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The beauty of self-negation

Self-negation is the act of exercising your will power to do what you don’t want to do such that you benefit from this act [of self negation]. The more one practices self-negation the better you get at controlling your will and making it do what you want it to, when you want it to.

For obvious reasons this can have tremendous benefits. Just imagine a situation where your superior wants you to sit late or gives you a task that is very difficult and you have enough control over yourself to not get flustered! In fact imagine turning your world into the world you always imagined as a child… by taking the difficult steps, through self-negation…one can only marvel at the beauty of creating the world you want!

We get the chance to practice self-negation many times in the day, each chance another ‘opportunity’ to get better at controlling ourselves.

Every time we sit down to eat for example we can eat good food in the quantity that the body requires and after that leave some space in our stomach. The food that would have filled the remaining space would not nearly be as enjoyable as the little ‘hunger’ that is left.

Similarly to communicate with a woman [a person could be born a woman or a man with probably a 50% probability. There is every possibility that you the reader of this post could have been born of the opposite gender!] i.e. with a person with the ‘soul of a woman’ [kind, gentle and warm] is much more beautiful than wanting her body!

The practice of namaz, the discipline of performing it each time it is due is also an act of self-negation!

Not over sleeping, in fact using your time to do something more interesting is also a very beautiful act of self negation!

Each of the examples in themselves when practiced will reveal the beauty in them.

All of them taken collectively I think would allow one to create their own future!

Comments

  1. Sounds like you're getting "self negation" confused with "self control" or "self discipline". People who are self negating probably had parents who didn't like children much and objected to everything the child said and did. With years of angry disapproval, the child learned to be as self effacing, self defeating as possible - in fact just not even existing, was the safest thing to do. So they grow up always taking the back seat, never accomplishing anything, ignoring their needs, always bowing to the whims of others. Your definition is really self discipline, the knack of keeping yourself in line, so to speak.

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