By Charles Leyman Kachitsa
If you fear fear, fear will fear you. Apparently some degree of fear applied wisely becomes to the prudent in some situations the best strategy one can apply. However, fear is the antithesis of progress and more often it breeds illogical rabid actions.
The most damaging fear is the fear one has that things will be turned to normal though one knows they are in the wrong. In some cases people hold on to their wrong deeds for fear of losing face or appearing as weak.
There is another fear that is hard to understand, the fear that you will be loved or liked. There are some people inherently as a result of past experience fear the power that comes with love. Such people may act angrily to any smaller indication that some one wants to love them unreservedly. Past disappointments may have made them build a fence around them that they will not allow any show of love in their life. You may approach such people wanting to help or indeed just show them love but normally they would act in extreme ways to wade off such advances. Even compliments to the effect that they are liked or loved is an insult to them.
This week we continue to look at quotes like last time from a book which objectives falls well in line with the publication’s. The thrive to find such words that when read will bring smiles to people’s faces, sayings that will inspire and encourage those reading that everything is possible. It is true, what we read affects the health of our mind, some words and stories bring misery in the readers. One has therefore to be careful that what they are feeding the mind is those things that will nurture into into positive growth. I am sure that you will learn one or two things from these quotations, read and enjoy:
THE POWER OF NOW – A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle.
“One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all however, was my own existence. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger that the instinctive desire to continue to live. ——-‘I cannot live with myself any longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I could live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I cannot live with.’ ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘only one of them is real.’
“A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. ‘Spare some change?’ mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. ‘I have nothing to give,’ said the stranger. Then he asked: ‘What’s that you are sitting on?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied the beggar. ‘What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.’ ‘Have a look inside,’ insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold. ————- I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.”
“I love the Buddha’s simple definition of enlightenment as the end of suffering. ‘There is nothing superhuman in that, is there? Of course, as a definition, it is incomplete. It only tells you what enlightenment is not: no suffering. But what’s left when there is no more suffering? The Buddha is silent on that, and his silence implies that you’ll have to find out for yourself. He uses a negative definition so that the mind cannot make it into something to believe in or into a superhuman accomplishment, a goal that is impossible for you to attain. Despite the precaution, the majority of Buddhists still believe that enlightenment is for the Buddha, not for them, at least not in this life time.
“Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease. ———– Note: The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — You usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.”