Blue Sky

This TED talk by Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati is one of the best I’ve seen. I’ve watched it several times, and each time something new still strikes me.

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“One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough.”

“To be compassionate is not a joke. It’s not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. The self: you are self-aware. On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream.”

“That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. But the extension of the logic is that you don’t need to fulfill your desire to be happy. You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be.”

“To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. You learn swimming by swimming. You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook.”

Happy New Year

Full transcript   |   TED talk page