Page 108 - Making It To The End Of The Month

MAKING IT TO THE END OF THE MONTH
radical giving of your income that you begin to heal the world.” Go ahead. Take a step on this path less travelled. Be generous.
Greed is the opposite of generosity. It is a strong and selfish desire for something, in particular wealth, power or food. If we’re going to be generous, we must be on our guard against all kinds of greed since it is never satisfied no matter how much we accumulate. As we’ve seen over and again, society’s goal is to get more and more and more. The only antidote to this greed and materialism is generosity. To break the grip of greed, we need to do the exact opposite: give and give and give, and then rejoice and be thankful.
The problem with greed is that it often goes unnoticed. This is because, generally, we only compare ourselves to people in our social group or neighbourhood and not to the rest of the world. The human heart always wants to justify itself, so we compare ourselves to people in our social realm with thoughts like, “I don’t live as well as him or her.” Thus, we assess our greediness based upon our possessions rather than the intents and desires in our hearts. This was evident in the story of Pahom – he did not recognise that greed was resident in his heart; he felt justified in his attempts to improve his standard of living since he compared himself to
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