After Beginning My Journey Of Learning How To Read
After beginning my journey of learning how to read, I was introduced by my parents to a special collection of books about the power of positive thinking. After finally devouring this set of books, I attempted to become only positive. There was a part of me that didn’t want to admit that I also had what appeared to be a negative side. Guess, what happened? The more I tried to put on a positive façade in my public life, the more negative my private life was becoming. The people who weren’t so important to me were getting most or all my positive pole, while my closest loved ones and I would catch all the negativity. Clearly, this wasn’t working for me. It seemed that the more I tried to become only one sided, the more I punished myself and those close to me.
I wondered what was wrong with me, and why I couldn’t be positive all the time. Then I thought, maybe someone else figured it out. So, I went and interacted with various positive thinking teachers. I went to their seminars, met them, spoke to them, and found out, one by one, that all of them had both polarities. Not one of them was all positive all the time. I concluded, I can’t be one-sided, even though I am diligently focused on it, studying it, learning it, going to seminars, reading books, buying CDs, doing everything that a human being can do to succeed at it. If I can’t do it, then, the people I’m teaching probably aren’t going to do so either. I can’t teach a one-sided state. I have not obtained it. It must be an incomplete concept. It’s a lie.
I believe we live in a world addicted to fantasies. The fantasy of always being nice and never mean, of having the career we love and never experiencing stress, of having relationships that are never ending honeymoons or having bodies that resemble the air brushed models we see in magazines. It is these fantasies that are the very source of our mental suffering and as a result depression.
Have you ever thought: When I get this car, life will be better; When I get this new house and land, my life will be better; When I get this new job and more money, life will be better; When I get this new relationship, life will be better.
Most people think that when they get something else life will get better, but all it does is transform the positives and negatives into new forms. I’m not saying you shouldn’t seek, but if you seek something you think will give you more positives than negatives, you’re living with an illusion. When you get what you imagine you want you will find out that it has a new catch or twist to it that you didn’t anticipate. If you live in the illusion that it’s going to give you a lot of happiness, you may be let down, for it won’t, at least for long. It only gives you a new set of pains and pleasures.
Instead of trying to run from pain and seek pleasure, why not embrace both in the pursuing fulfillment of your purpose? Look back over every aspect in your life, from the smallest thing that you think you were challenged by: criticisms, illnesses, disappointments or whatever, and ask, ‘How did that help me?’ Don’t stop until you can give thanks for all the different parts of your life, because if they are there, they are serving you. I’ve personally taken the opportunity to do this, and every once in while I get a new memory, a sudden flash of some little event that I’d completely forgotten. Then I ask, ‘How did that help me become what I am today? How did that specific moment, as remote and distracting as it looked, help me?’
After you have completed this exercise you will see that at any given moment in your life you are and were perfectly balanced. You will never get one side without the other, and any time you think you’ve got one-sidedness you’re living in illusion and about to get a lesson to wake you up to the truth of duality. It is not about thinking positively, it is recognizing that the good and the bad occur simultaneously.
