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RE: Abundance Without Attachment
December 16, 2014 at 3:49 pm
My mom is a hoarder, so I know that extreme. However I've had some periods that I've spent homeless and couch surfing, eating food I've found since I needed all the money I had to get gasoline to go to work.
It's true that stuff is just stuff, and not important in the grand scheme of things. I have no possession I would be sad to get rid of if I had to. But some stuff is needed. A bed, a shower, and some food. And I don't think it's bad to be attached to those things. I prefer a warm bed to the back seat of my car. I prefer having a warm meal that I cook to handouts.
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RE: Abundance Without Attachment
December 16, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Basic necessities are always a must, but when people talk about materialism they usually mean thing you don't really need to lead a healthy life. You need a roof, food, a good place to sleep, and such. You don't really need a PC and three types of consoles with their own games. You don't need this year's mobile device to function. That kind of thing.
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RE: Abundance Without Attachment
December 16, 2014 at 4:37 pm
I think that the most important factor in how happy you are is... how happy you decide you are. Most of the things we identify with happiness or unhappiness generally contribute based on how we believe they should. If you believe that wealth makes you happy or unhappy, you'll find reasons why it does, and the same with whatever other situation you can think of. It's the whole basis of the glass half full/empty idea.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
