Pure awareness cannot be used for personal gain

 This would be pulling in two opposite directions at the same time, thus contaminating emptiness …and screwing ourselves up! We can work purely for its own sake, creating a beautiful piece of music or making people laugh or designing weapons or making lots of money, but this would come under the heading of the eight worldly concerns.

 The Eight Worldly Concerns
Attachment… to gain, pleasure, praise and fame.
Aversion… to loss, pain, blame and bad reputation.

 In a relative world, we want to do the right thing, be successful, use our intelligence, and be a decent human being. This is fair enough: we certainly don’t want to cause harm to others, or to ourselves.

 But this is samsara, and we become too involved. In fact, the human realm is described as the realm of desire – excessive activity and frustration. From a spiritual point of view, this involvement gives rise to attachment and aversion based on ignorance. We have to decide what is truly beneficial. This is a very subtle business, and a personal dilemma.

All that glitters is not gold.
We may find ourselves imprisoned in one of the six realms.

 When attachment and aversion are present,
everything gets sticky…sticky…sticky…!?