Gain New Strength Every Day
Key Lesson: If, each day, you will use the strength you have been given -- to do what life asks of you -- not only will you grow stronger every day, but you will also witness an increasing willingness to embrace those tasks in life once thought too great to bear.
How to Defeat What is Defeating You
The biggest problem facing us as individuals today is that we have all been caught up in the race of looking for relief. Our time would be spent far more profitably looking for strength. When caught in a fierce storm, why scramble to find a cave at the foot of the mountain when the same energy can be used to climb? There is a choice. You can tremble within the cave, or live above the tempests that lash the valley below. Our mistake is that we are trying to figure out how to cope with suffering -- make the best of it -- instead of learning how to terminate it. We would never tolerate a dictatorial government, so why do we put up with all of the inner tyrants? We need not. A revolt is necessary and I can promise you that victory is assured. However, you must revolt intelligently. Don't waste your time planning a coup in the workplace or at home. Leave your relationships alone. They are not the problem. If you want to live the ever-pleasant, ever-present life, the only regime you must overthrow is your present way of thinking. This is not nearly as difficult as it may sound.
The first step in this right rebellion to reclaim your own life is to learn what it means to think about yourself instead of from yourself. The difference being that when you learn to think about your thinking, this special kind of self-separation allows you to question its intelligence. This is a highly intelligent act because thinking from yourself lets unexamined thoughts race by and into action. For instance, saying yes when you mean to say no, or vice versa, is a small but painful illustration of what happens to us when we don't examine our thoughts and feelings before speaking. Resentment almost always follows, and one of the chief tricks of an inner tyrant is to make you think that what it wants is what you want.
The lower self loves to feel resentful. Resenting someone is like a pleasure cruise on a luxury liner for this misguided nature, because it can crash and sink itself again and again over the situation. A situation, incidentally, it caused itself but whose wreckage you are left to clean up. So you see it can be highly profitable to challenge your own thinking. Just as you would never buy a sack of diamonds without first confirming the seller's professional standing and the stones' actual value, you should never buy any of your own thoughts or feelings until you are certain of their source and that they are indeed yours!
If you will only let these truthful ideas prove the astonishing fact to you that there is never any intelligent reason to feel bad, to feel overwhelmed, then one day this new understanding will go before you and defeat all that has been defeating you.
