Be Generous In Spirit
Be generous in spirit and life will show you the red carpet. When discussing generosity there are two mentalities involved here, one, an abundance mentality and the other, a scarcity mentality.
An abundance mentality is one of believing that the world is abundant and unlimited and sharing one’s blessings with another is their approach to life.
A scarcity mentality believes that there are limited resources and that you are either a winner or a loser and if I win that’s good and if you lose, it’s just too bad but it doesn’t affect me in the least.
Generosity doesn’t take into consideration how much one has to give to share with another, its the mental approach to wanting to share it with another. A street beggar sharing his meagre meal with another street beggar is genuine generosity whereas a billionaire giving $1000 to charity, while admirable, is relatively meaningless to the billionaire.
Life gives to Life through us and we somehow believe it is us doing the giving. We come into this life with nothing and we leave with nothing and whatever we store up and value will be shared among our inheritors and the Tax Man.
The one reward of having a spirit of generosity while we are alive is to see the happiness and joy our giving does for the beneficiary and then how we feel about that via our levels of happiness and joy. Most times we benefit even more than the beneficiary as we feel elevated and our vibrations are lifted upwards and we feel blessed with this feeling.
Maimonides, a Jewish Rabbi,(1138-1204), created the Eight Steps of Charity and it is worth summarising them to give one a better idea of generosity;
1. To give unwillingly
2. To give inadequately but with gladness and a smile
3. To give only when asked to do so
4. To give directly into an outstretched hand before being asked to do so.
5. To give without knowing to whom but the beneficiary knows who gave
6. To give to a known beneficiary but the beneficiary does not know who gave.
7. To give without knowing who gave and who receives, as if one is giving to heaven.
8. To support someone with a loan or an endowment, or entering into a partnership with him, or find employment for him, thereby strengthening him so he does not have to be dependent on others for charity.
Generosity can be seen as being entrusted by your Higher Power to be their hands in sharing their wealth which we mistakenly believe to be our wealth. We come into this world naked and we leave the same way. Whatever way we look at generosity simply know we either give willingly or unwillingly but we give all we have and prize away when we leave this earth.
Be a generous giver and know the happiness, joy and bliss that comes from being generous to another.