Hamza Qazi
Why is it so hard to be good? Is it an occupational hazard of being a human being? Are we condemned to go through innumerable lifetimes making the same mistakes, to slip back easily into habitual behavior, incapable of taking up the challenge that evolution throws at us?
In a moment of rare insight (or weakness), most of us often resolve to shun anger, envy, selfishness and henceforth be compassionate, loving and so on. When the higher calling beckons, we congratulate ourselves and decide to overflow with the milk of human kindness. For a while, we smile at everything and everybody, count to ten instead of blowing up, take deep breaths in times of stress, see the good side of people, and turn the other cheek when slapped. And most often, instead of acknowledgement and reciprocation of our goodness, we find that we are taken for granted and worse, taken advantage of. It gets harder and harder to keep up the good act, and we reach break-point sooner or later. We then promptly slip back into our original, normal, sometimes nasty selves. And so, we’re trapped in between our ‘trying’ and our ‘being’. The excerpt is an inspiration from a book by Neale Donald Walsch.
‘Desire to become happy places us in hell, while desire to operate out of happiness places us in heaven’.
In a book named Conversations with God, the author says that when you intend something, the exact opposite of the same will first manifest in your life. When you wish for health, you’ll first fall sick; if you wish for wealth, you’ll first experience poverty. Thus, when you wish to be compassionate, you’ll first experience being rude and intolerant. Accordingly, this is most natural, for most of our actions and intentions are doomed to failure because we operate from a space of lack rather than that of abundance.
By nature, the universal consciousness has empowered us with all that is needed to be happy, successful, peaceful, and fulfilled. In our limited vision, we fail to recognize it and create the very opposite reality. That’s because we believe that we can only be happy, successful or peaceful when we have material and transient possessions, such as money, situations or a good company. This cannot be overcome unless there is a paradigm shift in the way we operate. Suppose you wish for fulfillment; the common approach is that you expect to earn and ‘have’ money to ‘do’ charity and then feel ‘fulfilled’.
Suppose we reverse this process – just ‘be’ fulfilled, proceed to ‘do’ acts of charity coming from that space, and presto – you’ll see that you ‘have’ the money for more charity. In other words, it is the spiritual that is primary, and which manifests the material. This rule can be applied to anything and everything.
This also explains the phenomenon of why prayers most often don’t work. Suppose you pray for health, the implicit message the universe receives from you is that you are not healthy now – you are basically admitting to a lack. So the Universe helps you experience sickness first in order to experience health. Same with the prayer of asking for patience, tolerance, and so on – you feel and experience the opposite of these qualities before they are thrown out of your system. So a better approach is to assert and feel ‘I am patient, loving…’ rather than ‘I need to be patient, loving, as I’m not…’ So next time you want to blow your top, quite simply, don’t, instead of feeling the ‘need’ to control it. Because you’re already a patient, logical person, and such a person wouldn’t blow up. And the only prayer one needs to say is a heartfelt ‘thanks’ for what is…
This is not just about life.. it’salso about how we deal with it in the most natural manner.. The people at large need to understand this for we are living in a competitive world but our thoughts still belong to the 60s..We want to break free from the jail which we aren’t in..and in the process we are maneuvering our minds to destructive ideologies rather than using them for something constructive ..
It’s not easy ..but there’s no harm in trying this.
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