Compassion - Why we need it?

Compassion is the source of our happiness in life. Without loving kindness and compassion, there is no peace or happiness in the family, the society, the country or the world. Compassion is also the source of a healthy mind and a healthy body.

Practising compassion means hot harming others but only helping them, and helping others is the cause of our own success. If we are loving and compassionate, we make our life worthwhile by bringing happiness to others. Seeing others happy, should make us happy...

Compassion makes everyone our friend. If we lack compassion, we have difficulty finding friends, and when we do manage to find some, sooner or later they will become our enemies. Even the members of our family can become our enemies.

Without compassion, life is really miserable. People who are only concern about themselves and whose heart are empty of affection and compassion for others have no real peace or happiness. It brings loneliness, depression and many other problems.

If we don't have compassion, no matter how many friends or how much wealth we have, we have no real peace or satisfaction in our life. we won't be able to enjoy life as our heart will be like a hot, barren desert. If we lack these precious qualities and our attitude to life is selfish, our wealth actually brings a lot of worry and fear and unfulfilled expactations. We will also be afraid that one of our competitors will become richer, more powerful, better, stronger....etc etc thus our wealth actually create problems in our life bringing us enemies and even endangering our life.

Self-cherishing and lack of loving kindness and compassion makes lives of wealthy people unhappy and unsatisfying. No matter how much education and intellectual knowledge we have, we will have no peace in our heart if we lack loving kindness and compassion. Even if we spend our whole life studying, our education will only cause us problem if we are motivated simply by self-concern. Instead of bringing happiness and satisfaction, our education will cause pride, anger and other unhealthy thoughts to arise. If we don't have compassion, there is danger that we will use our education and intelligence to harm others, even to destroy ourselves and the world.

Excerpts from: Ultimate Healing - The Power of Compassion (by Lama Zopa Rinpoche)

Why Some People Have All The Luck
By Professor Richard Wiseman - University of Hertfordshire

Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve?

A psychologist says he has discovered the answer. Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are always in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experience ill fortune. I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, I have interviewed them, monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities,whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.

I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50."This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. My research eventuallyrevealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitudethat transforms bad luck into good.

Towards the end of the work, I wondered whether these principles could be used to create good luck. I asked a group of volunteers to spend a month carrying out exercises designed to help them think and behave like a lucky person. Dramatic results! These exercises helped them spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck. One month later, the volunteers returned and described what had happened. The results were dramatic: 80% of people were now happier, more satisfied with their lives and, perhaps most important of all, luckier. The lucky people had become even luckier and the unlucky had become lucky. Finally, I had found the elusive "luck factor". Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:

1) Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right
2) Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine
3) Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well
4) Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call.

Have a Lucky day and work for it.

The happiest people in the world are not those who have no problems, but those who learn to live with things that are less than perfect! :)