When you are dreaming at night, do you miss your waking world? Do you even remember it?
We are so invested in this life and all its details whenever we are awake, but it goes away every night and we don’t even notice. We are invested instead in our dream world and dream self. When we die, this waking world and waking self will go away forever. And we won’t even notice then, either. We will neither remember nor miss this life. We think we will, we worry about losing everything, but we won’t in fact notice once death has actually happened.
What this tells me is that it is more important to prepare for my future lives than to be overly concerned with this fleeting dream-like one. I write more about that here: Looking back at this life. We think we have time … but we don’t have much, not really, a few hundred months at most. And a big part of getting ready to turn the page over to our next chapter, which will be here before we know it, is creating as much good karma as we can. Our future self will thank us. As Atisha says:
Since future lives last for a very long time, gather up riches to provide for the future.
Rejoicing is a rapid, enjoyable, and powerful way to create a lot of merit or good karma. Carrying on from here: How to get ahead.
Talking of Shantideva and racehorses, just as I was writing this on a plane, these racehorses appeared on the screen in front of me. What fun is it for only one of them to win? I thought. I wanted them all to win.
If you are feeling particularly competitive at the moment, or stuck in some cycle of mutual dislike or distrust, try this suggestion from Joyful Path of Good Fortune:
Our practice of rejoicing will be especially powerful if we can rejoice in the virtues of people whom we dislike or who dislike us. If we can rejoice equally in the virtuous actions, happiness, and prosperity of all beings, we shall overcome jealousy and hatred, and we shall easily attain the realization of compassion and love.
With respect to Shantideva’s classification, if we want to overcome pride over inferiors, we can cultivate humility. I think that the three reasons for neglecting or ignoring our inherently existent self that Venerable Geshe-la explains in the section on humility in The New Eight Steps to Happiness are brilliant. Another thing I like to do is to think that I’m a servant of holy beings out of respect and a servant of sentient beings out of love. Any sense of self left over is the self of self-cherishing, a self I try to protect and serve but which doesn’t actually exist.
Mental actions are more powerful than physical and verbal ones, as Venerable Geshe Kelsang has often taught. If our heart is in the right place, external achievements are on one level neither here nor there. Once during a long retreat, playing with Rousseau the cat and feeling motivated by bodhichitta, I noticed how incredibly happy and meaningful this felt – more meaningful, for example, than teaching Dharma without bodhichitta to hundreds of people. I mean, if you can do both, fantastic, but you get my drift.
This is what I do
At some point recently I noticed that the New Kadampa Tradition had put on sixty-four events on one day. This got me thinking about what a team effort this is – how totally impossible it is for one person to pull off 
even one of these events, how each event involved the efforts, hopefully joyful, of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. We are all in this together, trying to bring Buddha’s healing medicine to whomever needs and wants it. There seems little point in just focusing on our own little corner of the mandala when we could just as well spread our mind over the entire mandala and get all the merit.
So this is what I like to do. Every day I like to begin by exchanging myself with others (which sort of means thinking that I am in their shoes). I usually start with my teacher Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso – admiring all or any of his cosmic minds and deeds is an instant high. Then, in no particular order, I think about other people working to gain realizations of compassion and wisdom, bliss and emptiness, and helping others through giving and spreading Buddha’s teachings – both still-regular beings and Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and lineage Gurus. A slightly more in-depth practice of rejoicing is imputing myself on all the Sangha in this and other worlds, past, present, and future – so that their good fortune literally becomes my good fortune. It’s a very efficient use of time.
A profound way I like to do this is by mixing my mind with my Spiritual Guide’s mind to begin with – so starting from a point of not feeling unworthy. I can correctly identify myself as mere appearance not other than the emptiness of all phenomena (as explained in The Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra) and remember that this mere appearance is of my Spiritual Guide’s mind. 
Then I think about how happy he is when world peace temples get built and Centers get run harmoniously and study programs get set up and Sangha help each other, and, above all, when people gain deep experience of the teachings and can share this with others. I can share in that joy that he has. This certainly overcomes any inadequate sense of “They are doing better than me” or “I am not enough” – or any feelings of guilt or inadequacy on which envy is based. It’s just unadulterated joy.
On this subject, a quick but relevant digression – once we’ve mixed with his mind, we can then look back at our boring limited sense of self together with him – “What’s funny old L getting all bent out of shape about now?!” we both ask each other. I have found this to be the best space in which to work on myself without
identifying with my faults and feeling inadequate, unworthy, or guilty. We feel his unconditional love and joy in us, not to mention his sense of humor, and work within that environment.
A meditation on rejoicing
With some of what I’ve said in mind, here’s one way to set up a meditation on rejoicing:
We can allow our mind to become more peaceful through breathing meditation, letting go of any jealous thoughts that are ruffling the surface of our otherwise peaceful ocean-like mind. We can feel that this peace of our Buddha nature* is always connected to the supreme good heart of all enlightened beings (as described in this meditation, for example), and tap into those blessings.
Within this space, we can check and see how we’ve been relating to ourself – if it’s to a jealous or not-good-enough version, we can dissolve that away into emptiness. This is because a jealous person trying to rejoice is like pulling teeth.
How do we disappear it? By looking for it. Where is it? That version of me is not my body, not my mind, not the collection of my body and mind, and nowhere else to be found. Its unfindability is proof that it doesn’t exist. (Plus it’ll be gone soon, as soon as tonight with the arising of my dream self). So with no further ado, I can let it go. Click here for a quick fix meditation on emptiness.
Buddha also does not see it, which is a helpful consideration. This means that I can now identify with being a peaceful person who has everything I need and therefore can afford to be happy for others.
Then we can exchange our self with others, as explained above and in other places in these articles, and start feeling very happy.
Last but not least, to have a totally qualified rejoicing practice, we can remember emptiness – as it says in Offering to the Spiritual Guide, we rejoice in “the dream-like happiness and pure white virtue of others”.
Kadampa Rejoicing Group
By the way, I am not sure if you have yet discovered the Kadampa rejoicing page on Facebook? (We need one on Instagram and TikTok, too!) Sometimes I think it might be enough just to rejoice in Fiona Gordon’s rejoicing, lol. She’s got it down. And she always ends each post by remembering the emptiness of the three spheres = perfect.
Hope you enjoyed this final article on rejoicing 
I enjoyed writing these, so thank you for reading and making some great comments.
*Buddha nature is not real
Just one more thing before you go … our Buddha nature is not a “real thing,” in case you thought it was. It is no more objective nor inherently existent than anything else in the known universe; it too depends upon mind and exists by convention. Although it is good to identify with it in the sense that we can impute ourselves on it, we are not one and the same as our Buddha nature because there is no essential self that is anything.
One way to understand our Buddha nature is that when our mind is not unpeaceful, it is peaceful! Which is to say, if our mind is not shaken up by unpeaceful uncontrolled thoughts – delusions – it is naturally peaceful.
And there is no limit to how much we can grow that peace by (a) recognizing, reducing, and abandoning our delusions and (b) cultivating all our peaceful states of mind to completion. Our Buddha nature can therefore also be understood as simply our indestructible potential to transform ourselves because we are always empty of existing intrinsically or objectively. We are not our thoughts, but we depend upon our thoughts, and thoughts can and do change – so if we learn to deliberately think bigger, better thoughts, such as rejoicing, and identify with these, “I am happy with others!”, we change. I explain more about that here: Buddha nature: using wisdom to identify ourself correctly.
Bye! (Comments please).