Namaste
My brother spent a lot of time in foreign lands. While he was in Nepal for a year, I visited him, and we spent a month having adventures in that strange and beautiful land. Waving prayer flags, Nepalese and Tibetan handicrafts, and lots of cows on the streets — this was just a backdrop for the most fascinating aspect of Nepal, which was the people and their changing culture.
The common greeting there was a ‘Namaste’ – if you’re not familiar with it, you steeple your hands in a prayer-like manner before your heart, give a little bow, and say ‘Namaste’.
This greeting has been adopted by many spiritually-minded United Statesians, and the usual ‘translation’ of the greeting is something like ‘I honor the Godhead in you’.
It occurred to me the other day that this can have a veiled meaning for many of us.
Something like this goes on in our heads as we bow:
I see that you are smoking cigarettes and driving an obnoxiously huge SUV and in general aren’t contributing to the world, but I know that within you dwells the Godhead, and thus as I Namaste you I honor your higher self. May you learn to accord with your higher self in the near future. Amen.
What if, instead, something like this happened in our heads when we bowed:
Whatever you are doing, you are manifesting perfectly in this moment.
The idea here is that any disapproval of someone’s actions has completely to do with our own assumptions and misunderstanding of the world. What would happen if we saw everyone as manifesting perfectly in every moment?
Of course, our first thought is that the world would run amok, but with that level of compassion being shown to everyone, what would really happen?
Turn it about to yourself for a moment. What if those whose opinion was most important to you came and told you that you were absolutely perfect, and you could do nothing wrong in their eyes? Would you promptly go murder someone and steal their plasma t.v.? Probably not. You’d probably feel a great ease come over you, and find that it was suddenly much easier to make positive changes in your life, now that you weren’t constantly pressuring yourself to be perfect.
That’s the magic of compassion.
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