Is a home part of "The Good life?"
Is a home part of "The Good life?"
17 September 2019
Home a) the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
b) an institution for people needing professional care or supervision. (No, thanks - Not want not.)
The Good life = Eudaimonia, a philosophical term for the life that one would like to live, originally associated with Aristotle.
We possibly agree that a home has a lot to do with the concept of living a Good Life.
For millions of years animals carried with them what made up their home. We can do better now, as we are about to see…
When we talk about “home,” it brings up memories of comfort, companionship, and love. For most of people, though they have lived in different homes in the course of their lives, the most important one seems to be the home they grew up in. This is probably so because from childhood to adolescence and adulthood, our perceptions and perspectives of life are changing far more dramatically than in any other phase of life.
Here in Bali we now see another way that a home gives a deeper meaning.
We full or part time immigrants can create maybe for the first time a home which is truly representing “Us”.
Before we had to share the home with others and often the interests there where overlapping or even conflicting. Now the home is about us and our reduced circle of family only.
A place to finally be able to concentrate on matters of life and to have the option to go inside ourselves without the distractions we had to endure before.
Then we will see that it is not the opulence of the structure but the inclusiveness of the people which really makes a home.
The ambiance of a home that comforts us in this new, often final period of our life naturally sticks in our minds in a much more profound way than many other things that we may have seen before and will experience later on.
Therefore, let me suggest to take all the time you need and get the best advice available to find the right place if you are still out there and looking.
In Ubud area the local leader in property matters is for many years already the UbudProperty team. There certainly are reasons for this and you would do well to find out the why and how to use their expertise for yourself.
Thankfully, our generation is starting to think independently and collecting such expertise in many areas. Others before, where just accepting input from elders, religious institutions, teachers, kings and fortune tellers..
We are today transforming the world from authorities being the truth to truth being the authority. This is a good transition, but the in-between space can lead to confusion.
This reflects in our homes, where many things that used to represent our heritage, history, and culture, many knick-knacks which tell stories that not everyone is able to interpret correctly, are getting dumped by the next generation because they do not make sense to them or disturb the style.
A lot of things may not make any logical sense, but they may make a lot of life sense. People, things, and structures that are part of your home need not make logical sense – still they mean the world to you.
Homes have to become incubation spaces which awaken the understanding that ultimately, the only home a human being can really own and know is within. If you do not realize in this lifetime that the ultimate home is within, then the only home you will experience is the grave.
If the material structure around you, referred to as ‘our villa’ gave you the peace of mind to find your home within, then the Good Life whatever you want this to be, is within reach before your expiry date.
If you would ask around: “How do you define ‘The Good Life’, chances are you hear what minutes ago my wife said to me when I asked her the same question.
“I want to be healthy. I want to be able to choose what I do with my life. My relationship to family and friends is important. I’d like to have financial freedom. I want to see people around me happy and well.
“Anything else maybe?” I was asking and she shrugged her shoulders: “nah, not really”.
Are there any gaps, which you can fill in? There surely must be more.
You see, I am just back from breakfast on the terrace. My feet are cold, because up here, 500 m above Ubud it is still fresh at night and the tiles are cold.
So, as far as I am concerned right now, one more thing could be added: Physical wellbeing.
Now if we look at the meaning of being physically well, this immediately opens up a whole can of worms.
What feeling good is like, we sure do not need to discuss. A coffee with a snack in the afternoon, the break after exercise when the body can relax and endorphins are released, maybe a massage, a hot shower… a list which can go on and on from ‘just nice’ to ‘crazy ecstatic’.
Hold on, but this is just relating to our flesh and bones. Is our the emotional and mental wellbeing not even of much more importance?
Does this warm shower really take our worries away? Does the cup of coffee with biscuits on the side help to forget that grandfather just was delivered to the hospital, blue and red lights blinking?
Before I continue on this, I like to clarify my actual limitations in knowledge and understanding on the subject of the Good Life. I am not an expert myself, just beginning to scratch a bit on the surface.
You see most of you have likely already joined some kind of seminar or lectures.
Where did the presenter or guru get his apparent knowledge from? Of course he obtained it from an external pool of information. Extracted what is essential for his theme of the day and passed this on. Same here.
However, I am using my own words, hoping that this intellectually drastically reduced version is easier to read and more suitable for you, than a lengthy essay on all philosophical aspects connecting your home and life’s quality. After all, you came here to find something related to property in Ubud area, I guess.
On philosophy and spirituality we find plenty more in Ubud’s groups.
Because I am older than most of you, some of the insights came to me through the events I had to process over many years in various Countries. This allows me adding my spice to an otherwise already well prepared take away meal.
A small blotch on the side of this plate comes from a book of Birgit Ohlin, a life coach:
It can be argued that your values are one of the drivers of what you perceive to be the good life. Values such as power, security, tradition, or benevolence are a collection of principles that guide our selection or evaluation of actions, events, and people and what we “deem to be correct and desirable in life” (Schwartz, 1992).
To me this sounds very theoretical on a subject which is touching our spirit and emotions.
Sure, on the surface it makes sense and this may be how most humans look at the quality of their life.
This kind of perceived quality is therefore established in many minds.
And, of course you know what our mind is actually being made of, right? Do you?
We may not like to think it through, but isn’t our mind the rubbish bin of everyone who was passing by and dropping their bit of information into the bin. Parents, friends, teachers, books and also the people who had to make you afraid in order for some of their nonsense to stick to the inside of your bin.
Much of the content of our mind is not our choice, no matter how good or poor. Can you agree?
Now we can sunderstand that our mind cannot be who we indeed are.
The same actually applies, when looking just at our body only. (72% just water, like a bottle which is ¾ full of it). The rest is food accumulated over time to make the body grow. Again, this is not really who we are, although we took possession, groom and paint the combination of molecules and refer to it as ‘this is I’.
It follows, there must be more than the put-together mind and the trillions of independent cells to which people speak and ask “and how are you today ?”
I just mention this to wake you up to the idea, that the Good Life cannot be something which is 100% obtainable from the outside and then hoped to increase the quality of what we refer to as good life for our body and mind, because this is not really who you are. It seems we need to go deeper inside and establish the real entity of “this is I”. But here we hit a wall. Science is not yet there and opinions vary too much to be of real help to define the “I” better.
A famous Indian (Sadhguru) said:
“Suppose you have a million dollars and your goal is to have a billion dollars by the end of the year. If it doesn’t happen, it’s a good thing because you have lived in that hope. But if it happens, let’s say in January itself, then what will you do? You will want to make it ten billion dollars. There was a time when you could be happy with one dollar. Now for the same happiness, you need a million dollars. That’s called inflation. That’s not enhancement of life.
All this accumulation would make sense, had you organized transport to take all these things with you when you die. Having your own furniture in Heaven or especially in Hell would be great. Otherwise, who knows – maybe they will give you this chair with a straight back that you don’t like, so taking your own sofa with you would be great, - if only that would work…”
Well, we see that such external values vary so much, that they cannot be relied on as to make anyone permanently happy.
He continued:
“Instead of setting goals for the whole year, just set this one thing: By the end of the day, you must be a little more joyful, a little more enhanced, a little better.
This will not work as a goal – it is better to look at it in retrospect. Tomorrow evening, just check, “Am I a little better than yesterday?” Just look at these twenty-four hours – it will make you more conscious. This is not about you being joyful or peaceful. This is about you being conscious of as many aspects of your life as possible”.
To me it seems as if from such awareness our soul can receive the kick start for experiencing the Good Life.
This morning, did you see that the sun came up bright and pretty? The flowers blossomed, no stars fell down, the galaxies are functioning very well. Everything is in order. The whole cosmos is happening wonderfully well today but just a single worm of a thought creeping through your head could make you believe it is a bad day today.
If you would indeed have set your goal to be a bit more enhanced and joyful, this worm would not have a chance of survival in your brain more than a short moment.
Definitely, somebody who does not have food and who is deprived of the basic needs for survival can be physically miserable.
But for most others, their needs are an endless list. You think the man who is driving the car is happier than the man who is walking on the street? It is not decided by what you have, this is fixing the outside only but does not profoundly enrich the experience of our life.
It just makes life more comfortable.
Your state of joy is the quality of your life.
I cannot blame you when you interrupt here - ‘Hey Ray, come on, what does all this have to do with your Real Estate Website and activity?’
Would you have met me in the office you would not ask.
We do not only look at selling you x square meters of home and land, we try to figure out, if such a purchase will make you happy, enhance your life and makes economically sense.
If buying property creates also worries (financing, taking care, uncertain value development), we may say, even against or own sales target: “Don’t do it.”
Maybe you cannot imagine this from a commercially oriented business, but this attitude is at the essence of our business ethics. Giving you what is best, not what we like to be best for one party only.
Just ask me to set up a group of clients, who did not purchase based on our advice. To most we keep contact.
Are you shocked by the following? -
When you are in pursuit of happiness, you are in some way causing suffering to others all the time. For us to sit in a comfortable home, do you know how many worms, insects and other creatures have suffered? In pursuit of human happiness, every creature on this planet has gone through untold suffering. If you ask the worms and the insects, they will say human beings are evil!
But then, where to draw the line? Not building that home? With each breath we are anyway killing millions of microorganisms. Just saying and now forget again.
However, one thing is for certain: Owning a nice and affordable home, or just planning for a home and buying the land today, does enhance the physicality of our life more than almost all else would.
Imagine you could have asked Diogenes in his drum. ‘Want a leak proof roof over the head, and a veranda maybe?”
Would he have lived in Bali during the rainy season, he may not have become famous for his response to Alexander The Great those centuries ago.
After all, -owning a home in paradise sure is
one of the building blocks for Your own Good Life.
The next step to there: call 0361 970 888
For the
Team of UbudProperty,
Kindly yours, - Ray
Home a) the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
b) an institution for people needing professional care or supervision. (No, thanks - Not want not.)
The Good life = Eudaimonia, a philosophical term for the life that one would like to live, originally associated with Aristotle.
We possibly agree that a home has a lot to do with the concept of living a Good Life.
For millions of years animals carried with them what made up their home. We can do better now, as we are about to see…
When we talk about “home,” it brings up memories of comfort, companionship, and love. For most of people, though they have lived in different homes in the course of their lives, the most important one seems to be the home they grew up in. This is probably so because from childhood to adolescence and adulthood, our perceptions and perspectives of life are changing far more dramatically than in any other phase of life.
Here in Bali we now see another way that a home gives a deeper meaning.
We full or part time immigrants can create maybe for the first time a home which is truly representing “Us”.
Before we had to share the home with others and often the interests there where overlapping or even conflicting. Now the home is about us and our reduced circle of family only.
A place to finally be able to concentrate on matters of life and to have the option to go inside ourselves without the distractions we had to endure before.
Then we will see that it is not the opulence of the structure but the inclusiveness of the people which really makes a home.
The ambiance of a home that comforts us in this new, often final period of our life naturally sticks in our minds in a much more profound way than many other things that we may have seen before and will experience later on.
Therefore, let me suggest to take all the time you need and get the best advice available to find the right place if you are still out there and looking.
In Ubud area the local leader in property matters is for many years already the UbudProperty team. There certainly are reasons for this and you would do well to find out the why and how to use their expertise for yourself.
Thankfully, our generation is starting to think independently and collecting such expertise in many areas. Others before, where just accepting input from elders, religious institutions, teachers, kings and fortune tellers..
We are today transforming the world from authorities being the truth to truth being the authority. This is a good transition, but the in-between space can lead to confusion.
This reflects in our homes, where many things that used to represent our heritage, history, and culture, many knick-knacks which tell stories that not everyone is able to interpret correctly, are getting dumped by the next generation because they do not make sense to them or disturb the style.
A lot of things may not make any logical sense, but they may make a lot of life sense. People, things, and structures that are part of your home need not make logical sense – still they mean the world to you.
Homes have to become incubation spaces which awaken the understanding that ultimately, the only home a human being can really own and know is within. If you do not realize in this lifetime that the ultimate home is within, then the only home you will experience is the grave.
If the material structure around you, referred to as ‘our villa’ gave you the peace of mind to find your home within, then the Good Life whatever you want this to be, is within reach before your expiry date.
If you would ask around: “How do you define ‘The Good Life’, chances are you hear what minutes ago my wife said to me when I asked her the same question.
“I want to be healthy. I want to be able to choose what I do with my life. My relationship to family and friends is important. I’d like to have financial freedom. I want to see people around me happy and well.
“Anything else maybe?” I was asking and she shrugged her shoulders: “nah, not really”.
Are there any gaps, which you can fill in? There surely must be more.
You see, I am just back from breakfast on the terrace. My feet are cold, because up here, 500 m above Ubud it is still fresh at night and the tiles are cold.
So, as far as I am concerned right now, one more thing could be added: Physical wellbeing.
Now if we look at the meaning of being physically well, this immediately opens up a whole can of worms.
What feeling good is like, we sure do not need to discuss. A coffee with a snack in the afternoon, the break after exercise when the body can relax and endorphins are released, maybe a massage, a hot shower… a list which can go on and on from ‘just nice’ to ‘crazy ecstatic’.
Hold on, but this is just relating to our flesh and bones. Is our the emotional and mental wellbeing not even of much more importance?
Does this warm shower really take our worries away? Does the cup of coffee with biscuits on the side help to forget that grandfather just was delivered to the hospital, blue and red lights blinking?
Before I continue on this, I like to clarify my actual limitations in knowledge and understanding on the subject of the Good Life. I am not an expert myself, just beginning to scratch a bit on the surface.
You see most of you have likely already joined some kind of seminar or lectures.
Where did the presenter or guru get his apparent knowledge from? Of course he obtained it from an external pool of information. Extracted what is essential for his theme of the day and passed this on. Same here.
However, I am using my own words, hoping that this intellectually drastically reduced version is easier to read and more suitable for you, than a lengthy essay on all philosophical aspects connecting your home and life’s quality. After all, you came here to find something related to property in Ubud area, I guess.
On philosophy and spirituality we find plenty more in Ubud’s groups.
Because I am older than most of you, some of the insights came to me through the events I had to process over many years in various Countries. This allows me adding my spice to an otherwise already well prepared take away meal.
A small blotch on the side of this plate comes from a book of Birgit Ohlin, a life coach:
It can be argued that your values are one of the drivers of what you perceive to be the good life. Values such as power, security, tradition, or benevolence are a collection of principles that guide our selection or evaluation of actions, events, and people and what we “deem to be correct and desirable in life” (Schwartz, 1992).
To me this sounds very theoretical on a subject which is touching our spirit and emotions.
Sure, on the surface it makes sense and this may be how most humans look at the quality of their life.
This kind of perceived quality is therefore established in many minds.
And, of course you know what our mind is actually being made of, right? Do you?
We may not like to think it through, but isn’t our mind the rubbish bin of everyone who was passing by and dropping their bit of information into the bin. Parents, friends, teachers, books and also the people who had to make you afraid in order for some of their nonsense to stick to the inside of your bin.
Much of the content of our mind is not our choice, no matter how good or poor. Can you agree?
Now we can sunderstand that our mind cannot be who we indeed are.
The same actually applies, when looking just at our body only. (72% just water, like a bottle which is ¾ full of it). The rest is food accumulated over time to make the body grow. Again, this is not really who we are, although we took possession, groom and paint the combination of molecules and refer to it as ‘this is I’.
It follows, there must be more than the put-together mind and the trillions of independent cells to which people speak and ask “and how are you today ?”
I just mention this to wake you up to the idea, that the Good Life cannot be something which is 100% obtainable from the outside and then hoped to increase the quality of what we refer to as good life for our body and mind, because this is not really who you are. It seems we need to go deeper inside and establish the real entity of “this is I”. But here we hit a wall. Science is not yet there and opinions vary too much to be of real help to define the “I” better.
A famous Indian (Sadhguru) said:
“Suppose you have a million dollars and your goal is to have a billion dollars by the end of the year. If it doesn’t happen, it’s a good thing because you have lived in that hope. But if it happens, let’s say in January itself, then what will you do? You will want to make it ten billion dollars. There was a time when you could be happy with one dollar. Now for the same happiness, you need a million dollars. That’s called inflation. That’s not enhancement of life.
All this accumulation would make sense, had you organized transport to take all these things with you when you die. Having your own furniture in Heaven or especially in Hell would be great. Otherwise, who knows – maybe they will give you this chair with a straight back that you don’t like, so taking your own sofa with you would be great, - if only that would work…”
Well, we see that such external values vary so much, that they cannot be relied on as to make anyone permanently happy.
He continued:
“Instead of setting goals for the whole year, just set this one thing: By the end of the day, you must be a little more joyful, a little more enhanced, a little better.
This will not work as a goal – it is better to look at it in retrospect. Tomorrow evening, just check, “Am I a little better than yesterday?” Just look at these twenty-four hours – it will make you more conscious. This is not about you being joyful or peaceful. This is about you being conscious of as many aspects of your life as possible”.
To me it seems as if from such awareness our soul can receive the kick start for experiencing the Good Life.
This morning, did you see that the sun came up bright and pretty? The flowers blossomed, no stars fell down, the galaxies are functioning very well. Everything is in order. The whole cosmos is happening wonderfully well today but just a single worm of a thought creeping through your head could make you believe it is a bad day today.
If you would indeed have set your goal to be a bit more enhanced and joyful, this worm would not have a chance of survival in your brain more than a short moment.
Definitely, somebody who does not have food and who is deprived of the basic needs for survival can be physically miserable.
But for most others, their needs are an endless list. You think the man who is driving the car is happier than the man who is walking on the street? It is not decided by what you have, this is fixing the outside only but does not profoundly enrich the experience of our life.
It just makes life more comfortable.
Your state of joy is the quality of your life.
I cannot blame you when you interrupt here - ‘Hey Ray, come on, what does all this have to do with your Real Estate Website and activity?’
Would you have met me in the office you would not ask.
We do not only look at selling you x square meters of home and land, we try to figure out, if such a purchase will make you happy, enhance your life and makes economically sense.
If buying property creates also worries (financing, taking care, uncertain value development), we may say, even against or own sales target: “Don’t do it.”
Maybe you cannot imagine this from a commercially oriented business, but this attitude is at the essence of our business ethics. Giving you what is best, not what we like to be best for one party only.
Just ask me to set up a group of clients, who did not purchase based on our advice. To most we keep contact.
Are you shocked by the following? -
When you are in pursuit of happiness, you are in some way causing suffering to others all the time. For us to sit in a comfortable home, do you know how many worms, insects and other creatures have suffered? In pursuit of human happiness, every creature on this planet has gone through untold suffering. If you ask the worms and the insects, they will say human beings are evil!
But then, where to draw the line? Not building that home? With each breath we are anyway killing millions of microorganisms. Just saying and now forget again.
However, one thing is for certain: Owning a nice and affordable home, or just planning for a home and buying the land today, does enhance the physicality of our life more than almost all else would.
Imagine you could have asked Diogenes in his drum. ‘Want a leak proof roof over the head, and a veranda maybe?”
Would he have lived in Bali during the rainy season, he may not have become famous for his response to Alexander The Great those centuries ago.
After all, -owning a home in paradise sure is
one of the building blocks for Your own Good Life.
The next step to there: call 0361 970 888
For the
Team of UbudProperty,
Kindly yours, - Ray