I wrote in my previous email about 'getting a kick' out of doing good. I recently wrote an email to a friend. This email is reproduced below and it will show you what that kick was.
Hello,
It was great to get your request. I personally feel I have tread little on the journey my self. There are people who have travelled it much.
That said, I have discovered a few simple facts that have made my quality of life better. It turns out that as things get simpler so do I.
I have tried to reason things out with myself. It seems that everytime I am honest with myself and give a 100% to whatever I think the next step should be, I get some interesting answers.
The question I keep asking my self is: The world has to be a beautiful place if God made it [I personally believe in God] then why is it not beautiful for me?
The answer is always a beautiful one.
A parallel dialogue in my mind is: "The world was a great place when I was a kid. I still feel like a kid at heart. What then has happened to the world? I just seem lost. I need to figure this out. Every time I have ever learnt anythign it has always simplified things for me. I need to learn enough things so that things get back to normal."
To open my eyes to a more beautiful way of looking at things: I think at the most abstract level and work my way down. At the abstract level things are always more beautiful. But this beauty is always fleeting till you make it manifest in your life i.e. at the concrete level.
I think I have made progress and then people around me tell me I have. But I still have doubts. Doubts about whether such a positive world view is real or in fact imaginary.
The deeper I dig into it the more real I find it and the more imaginary the world I am leaving behind.
At present I have made a tremendous breakthrough. I have managed to leave behind the whole debate whether negativity/doubts have any credibility. I am now taking life a bit more seriously. Now I need to know what is the next right thing to do and do it.
Things are getting better and I know [after this breakthrough] that the actual journey has just begun.
Negativity and Doubts occupy our minds in various forms. They are like an addiction. The way I got around them was that I undertook a "fast" - a fast from non-sensical thinking. It was nerve wrecking in the begining. At times I was consciously trying not to think. Gradually over two or three days all such thoughts were nearly gone.
Interestingly by doing this I have managed to change the way I feel by changing the way I think.
A more structured way of doing the above is called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy". What I understand of it is: Any thing that is bothering you should be put down as a "problem statment". The next step is to break your problem statement down into its component parts and write alternative solutions to these "problem parts". [You already know atleast one answer for each problem part but you are probably stuck with just this one answer. The CBT exercise will help you come up with alternative solutions that just weren't popping up.]
Hello,
It was great to get your request. I personally feel I have tread little on the journey my self. There are people who have travelled it much.
That said, I have discovered a few simple facts that have made my quality of life better. It turns out that as things get simpler so do I.
I have tried to reason things out with myself. It seems that everytime I am honest with myself and give a 100% to whatever I think the next step should be, I get some interesting answers.
The question I keep asking my self is: The world has to be a beautiful place if God made it [I personally believe in God] then why is it not beautiful for me?
The answer is always a beautiful one.
A parallel dialogue in my mind is: "The world was a great place when I was a kid. I still feel like a kid at heart. What then has happened to the world? I just seem lost. I need to figure this out. Every time I have ever learnt anythign it has always simplified things for me. I need to learn enough things so that things get back to normal."
To open my eyes to a more beautiful way of looking at things: I think at the most abstract level and work my way down. At the abstract level things are always more beautiful. But this beauty is always fleeting till you make it manifest in your life i.e. at the concrete level.
I think I have made progress and then people around me tell me I have. But I still have doubts. Doubts about whether such a positive world view is real or in fact imaginary.
The deeper I dig into it the more real I find it and the more imaginary the world I am leaving behind.
At present I have made a tremendous breakthrough. I have managed to leave behind the whole debate whether negativity/doubts have any credibility. I am now taking life a bit more seriously. Now I need to know what is the next right thing to do and do it.
Things are getting better and I know [after this breakthrough] that the actual journey has just begun.
Negativity and Doubts occupy our minds in various forms. They are like an addiction. The way I got around them was that I undertook a "fast" - a fast from non-sensical thinking. It was nerve wrecking in the begining. At times I was consciously trying not to think. Gradually over two or three days all such thoughts were nearly gone.
Interestingly by doing this I have managed to change the way I feel by changing the way I think.
A more structured way of doing the above is called "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy". What I understand of it is: Any thing that is bothering you should be put down as a "problem statment". The next step is to break your problem statement down into its component parts and write alternative solutions to these "problem parts". [You already know atleast one answer for each problem part but you are probably stuck with just this one answer. The CBT exercise will help you come up with alternative solutions that just weren't popping up.]
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