Friday, June 13, 2008

The 100 Possession Challenge

I've been interested in decluttering my life for a while, and in spurts I give it a try (though often not getting beyond one room). It turns out that some people are willing to try taking this to the extreme in the "Olympics of decluttering" and reducing their personal possessions to 100 items. Gulp! My family had an interesting conversation about it over lunch today, and decided that it would have to be 100 items per person, and jointly owned family-stuff wouldn't count. But still, getting down to even 200-300 items would be an extreme challenge. I'm not sure if I'll give it a try, but at least it give me great inspiration to work on decluttering my life more. By the way, did you know that ancient Buddhist Law of Possessions allowed a monk to have only 8 possessions? Interesting.... I believe that is roughly what Gandhi owned when he died.

If you want to read more, try the Zen Habits web site article here. ( The Zen Habits site is an incredibly wonderful site in general when it comes to decluttering you possessions, your mind, and examining your priorities.) There is also a guy blogging about his efforts. And finally, surprise, there was even a recent Time magazine article about this movement.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Spiritual Intelligence

I was trying to look up Spiritual Activism on Wikipedia recently. While they didn't have an entry on that, the did have one on Spiritual Intelligence that was rather interesting. Spiritual Intelligence is considered to be one of the several types of intelligences, such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, etc.

There were several definitions of Spiritual Intelligence given in the article, some of which struck me as too vague to be of any meaning to me. Here's a collection of some of the more interesting and meaningful ones though:

[Spiritual Intelligence is]the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning-giving context; the intelligence with which we can assess that one course of action or one life-path is more meaningful than another... [It]allows human beings to be creative, to change the rules and to alter situations. It allows us to play with the boundaries; it gives us our moral sense; it allows us to wrestle with questions of good and evil and to envision unrealized possibilities.

The article goes on to list a set of practical aspects of spiritual intelligence:

  1. Acceptance of adversity rather than raging against it. Not resorting to blame, guilt, rationalising, anger, despair, denial and other typical defense mechanisms.
  2. Using materials preciously and avoiding waste. Recycling, reusing things wherever possible, reducing waste and repairing things instead of replacing them.
  3. Being grateful for everything including adversity.
  4. Having the capacity to see one's ego (Witness Consciousness) and choose whether to go with the ego's habitual tendency or do something different.
  5. Apologising for one's mistakes and making amends wherever possible.
  6. Seeing the inherent beauty of everything and everyone.
  7. Having a positive attitude.
  8. Treating everyone and everything with compassion and gratitude including tools and machines.
  9. Leaving every place you go better than you found it.
  10. Respect for the environment and bio-diversity as having inherent as well as practical value

It sounds a lot like the list of characteristics of a well rounded mature personality.