Each day should bring you hope and joy so that you will have no time to entertain depressive thoughts and complaints. Live each day well and in harmony with yourself and others. Live it with full awareness so that throughout the day you are alive. Knowing right from wrong you will be able to keep all the precepts and enjoy being able to do so. This will cause the arising of compassion because you are aware of what life is!
Then in the evening reflect with gratitude for what the day has given you. A day is a day. It will be filled with activities which can be great or mundane, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant or both. Be happy that you are fully aware of all these activities and treat them as teachers. Learn from them and realise that all activities create opportunities, are causes that will have results. In this way all happenings and situations of the day, be they happy or otherwise, can be accepted as one stepping stone to the next. Then even failures will no longer be dreaded because they will eventually lead to success. Everybody seeks success and equates it with happiness. This is the view of the unthinking mind, a mind that has not understood awareness of the truth. One should guard against the dangers of success at all times because it can cause you to drop your guard and fall asleep or it may cause you to become more greedy. Only the mind that is aware of such dangers will prevent the turning around of success into failure which will be painful. In happiness few will remember the purpose of life and the value of a calm and contented life, in happiness most people forget the Divine.
It is likely that they may be caught up with worldly success, become drunk with it, and then love their awareness of the precious opportunity of living for the purpose of attaining the great goal of life. Only the constant practice of awareness will lead them to continue their good practices when everything is good and smooth.
When life is tough and the going is rough, everyone remembers the Divine and the path that leads to divinity. Only when faced with dangers and pains do people begin to realise the importance of compassion, generosity and the like because they long to receive them. Only when caught with failures do people begin to think, to become more holy and good, hoping for God’s help and looking for the morrow to bring them the change of luck! Then they will try to live the day well for the sake of receiving blessings! There is nothing great in this practice because it is tinged with expectations and fear!
Live well then. Each day should be a day of joy and happiness because suffering is always self-created! Just because you want to have more things in life, a little more fame and fortune, you will be led to a deluded state of mind so that each day is lived with greed, anger and delusion. Watch it. Realise the dangers of a drunken mind, it will cause greater pains and disappointments and even though success can be attained, then are you sure that there is a limit to your craving? Happiness is he who has awareness of this fact!
Monday, 4th March 1985 (1st Moon 13th Day)