Hi everyone, welcome back. A couple of weeks ago I examined the feeling of Love and how it gives meaning to our lives when we are feeling this feeling and makes life a little easier to live. This week I would like to examine ‘problems’, how humans define problems and if these problems are actually ‘real’, the way our mind makes us believe they are.
Belief: I have so many problems in my life. I don’t know how to get rid of them to become happy and peaceful.
Here is my understanding of how most humans define ‘problems’. But before I even try to define what a problem is, I would like to take you guys back to the very basics of how a human mind operates. Have you have ever noticed that a human mind maintains 2 columns in its mental notebook – one column is for things/people/events that the mind tags as ‘good’ and the other column is for things/people/events that are tagged as ‘bad’ by our mind. In addition to maintaining these 2 columns, our mind also has a layer of ‘expectations’ where it only expects to encounter the things/people/events that it has tagged as ‘good’ and any thing or person or event which does not fall within this category of ‘good’ is treated by the mind with suspicion and fear and is therefore called a ‘problem’ which needs to be fixed or solved. And because a human mind generally has a much longer list of ‘bad’ things/persons/events, therefore, the list of ‘problems’ that we have in our lives appear to be very long also. So, before I philosophize any further let’s look at this through an example.
Let’s take an example from our professional life. Let’s imagine that you are one of those folks who have been ambitious with regards to your career and wanted to rise in your career, however, you had a very rocky start to your career where you could hardly even manage to find ‘a job’ let alone a ‘good job’. So this was the first ‘problem’ that you encountered in your career which is that you were unable to find yourself ‘a good job’. But now that you have ‘a job’, you work very hard and hope that the executives in your department notice your hard work and promote you sooner rather than later and if that happens, you will be able to define your ‘job’ as a ‘good job’. However, this doesn’t happen either and your executives don’t notice your hard work and as a result don’t promote you. So this becomes the second ‘problem’. By this time you may be frustrated enough that you start looking for another job, however, since you didn’t get promoted, you are unable to secure that next level job that you think you absolutely deserve and this becomes the third ‘problem’. And honestly, I can go on and on and on here but the point I am trying to make is that because from the get-go you tagged each situation that you encountered as ‘bad’ and therefore a ‘problem’, your mind went into overdrive and started to find ways to fix and solve that problem. And on top of that because you continued to tag subsequent situations as ‘bad’ also, your mind just never lost track of the ‘problems’ that it needed to fix and solve. But have you ever thought may be (just may be) that on this journey which you defined as full of problems, the Universe was actually trying to help you see this another amazing opportunity or guide you towards using this other amazing skill that you have within you which you never paid attention to. But because you had a very specific plan in your mind about how your life should unfold, you never even entertained the idea that may be this is a signal from the Universe that you are supposed to do something else in your life instead of what you are trying so very hard to achieve and accomplish. I know all this very well folks because this example is very similar to my own story 🙂 and when I finally woke up to the fact that this Universe is actually asking me use the amazing skills I have within me is the day I started to write this blog! I don’t know if there is anything that comes out of this blog for me but what I know for sure is that because I think and feel everything so very deeply and have spent years paying attention to my thoughts and the beliefs behind those thoughts, I now have an amazing understanding of how human mind works and I love to share that understanding with other people because I have also come to understand that even though we are separate human beings living separate lives, our minds have very similar beliefs and thinking as a result of these beliefs. And this is the reason when I share anything in this blog, it comes directly from my heart to yours 🙂 with the hope that anyone who is reading can view their situation/life from another perspective. And honestly, as I too learn and create new beliefs, I read my own blog from time to time to remind myself of these different perspectives :-)..And I know very well that it’s not easy to un-learn old beliefs but I choose to live a life which is not full of fear and I commend anyone who tries to do the same thing.
You know folks we all create plans about how our lives should unfold and what should happen, when it should happen and how it should happen. And I don’t think there is anything wrong in creating those plans as long as we can remember that the plans we create are created by our very limited human mind and but when it comes to living life as a human on Earth, there is something far far greater than a human mind which some people call fate, some call destiny, others call it God, I call it Universe. But because we can’t see this God or Universe, we don’t completely trust in it. And because we don’t completely trust in it is the reason why our mind creates all these plans in the first place because if we actually trusted in the Universe or God we would know that we are already being helped and taken care of even when the things/persons/events appear to be ‘a problem’. And so if we can only learn to consciously ‘not tag’ everything that we didn’t expect to happen as a ‘problem’ and instead view it as an opportunity to learn and grow, life will become so much simpler. If we can only access all this wisdom while we are going through the ‘problems’ instead of looking back and realizing, our lives would be so much peaceful.
And as always, feel free to leave a comment, if you feel like leaving one. And until next Friday, live life 🙂
