Christmas Candy, the Meaning of Giving, and Tibetan Meditation Centers

Here in the United States we’re just finishing up the annual emotional and commercial orgy of Christmas, also known as, “the season of giving.”  It started me thinking about the nature of giving and, oddly, a Tibetan meditation center I toured over 20 years ago.

Our guide was a woman who lived there with the improbable name of, “Candy.”  I’m guessing that trying to explain the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy to a group of tourists in Bermuda shorts was not the highlight of her day, but she was pleasant, kind, and patient.  One of the concepts that she put in a nutshell for us was the idea of accumulating merit.

“We get up in the morning with the idea of helping other sentient beings and, if we do that, it earns us karmic merit.  And then, instead of clinging to that merit for ourselves, we dedicate it to the good of other sentient beings.  Which accumulates more merit, which we dedicate to the good of other sentient beings.”

I glanced around at the people I was with and their faces were frozen in expressions that pretty much conveyed, “I don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about, but you seem relatively harmless.”  To me, though, it was a major revelation.  In just those few sentences, I understood the concept of giving with absolutely no expectations of getting anything back.  It’s been something I’ve gone back to again and again over the last two decades.  A lasting treasure.

Now, here’s the thing:  I feel absolutely sure that Candy had no idea that she was making a major impact in another person’s life and thoughts.  We spent maybe 30 minutes with her and I’ve never seen her again, but I still remember that moment like it happened yesterday.  It was a gift, and the gift was her just living her life and telling her truth.

We tend to think of giving as being something that’s transactional and we can see that idea illustrated in the Six of Cups.  The little boy is giving a gift of love (symbolized by the Cup) to the little girl.  Implicit in that image is the next step in the transaction, where the little girl is going to say, “Oh, hey!  What a nice cup!  Thanks so much for thinking of me.”

And then we feel good because we’ve made someone we care about feel good and we feel good about ourselves because, after all, we were thoughtful enough to give something nice to someone we care about.  When we put all of the commercialism and forced jolliness aside, that’s part of the sweetness of Christmas – it’s a chance to give something to others and tell them we love them.

Most of us feel pretty disconnected with that in our general, everyday lives, though.  We may get up in the morning with the intentions of being, “good,” people.  We’re loving with our life partners, we don’t snap at the cashier in the grocery store, we smile at our co-workers and try to work hard at our jobs.  As near as I can tell, right around 90% of us are good people, in the sense that we make some effort to not be shit heads and to be decent to our fellow humans.

Still, a lot of us are afflicted with a sense of meaninglessness.  We feel like we’re slow walking through life in a sort of a daze and we’re not really making any difference.  It’s like we’re born, we eat a lot of t.v. dinners, and then we die and we wonder if anything we’ve done actually matters.

That’s where synchronicity and a leap of faith comes in.  That’s where giving with no sense of attachment to the results comes in.

Each one of us is absolutely unique.  There’s never been anyone exactly like us before and there will never be anyone exactly like us again.  To the extent that we celebrate that uniqueness and share our own individual truths in our lives, we become a walking, talking, breathing gift to the world.

But we almost HAVE to detach that gift from results.  If we make our giving transactional – which is to say, someone saying, “Thank you for being you,”  – we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment.  The fact of the matter is that most people don’t even see us, in any sort of a meaningful way.  Like us, they’re hustling and bustling through life, trying to pay their bills, hoping they’ve got some clean socks, trying to figure out what in the hell they can cook for their kids that isn’t a t.v. dinner.

And if they do notice us, the odds are that they’re seeing us through so many perceptual filters that they don’t see who we really are.  As the old Indian adage goes, “When a pickpocket looks at a saint, all he sees is pockets.”  

So, we have to make a little leap of faith that we ARE being seen without knowing that we are.  And that we ARE making a difference in other people’s lives and in the world, without any proof that it’s so.  Sometimes it may be like Candy at the meditation center, where words we speak become seeds that grow in other people’s lives.  Sometimes it may be as simple as smiling at a person we pass on the street, never knowing that they were depressed and suicidal until they saw our smile.

We can see that in another card, the Ace of Cups.  The cup represents love flowing into the world, but, unlike the Six of Cups, it’s not attached to anything.  It’s not something we have to earn.  It’s not dependent on being thanked or being noticed or appreciated.  It’s just there in the world and it makes life better by its very presence.

When we finally get it that we’re giving to the world around us and making a difference just by being us to the fullest extent that we can, then we shift into having meaning in our lives because we ARE making a difference.  We may not see it.  Perhaps no one will ever tell us.  Maybe it will take twenty years for that good to ripen in someone else’s life, but we DO matter.  Every single day.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available on Amazon for less than the price of a meaningless t.v. dinner and it’s twice as nutritious!