Gratitude and appreciation opens the most wonderful doors of blessings the Universe has to offer. Those who are not grateful and appreciative end up scraping the bottom of the barrel of life overwhelmed with a burden of things to complain about. The more they complain the more they attract and manifest more reasons to complain. It's a vicious cycle that many are hopelessly stuck in and will probably never escape within their miserable lifetimes.
Oh well....
It took me a long while to finally realize that everyone has the right to ruin their lives if they so choose and it's none of my business if they choose to do so.
It took a hell of a lot of suffering before I learned that lesson and began to understand that a great portion of peace of mind comes from minding one's own business whenever possible.
You can be a great Buddha who has mastered yourself, but if you are then put in charge of a monastery and are responsible for monks who have not mastered themselves chances are your peace of mind will be continually sabotaged. It's rather impossible for the "enlightened" leader of a monastery to mind his own business when his monks get into trouble because they are not so very "enlightened". What the monks of the Buddha did was indeed the Buddha's business whether he liked it or not!
I remember reading a story of how one of The Buddha's monks was a homosexual and was seducing other monks. Oh man! Was the Buddha ever pissed off when he found out! Gave his "enlightened" peace of mind a real kick in the nuts alright!
