At Least Give Your Smile
Edited extract from unpublished transcript; final session of a 10-day seminar in Australia, March 2001.
Thought stirs the emotions and then emotion stirs more mental activity. And so it goes on. To reduce the emotional fire that makes thoughts so tumultuous and tormenting, start by giving. The fire is your selfishness and the end, or diminution, of your self, begins with giving.
You have to give; and it can be an effort. Everybody likes to be spontaneous, so they say. That’s the puerile mind and emotions. Everybody wants to be spontaneous - like their spontaneous selfishness! To break the selfishness you have to exert effort. You have to do it against your ‘can’t be bothered’ wilfulness. You have to break through. You have to do it!
Instead of sitting there with the mouth going down, lift the corners of the lips up. If you just sit there, aimless thought will come in and the corners of the lips will go down and down and you’ll put on the mask of habit. The idea is to loosen up the mask.
Practise it. In the beginning, the smile might be phoney. But you’re not going around with a silly grin on your face. Just the corners of the lips lifted up a little, when you sit in the bus or the train, or anywhere. Whenever you think of it, lift up the corners of the lips!
Reaction and Response