Goodness: the power of being good
Reading Time — 7 minutes
If you want to be peaceful, if you don’t want to be disturbed easily in life, if you want to have equanimity and composed calmness in every situation, your control of your mind and emotions needs to be rock solid. And the power of goodness is one of the greatest ways to achieve that.
Goodness is the foundation for peace and calm
Goodness — being kind, being good — will give us rock-solid equanimity, calmness and poise in any situation. We all know it’s good to be good, but simply being a good person is the foundation for unshakeable strength.
If a person goes out for a date and they’re not composed, their date will get scared and that’ll be the end of that. Even in the marketplace, if you’re negotiating with a person and you’re not composed, the salesperson won’t reduce the price.
To have equanimity and composed calmness throughout all circumstances in life, then your control of your mind and emotions should be rock solid, like a mountain. A storm will knock over the trees but it can’t knock over a mountain, because it’s rock solid.
Now, how do you develop this rock solid control of your emotions, your mind, your thoughts? How do you control these like the dog wagging its tail, not the tail wagging the dog—not the mind and emotions controlling you?
You can do that through goodness. In other words, through having the feeling inside you that you are a good person, not a bad person.
When you have that feeling, then it doesn’t matter what people say about you, because in your heart you feel and know you’re a good person, you’re nothing but goodness.
So that’s what you want to cultivate. The goal is to feel like that.
How to believe you are a good person
If you look at yourself and you don’t feel you are a good person, how do you change that? You change that by collecting experiences that you can refer to, so that when you look at yourself you begin to see evidence that you’re nothing but goodness.
When a person feels that they are bad, or that they don’t have goodness, it is because they haven’t consistently lived and expressed selflessness and kindness in their life. They haven’t been very kind and selfless to other people, they haven’t been very kind and selfless to animals, so they don’t have experiences of their own goodness to reference.
They tend to focus more on survival—“How do I have a good career? How do I make it to university? How do I get that job? How do I get that promotion? How do I buy a good house? How do I have whatever I want?”
They focus on those things as their primary goals, and not on the goal of being good to people, being kind to others, being helpful when someone is in need, giving to a stranger.
How to collect experiences of goodness
When you have the goal to be kind, then when someone is struggling in life and they share their story, you hear it and you try your best to listen to them. You don’t think, “I’ve got enough problems of my own, I don’t have time to hear about your problems.”
When a person feels that, it’s because they don’t care about others. They think, “I’ve got enough on my plate,” and they are focussed on their own survival.
You don’t need me to tell you how to collect these experiences of kindness and goodness. We all know how.
There’s not one person on the planet who doesn’t know how to be kind and good. Even the troublemaker in school knows how to be good, but he just doesn’t want to because he thinks if he’s bad then the other kids will see him as tough. But even he knows how to be kind, how to be good.
Setting our goal to be good
So, set goodness as your primary goal, instead of survival. Everybody has to survive—nobody’s going to come and put food on your plate. So take those actions needed to survive, but know survival is not your primary goal.
There might be two people working at a supermarket checkout, but one person is working with the motive and intention to survive while the other person is thinking every moment, “I love to be kind and peaceful, I love helping others, I love making others feel good.” So they are doing the same work but one is sponsored by goodness and one is sponsored by survival.
A person who is focusing on survival is not more efficient than a person who is focusing on goodness, because goodness is not related to time or speed, it’s about how we’re being towards others.
So we have to get the goal right, we have to get our priorities right. And we do that by understanding that being kind and being good will give us that equanimity, that rock-solidness, that calmness, that poise.
The benefits of being good
When you are kind and good you start to build up a reference of these experiences, so when someone says, “Oh, you’re hopeless, you’re absolutely hopeless,” you just feel, “I think you’re talking about someone else, I don’t think you’ve got it right.”
Without saying anything to that person, you just don’t react, because you know that doesn’t describe who you are.
When you live with goodness, nobody can prove that you are a bad person because you’ve got so many reference points in your life of nothing but selflessness and kindness and nobleness. Such sacrifice, such beauty, such gentleness, such understanding, such helpfulness.
So in goodness you remain innocent. If someone says you are bad, all you have to do is go to your reference points and just look at the magnificence of your being, of how you’ve lived.
When you have such a large ‘collection’ of acts of kindness and goodness, then suddenly you’ll be unshakable. You’ll have such strength, such equanimity of mind, such deep peace.
Like a rock, you’ll be unshakable. Nothing in life will be able to disturb you. It won’t matter if there’s no money, no partner, no house, no car, no food—you’ll be unshakable. You’ll be undisturbed, with a smile on your face.
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