Reading and Sharing

I was reading the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. I think if he were living today, most people would consider him to be a madman. 

If Swami Vivekananda were to be living today and show up on our doorstep with a begging bowl, how would we react or respond? 

I have caught myself being judgemental. A few years ago I read something in one of the personal development books that have stayed with me till today. The moment we judge others, we give the right to others to judge us as well. We are too quick to react, to speak rather than give others the benefit of doubt.

In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey, there is a story of the author visiting a cafe where a child next to him is playing and making a lot of noise that was disturbing the author. Finally, he stood up and spoke to his father next to him. “Why don’t you ask your son to calm down and not make so much noise?” The father replied, “I don’t know what to say to him. His mother just passed away.”

We jump to conclusions too soon, too quick to judge. The silver lining in this seems to be that a good number of people in the world have realized the need for mindfulness and that’s why it’s gone mainstream now. Yuval Noah Harari in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21 Century, mentions mindfulness to be one of the most important factors for the benefit and progress of humanity. 

I digress, started the post by reading the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and now talking about mindfulness and books. Time to be mindful and get back to what I wanted to share and convey 🙂

We judge others too easily, we feel we know everything about the other person and therefore can judge them. But we hardly seem to know ourselves well, who we really are, what really matters to us? If we knew ourselves very well, we wouldn’t get influenced and distracted by random things in the world. Reminds me of the wisdom of the proverb that goes something like, “Know thyself”. 

Knoweth thyself, knoweth the world.

I just made that up, but it sounded good 🙂