Personal growth: Developing the spirit of generosity May 11, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Tao Te Ching.Tags: abundance, generosity, Lao-tzu, Law of Reciprocation, personal development, personal growth, Personal growth and development, self-improvement, Tao Te Ching
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One of the precepts that we soon come across in a serious study of personal growth and development is what we might call an attitudinal + action version of the Law of Reciprocation.
In the case of bringing the concept of generosity into our self-improvement program, the law is straightforward: give and you will receive.
As we increase our self-awareness, and our knowledge of the principles of personal growth as it applies to our attitudes, emotions, and behaviour patterns, we discover how generosity can benefit us in many ways; in addition to helping the recipients of our generosity.
Although the true spirit of generosity requires that our actions be done without expectation of reward, nevertheless we gain as much, and possibly more, than those we are generous towards.
We can be generous with our time, our resources, our knowledge and skills, our understanding, our acceptance, and more.
The ancient Chinese wisdom writer Lao Tzu stated the concept concisely in this excerpt from chapter 81 of the Tao Te Ching:
A sage never hoards:
the more you do for others,
the more plenty is yours,
and the more you give to others,
the more abundance is yours. (1)
(1) Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, as translated by David Hinton in his book, The Four Chinese Classics
Personal growth: Is empathy intuitive or learned? April 20, 2014
Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Concept of personal growth.Tags: empathy, intuition, personal development, personal experience, personal growth, Personal growth and development, philosophy, spirituality, Tao Te Ching, visualization
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For a program of personal growth and development to be complete, experts tell us that it is important for us to work on fostering the moral attribute or virtue of empathy within ourselves
Within the concept of personal development or self-improvement we could define empathy as being the ability to recognize, understand, and appreciate the feelings or emotions being experienced by another person, or any living entity that has feelings and emotions.
This Personal Development Potential post presents some ideas, or factors to consider, concerning the quality of empathy, rather than trying to provide definitive scientific answers on this abstract human ability.
A key question is whether we possess the attribute of empathy intuitively, or do we need to undergo a variety of circumstances, experiences, and /or education in order to have this capability.
Questions relating to non-intuitive empathy:
These questions involve the paradigm of personal experience as opposed to non-personal experience.
A few possibilities or examples:
(1) Do we have to have gone through a period of poverty in our own lives to appreciate the pain of people who are poor?
(2) Do we have to have or have had some personal mental or physical limitation in order to sympathize with a person who is mentally or physically challenged?
(3) Do we need to have lost a loved one in order to have empathy with someone who has suffered a personal loss?
(4) Do we have to have failed with an important financial project in order to empathize with a friend who has gone bankrupt?
Alternatively, can experience with opposites create empathy?
Turning around the above questions 1-4 we can ask:
(1) Can being financially secure help us to appreciate or understand the difficulties and emotions induced by poverty?
(2) Can being perfectly healthy mentally and physically help us to empathize better with people who are not?
(3) Can never having experienced grief help us to appreciate someone else’s loss?
(4) Can being highly successful in our lives help us to have empathy for the person who has failed with their major life-projects?
Such questions unfortunately, are just that – they are not answers.
But hopefully, sympathetic feelings and human decency are inherent or intuitive, and this, combined with our work on self-improvement, will imbue us with the character attribute of genuine empathy.
Appreciation and understanding through opposites
There is an interesting viewpoint on the generative quality of opposites expressed in the Tao Te Ching, as translated by David Hinton:
All beneath heaven know beauty is beauty
only because there’s ugliness,
and knows good is good,
because there’s evil.
Being and Absence give birth to one another,
difficult and easy complete one another,
long and short measure one another,
music and noise harmonize one another,
before and after follow one another. (1)
1) The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Analects, Mencius, Translated by David Hinton, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, California, 2013
(Hinton provides an excellent overview of these classics, which helps in understanding the thought process of each of these Chinese ancient sages.
Further reading:
There is an extensive scholarly article on empathy on the Wikipedia website at the following URL:
Personal Development Ideas 