USE IT OR LOSE IT

If you hate a person, you hate something  in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us. -- Herman Hesse

That says the same thing as "What you see is always yourself," my personal favorite. Or, "If you can spot it, you got it." It has a lot more leverage coming from the likes of Herman Hesse, doesn't it?

Why, then, knowing these pithy truisms... agreeing with them even!...do we continue to immediately react in either hurt or anger to any objectionable remark that comes our way? Rather than look within and find our self?

Turning our efforts toward self-awareness, discipline and desire for spiritual answers is an upgraded life's work. We will perceive deliberate snubs...we can know they say absolutely nothing about us personally. Or we can stay in the reasoning mind, ever guarding against an incoming slight, with our race-race mind trying to perfect an all-purpose put-down.

We can...we must if we are going to grow spiritually...simply choose not to pick up an incoming. The minute we pick it up, we own it. That's when the reaction turns inward, rides us like a pony, and we send out our own deliberate snub...which will hit its target, be processed as needing a like response and shot back in a never-ending cycle of no-growth, spiritual or otherwise. Unless of course we count expanding our ego as growth.

Just learning restraint of tongue and pen is obviously a good thing, but the better thing is learning to upgrade our attitude one minute before we need restraint of tongue and pen. The message a restrained tongue held with a bad attitude sends is as discordant as playing the "Minute Waltz" repeatedly on an untuned piano.

The lesson to learn unto living is that God, the Spirit within each of us, has already solved any problem we can ever perceive. Has already gone before us to make the crooked places straight. Our only job is to come to realize there is no problem to be fixed... there is only Solution, i.e., God.

Then use It.

Thank you.