..续本文上一页ry good indicator of where one is in the spiritual life is to see how well you get on with other people - especially the difficult ones. Can you be peaceful when someone else is giving you a hard time

　　 Can you let go of anger and irritation towards a person, a place, or towards yourself

　　 Eventually we have to, otherwise we are never going to get to enlightenment, we are never going to get peaceful.

　　Imagine what it is like to say: "No more will I get irritated, no more will I fight or reject a person or their habits. If I cannot do anything about it, I will learn to peacefully coexist with that which I do not like. I will learn to peacefully accept the pain, instead of always turning my head away from the pain and seeking the pleasure." Imagine that!

　　Sometimes people think that if you do not get angry then you just tend to be a vegetable, you just allow others to walk all over you, you will just be someone who sits here and does nothing. But ask yourself: "What do you feel like after you have been angry

　　 Do you feel full of beans, very energetic

　　" We get worn out when we are angry; it just eats up so much of our heart energy. Even when we are irritated or negative towards a person or a place, that eats up energy. So if we do not want to feel so tired and depressed, we can try, as an experiment, not getting irritated. See how much more wide awake and zestful we feel. Then we can send that energy out into caring for others, and to caring for ourselves as well. It is in our power to do that. If you really want to get on the fast track to enlightenment, try giving up irritation and anger.

　　So how do you give it up

　　 Well, first of all, by wanting to give it up. But a lot of us do not want to give up our anger and irritation - for some obscure reason we like it. There is a wonderful little story about two monks who lived together in a monastery for many years; they were great friends. Then they died within a few months of one another. One of them got reborn in the heaven realms, the other monk got reborn as a worm in a dung pile. The one up in the heaven realms was having a wonderful time, enjoying all the heavenly pleasures. Then he started thinking about his friend, "I wonder where my old mate has gone

　　" So he scanned all of the heaven realms, but could not find a trace of his friend. Then he scanned the realm of human beings, but he could not see any trace of his friend there, so he looked in the realm of animals and then of insects. Finally he found him, reborn as a worm in a dung pile... Wow! He thought: "I am going to help my friend. I am going to go down there to that dung pile and take him up to the heavenly realm so he too can enjoy the heavenly pleasures and bliss of living in these wonderful realms."

　　So he went down to the dung pile and called his mate. And the little worm wriggled out and said: "Who are you

　　", "I am your friend. We used to be monks together in a past life, and I have come up to take you to the heaven realms where life is wonderful and blissful." But the worm said: "Go away, get lost!" "But I am your friend, and I live in the heaven realms," and he described the heaven realms to him. But the worm said: "No thank you, I am quite happy here in my dung pile. Please go away." Then the heavenly being thought: "Well if I could only just grab hold of him and take him up to the heaven realms, he could see for himself." So he grabbed hold of the worm and started tugging at him; and the harder he tugged, the harder that worm clung to his pile of dung.

　　Do you get the moral of the story

　　 How many of us are attached to our pile of dung

　　 When someone tries to pull us out we just wriggle back in again because that is what we are used to, we like it in there. Sometimes we are actually attached to our old habits, our …

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