Daily Positive Thoughts: January 01, 2016: Sense & Sensibility

Daily Positive Thoughts: January 01, 2016: Sense & Sensibility

Sense & Sensibility

Common sense is to know the difference between being sensible and being sensitive.  Understand with your heart but protect your feelings.

The Power to Choose

It is extremely important to realize that, in any situation, you have the power to choose whether your response in that situation will be passive or pro-active, positive or negative, indifferent or attentive etc. You choose what action you take and how you feel. But do you exercise your power of choice all the time? You need to check which factors influence your decision making and push you either in one direction or the other? There are many factors that control and limit your power to make the right, and more importantly, free choices. These factors primarily include influences of people that dominate your ways of thinking, your beliefs, your attitudes, even your complete personality. You are also limited by the influence of your own fears, attachments, desires, biases or other negative and waste thoughts, which result in a lack of focus.

There are a lot of people who are not used to thinking for themselves or even prefer being a “yes” man, going along with what others think and say, without having an opinion of their own. Also as you pass through your childhood and teenage life and enter adulthood, you acquire many preconceived ideas or beliefs from your family and social and cultural environment; that is why you assume inside that some things or people are always positive and others are always negative when, in fact, that’s not necessarily true. This directly affects the type of decisions you make, each time there is a requirement for one. In any particular situation, courage, wisdom, high self-esteem and focus is required to sit down calmly and make an assessment about the possible choices before you, and then finally make the right decision. The more you practice relaxation, positive thinking and meditation, the more you rise above all the negatively influencing factors mentioned above , the more you experience the positive qualities and powers mentioned above and exercise your power of choice accurately and with confidence.

(to be continued tomorrow)

The Soul World Or Incorporeal World

The Soul World, which is the sixth element, is filled with golden-red, divine light (experienced during meditation). Over there, the conscient (living entities), the souls, have neither bodies of matter nor bodies of light. There exists neither thought, word nor action; just complete stillness, silence and peace. Just as this world occupies a tiny part of this physical universe, so too the souls occupy just a tiny portion of this infinite world. This is the highest region, the original home of souls and the Supreme Soul, God. This is the region which human beings, irrespective of culture or religion, have tried to reach in thoughts, prayers, etc. It is called by various names in various religions - Heaven, Nirvana, Shantidham, Paramdham, Brahmand, etc. Before I came to this earth, I was there with all other souls, brothers. The experience of complete and utter peace, purity and silence is there in my sweet home. There the soul is untouched by matter. Souls reside there as star-like points of light. They remain dormant, with their roles in the physical world latent (hidden) within them. The roles emerge when they the souls appear on earth, the world stage.

The souls stay in the soul world in well-defined groups. They descend onto this earth in a certain chronological order, according to the quality of sanskaras. At the apex of this configuration of souls is the Supreme Soul, whom the other souls call God, Allah, Jehovah, etc. Beneath him the souls are positioned number wise according to their degree of similarity to the Supreme. Depending on the quality and the part the soul has to play, it emerges in the human world, taking the body of a developing baby in a mother's womb. It then continues through the cycle of birth and rebirth according to the role that it has. When the parts are over, souls again return to this world of light, peace, liberation and complete purity. The deep rest the soul has had in the home has such an effect on it that even though it forgets the details about that world, there is always a desire to search for that peace and silence when it becomes lost and confused in the world of matter. In that supreme region only, souls remain in their completely original, natural state, which can be experienced through Rajyoga meditation.

Soul Sustenance

God’s Three Roles In The World Drama

God As A Creator

Logic tells us that spiritual and material energy in the form of souls and matter didn't just suddenly appear out of nothing. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can't be either created or destroyed. Matter itself is a form of condensed energy. Souls are also conscious points of energy. Both are uncreated and therefore eternal. The Second Law shows us that energy, when in use, moves from a potential state, in which energy is available, to a spent state in which it is no longer available. Putting both laws together we have what appears to be a system in which the basic components have neither beginning nor end. They move towards a state of energy exhaustion (entropy). If time were linear (a straight line) and there were no external intervention, then over an unimaginably long period of time the universe would just fizzle out.

Fortunately for both the souls and the elements of matter, there is one supreme energy source which is external to the process of entropy (unaffected by the process) and thereby retains its original potency or power. When things reach a certain stage of weakness and chaos, the Supreme Soul plays out His role of re-energizing the souls. The recuperation (recovery) to their original state, in turn, has a direct effect on matter. It also comes back to its own original state of perfection. If, as has been shown above, God's presence, power and knowledge are purely spiritual, then creation has to be a spiritual act and not a physical one. Creation can be understood as the regeneration or reshaping of what is already there and not one of creating something physical or non-physical out of nothing. God recharges the souls' spent spiritual energy.

(To be continued tomorrow .)

Message for the day

True humility comes from self-respect.

Projection: When we are full and in our state of self-respect, we will be able to remain humble in all situations. When there is no self-respect, any comments or criticism hurts the ego and we tend to lose our humility.

Solution: When I find myself getting affected by criticism, I need to check whether I am sure of what I'm doing. Let me look within myself and see what specialties I have that I can use in my daily life. So when I increase my own confidence in this way and do everything with this confidence, I'll be humble.

In Spiritual Service,
Brahma Kumaris