you just might get it… I have often encountered this thought and another one has taken root in my mind based upon my experiences in life. “Be careful what you hate, ridicule, resist and abhor, you just might end up turning into that”
Today as I see the shocking role reversals in this world I marvel at the depth of thought in the first saying that comes from ancient times (possibly holy books) and the second one as well that comes from my own observations in life. Thought moulds a persons life. What we think about most is what manifests. This is a universal rule that everyone who is latched onto The Secret believes. However there is something about life moulding thought that is also very important to understand. It does not matter what you are thinking about something, what matters is the amount of time you spend thinking about that thing. You will manifest what you think most about.
We spend our lives hoping that we do not turn into a particular sort of people and in the end we realize that that is exactly what we have turned into. Today I see outrage online, every single day about one or the other topic, and I wonder what happened to this country? This country where while growing up one of the most funny scenes from movielore was the Mahabharata scene from jaane bhi do yaaron is now talking about making examples out of people who worked in a stupid web-series with a 15 second mildly religiously objectionable scene. That web-series would have been watched by not more than 15 people had there been no misplaced righteous indignation and resultant publicity, now everyone wants to watch it before it is banned. We used to be a nation where we ridiculed the Middle East for the intolerance and state sponsored summary be-headings and today we are at a point where we celebrate leaders who promise and deliver swift retribution without due process (goli maaro saalon ko), politics has become what we ridiculed all along. We used to ridicule the materialism of the west, it was always about spiritualism and rising above the physical that we in our nation stood for… or at least that is what I understood when I was growing up. Today materialism is our mantra, we are collectively and aggressively looking for that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and any state that chooses to be rooted in traditions with little respect for militant materialism is termed backward (case in point West Bengal that fount of intellect that has nurtured since time immemorial and continues to give). Everything we do is about profits, margins and that much abused and least understood word “Development”. We are willing to freeze farmers to death at the borders of our capital city at the altar of development and profit… the transformation is complete.
There are so many more such and similar examples that we can see all around every single day. However the thing to do is to not seek them out. What we need to seek out are examples of hope and reclamation. We need to remember we have fallen headlong into the very same ditch that we wanted to avoid all along. We fell in not in-spite of thinking about that ditch but because we couldn’t stop thinking about that hole. We manifested ourselves into that ditch by thinking non-stop about it. Now if we want to claw our way out of this mess we need to think of the good that there is in the world and only about that.
The way out of poverty is not by thinking about poverty at all times but by thinking about prosperity at all times, the way out of bad health is by thinking about great health at all times, the way to the end of the marathon is not by thinking about the pain in your completely seized calves and chafed nipples but by thinking of the beer you’ll grab right across that finish line and about the sense of having done it that you shall have once you’re over that line. Ignore the pain in fact don’t ignore it… instead embrace it and treat it like a friend is what I say when out running nowadays… for pain is not telling you to stop, no it is telling you to go on and do it again tomorrow. It’s only because you did more than what you did yesterday that your calves, heels, feet, back ache and what better way to celebrate your progress than to do it all over again tomorrow, pain is progress (within reasonable limits… don’t end up with shin splints and plantar by overdoing stuff). Anyway I digress, randomly, as usual…
The topic was that we become what we hate… Hate is a very strong emotion, much stronger than love as far as the metaphysical is concerned. So be very careful about it in your daily life. Avoid hating and if you do find yourself disliking something then find it’s opposite and start cultivating the emotion of longing for that opposite so that without thinking about it you have pivoted to the positive emotion and that is always better… pivot always pivot.
Alas now if only we could tell the world about it and make them choose co-existence over divisiveness. Then again somewhere deep inside I feel we all, irrespective of political/religious leanings, know what is right and we will choose that over what we are being manipulated into right now. Choose to love and the hatred will fall off by the wayside without you having to make an effort.