Brahma Kumaris

02.12.15 Good Wishes Giving good wishes to others acts like sunlight, filtering into the dark corners of their mind and lightening their burdens. To order whilst being seated on the seat is to ensure obedience. Before I expect obedience from others, I need to check if my own mind and sense organs are obedient. For this, I need to be seated on the seat of my own self-respect (of the qualities I have). Thus seated, like a king, when I order, I find that orders are obeyed. Today I will practice a point of self-respect. I will recognize and appreciate one quality in myself. I will remind myself of this quality, from time to time, throughout the day. If I find my mind wandering or my sense organs disobedient, I will give orders with the same consciousness of self-respect. Then, I will find positive results. Love And Suffering (Part 1) There are two things that touch or move us in life: pain and pleasure. Both create addiction. We feel pain in the body, and sometimes it is even emotional. But suffering arises in the mind. The suffering in the mind arises from thinking negatively towards the self, towards others, looking at them with a vision or attitude that causes grief, sorrow and suffering. Both extremes, pain and pleasure, can create addiction. On creating addiction it can start to form part of someone's identity. Later if one tries to stop the addiction of pain or suffering, it can almost feel like a threat towards the self, and towards one's own identity as one perceives it, because suffering is identified with. It is too hard to see oneself as no longer suffering. An e.g. in this regard is that of a mother, with three children, who was undergoing a meditation course at one of the Brahma Kumaris centers. Her daughter had learned to meditate and became very happy and joyful. Seeing her happiness the mother came to learn to meditate. With a few sessions she felt much more at peace and had very good experiences, but all of a sudden she decide to stop the meditation practice and leave the course because she was starting experiencing a positive detachment, which she perceived as negative. Now, she was no longer feeling afraid of what might happen to her children. The meditation was awakening in her a love free from fears, but it brought on in her an inner clash of beliefs between the old and new beliefs. Her old belief was that to love someone is to suffer about them or create pain related to them. (To be continued tomorrow ...) Soul Sustenance The Relationship Between Anger And Attachment (Part 1) Most of us logically understand that all forms of anger are worthlessness emotions, but when we enter into the field of practical actions, we tend to argue that there are some situations where the weapon of anger has to be used and where it is justified or allowable. When someone tries to harm me personally, like giving sorrow to a friend or loved one, send a complaint about my work to the higher ups in the office or simply insult me or bang into my car at the street crossing for that matter, it would seem that our anger is justified, on such occasions. But the basic principle is the same in all these cases. We are, in our own mind, trying to control and change what we cannot change - the past or other people or events. In all the above cases above we suffer a lot when these things that are close to us are changed or lost. So why does that happen? It is because we keep all these things too close to us or in other words we are over attached to them. When someone tries to bring me down at the workplace, or in other words tries to harm my position in the office and I suffer because of the same, it is because I identify with my role in the office, I think I am the role. When someone bangs into my car, the emotion of anger emerges inside me, because I identify with the car, I think I am the car! This is the deepest mistake. It is the deepest cause of the negative suffering called anger. We are not aware of this of course, but if we were to take a moment and see what we do in our minds, we would see we emerge the image of our role or our car on the screen of our mind. We have then gone into that image in our mind, and we have lost our spiritual identity or individuality in that image. In effect we have identified completely with the role or the car or are too attached to them. So if the role or the car is harmed in any way, it feels like it is happening to us and, as a result, we become disturbed or angry. (To be continued tomorrow…) Message for the day Use the power of your thought and you will find negative situations changing into positive. Checking: When things are going wrong, check what kind of thoughts you are having - are your thoughts positive in spite of the negative situation or are they negative. The more you have negative thoughts, the situation will only worsen. Practice: When things are going wrong, take a thought that it is not the thing itself that is going wrong but it is your perception that makes it look negative. Also remind yourself that you have the power to transform negative into positive. When your thought changes, the situation changes too.