No, but maybe you will, someday.
So... just treat yourself as the most intelligent and yet the most modest person in the world. Then perhaps you will be able to change anything as you wish. Here's a tip:
The End of Failure
Success and Failure Defined
Success refers to the achievement in relation to a specific goal. If there is no goal set in advance, then, however much the achievement, it can't be called success. On the other hand, if there is no achievement and there is also no goal, then such non-achievement can't be called failure. Again, if there is no achievement at present but there is a promise of an achievement in the future, then the absence of achievement can't be called failure at present. The reverse case should also be considered: that if there is an achievement that involves the possibility of a loss which is supposed to result from that achievement, then such achievement, given that the possibility is in the awareness, can't be called success. Therefore, you may have made the wrong conclusion if you have concluded that you have become successful or have failed in a specific situation without giving the matter a clear thought.
Factors of Success
There is no failure in the long run. This is beyond all doubt if it is said in relation to a person who consciously pursues success. Only this Universal Law of Success, as I call it, needs to be kept in mind: Success and failure originate from each other. Each is defined from a specific point of view. As a result, any success may be called a failure from a particular point of view, and vice versa. Given this law, we'd better recast the mindset and have a fresh look at the concepts of success and goal. In doing so, we'll need to throw light upon the following set of concepts: ability, aptitude, values, intelligence & creativity, knowledge, priority, sacrifice, and strategy. These are the variables that assume different values for different individuals. But if success or failure has ever to be analyzed and interpreted in a consistent, fruitful way, then they must be defined in a uniform way.
Ability
By the word 'ability' we here refer to the mental or physical skill needed to do something. Our success or failure is a function of our abilities. Because you can increase your abilities by conscious efforts, you can also choose between success or failure. However, you must always keep the following questions in mind:
ï½ 1. Do my abilities permit me to set the goal/goals that I have in my mind?
ï½ 2. Are my abilities backed by sufficient experience?
ï½ 3. Is my goal somewhat above the range of my abilities?
ï½ 4. Are my abilities increasing day by day?
ï½ 5. Have I ever clearly listed all my abilities and deeply thought about them?
ï½6. Using my present abilities, what other abilities can I acquire?
You must think again and again about your goals until you have positive answers to the first five questions.
Aptitude
Ability is founded on aptitude. This word refers to the natural ability or skill, especially in learning.
Most of us have different abilities but a limited focus of aptitude. This is why you may have acquired many abilities but may not feel very much interested in using all of them or relating the goals of your life to all of them. This is where your nature and instinct come into play. In order to achieve success in what you intend to do, you should do the following:
ï½ 1. Find out which of your abilities conform to your aptitude to a great degree. Base your long-term goals on these abilities.
ï½ 2. Discover what more abilities you could acquire if you spent more time and energy to develop skills on the basis of your aptitude.
ï½ 3. Be on the lookout for setting and resetting your goals in light of your aptitude, and not your other abilities. This you must do if what you're doing at present is not firmly supported by your aptitude.
The natural direction of your fascination for work will always be influenced by your aptitude and not by your abilities. If your goals are not set in light of your aptitude, then you may even get bored of your abilities. In that case you'll probably have to use your real creativity and intelligence in amateur projects and be like a machine or slave in your profession. However, it is true that you'll never be hundred percent satisfied with your profession, but a hundred percent satisfaction means a barrier to further development. So you need not worry about it. Your latent creativity will always give you a push outward, thus giving you some trouble in the form of indecision and a feeling of being in uncertainty. This is not necessarily bad.
Values
Your values are your ideas (or notions) about what is important in your life. Both aptitude and values relate to your instinct somehow or other but there's a sharp distinction between the two concepts. While aptitude pertains to your natural ability to learn and inclination to learning, values pertain to your natural or instinctive choices of objects or instruments. The former involves development while the later involves enjoyment. Hence the former can hardly be deliberately changed until its demand has been satisfied but the latter can be changed and does change depending on the demand of the situation or the stage of development of the mind.
Values differ from person to person, country to country, culture to culture, and above all, religion to religion. It is your values that provide the motive force for your mind. Your values even influence your learning, understanding, world view, and mode of building relationships with others. Nothing influences you in your ideas about success and failure, happiness and sorrows, and satisfaction and dissatisfaction, more than your values do. Only when you have successfully identified what values have motivated your choice of action can you properly interpret why you are so happy or sorry as you are. So you can easily infer now that your values directly influence your goals and even modify your ideas of goals.
The five factors that most often set our values from behind the curtain are the following:
ï¾Necessity
ï¾Concept of the mission of life
ï¾Understanding
ï¾Concept of the 'self' and 'others' and
ï¾Ability to endure difficulties.
Necessity limits our choices. Our understanding, perception, and capabilities ï¾ none of these can escape this limiting force of necessity. Again, the prevalence of the same necessity over a considerably long period may form a mindset of a relatively permanent nature. The worst possible consequence of this phenomenon may be that it happens to germinate wrong values in the short term that may not remain attractive or active enough in the long term. A good way of avoiding such myopic vision is to react to the necessity with all efforts and skill while keeping an eye on something completely different ï¾ the mission of life.
One's mission of life is one's conscious and subconscious way of thinking about death. So this is one of the most basic issues of life, though often left unattended or kept covered under the shadow of the domestic movements of the mind. We often believe that we're aware of the missions of our lives, but actually what we're aware of are our desires and honesty and kindness projected to the world phenomena, and probably not of the real mission. For the real mission to be perceived, life must be juxtaposed with death only for a while and thus the distant, invisible goal identified. We often mistakenly cherish the notion that the mission of life is a product of erudite contemplation of life vis-Ã -vis the nobleness of the mind. But this is really a trick of the mind. The mission is everything that the life is for and can't be constructed. Rather, it has to be discovered and felt. And one can't do it successfully until and unless one has stood face-to-face with death and used death as a mirror.
One's values are also influenced by one's power of understanding. Understanding is a broad concept which encompasses the concepts of intelligence, creativity, knowledge base, predisposition, and intention. However, it is also influenced by one's awareness of how understanding takes place in the mind. It must not be confused with reasoning, however. Reasoning, being an impersonal process of thinking, is hardly colored by personal factors, while understanding is. An awareness of how understanding is taking place in the mind, which can be called meta-understanding, can help one a lot to overcome this limitation.
Sometimes we are caught in what I would call the values trap. By this term I mean the quandary one is in when one has the grudge expressed in a question like this: "My values are noble and good. Why then can't I have them realized?" The arising of this kind of thought in the mind suggests an anomaly somewhere that needs to be mended. If the cause of such a feeling is not searched for and taken care of, it may become the cause of lack of enthusiasm and inferiority complex. A set of rules applies to values, which are as follows:
ï½ However noble or ideal a set of values are, they must be pragmatic.
All materialistic values must also be accompanied by some idealistic values. Otherwise the values themselves will jeopardize the equilibrium of the mind as well as the environment. For example, if someone has the values that prompt them to say "I believe that money and financial freedom is a precondition for happiness in life," they should also be cherishing the values expressed by this conviction: "I believe that only honesty and fair play can ensure the realization of the desire for financial freedom."
ï½ Values must reflect one's concept of and plan for "others" of the society or system. For example, the desire "I want money" will work less effectively than the determination of "I will create a lot of material value in the system I belong to."
ï½ All short-term values must be backed by corresponding long-term values. This is because our desires usually arise from our present needs and so embrace our short-term commitment to ourselves. When we look at the future we look with the eyes of the past through the glasses of the present. As a result, though some things change in keeping with our desires and efforts, some things that also should have changed do not. This is due to our failure to attach long-term values to the set of short-term values we pursue. With the increase in affluence, are we getting increased security, for example?
If the set of values that an individual pursues is not balanced, then understanding will be onesided and clouded by intentions and feelings, rather than by logic. A holistic understanding necessitates one to feel and think at the same time. The logic of understanding comprises the following:
ï¾ Pure logic
ï¾ Emotional logic
ï¾ Logical emotions and
ï¾ Pure emotions.
Pure logic is the impersonal basis for thought. Logical emotions are emotions checked against their too-personal or narrow overtones. Emotional logic is logic systematically and irrevocably merged into emotion. Pure emotions are pure mental energy that set goals for themselves without any calculation.
One's understanding also influences and is influenced by one's concept of the 'self' and 'others'. This concept is so crucial that it serves as the dividing line between any set of two attitudes. In fact, it is this factor that has determined and will determine whether we will be happy on earth. The attitude resulting from the clarity of this concept forms the basis for what we call religion. In this sense, even atheists follow some kind of religion. However, whatever be the religion that we follow, it must be based on the principles of patience, sympathy, self-restraint, sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of individuality (or personal freedom).
The differences in people's values can also be correlated with their ability to endure difficulties. There can be no life without difficulty. There are ups and downs in every life. But if we form our values only in view of one side, we will surely first create more ups and downs in our mental states and then in the external reality. Changing values means changing decisions, which is good only when the change takes place upward ï from the material level to the conceptual.
The more materialistic the values, the narrower and more self-centered they render the mind, while the more conceptual (or ethical) the values, the wider and more comprehensive they render the mind. Therefore it would be very prudent of us if we looked at our values, especially those of material nature, and judged them anew in light of our respective manner of reacting to phenomena.
Intelligence and Creativity
Intelligence is the mind's ability to successfully react to changing situations. The word 'changing' should be considered with special attention. It implies time and speed. So we can say that intelligence is a mixed measure of the speed, success rate, and range of the mind's problem-solving ability.
Creativity, as opposed to intelligence, refers to the mind's ability to find new, unpredictable solutions to old problems or effective solutions to completely novel problems. Up to a certain level, both intelligence and creativity may mean something very similar or the same. The definition that we have considered also corroborates this opinion ï¾ both of them center on the concepts of a problem and a solution. However, beyond a level, creativity may have nothing to do with problems and their solutions, though it may still successfully relate to them. In the general sense, creativity refers to the mind's ability to escape set patterns and thus overcome limitations. In the applied sense, it refers to the mind's ability to create new ideas.
Our success or failure is a function of our intelligence and creativity. But there seems to be a sharp dividing line between their involvement in practical life: highly creative people are often seen to be more successful than highly intelligent people, but after a longer period of hard labor and perseverance. Conversely, the more creative a person is, the less successful they are in the short-term, while in the long term the reverse case is often likely to be true.
Those who are more intelligent than creative tend to define success in pragmatic terms ï¾ that is, with measurable references. On the other hand, those who are more creative than intelligent are usually prone to view success in terms of the number of events their ability can create, rather than the output of the events. Consequently, creative people may have to suffer the initial consequences of being creative ___ the extraordinary responsibility to sacrifice efforts and defer the rewards to a later point in time. Fortunately, those who are creative have the necessary patience and broadness of mind.
Before making or accepting a decisive comment on whether you have succeeded or failed in something, therefore, look back at yourself once again and discover whether you're more creative than intelligent. Success in not any end-product, so you should never measure it too hastily.
Knowledge
Knowledge is a factor of success. You must have sufficient knowledge of the related parameters and variables if you want to be successful in achieving a specific goal. However, there are hidden traps here. No knowledge can necessarily ensure good performance or achievement unless the nature of knowledge is known first. Even experts have begun to say that Knowledge Management, one of the latest issues in management, has failed drastically. Actually, human knowledge couldn't be more vitiated by anything than the knowledge that is founded on the audacious belief that knowledge can either be fully measured or bought or sold or developed or acquired or coded or even defined. Knowledge is simply part of the being. The word 'part' also doesn't fit in this context. Rather, knowledge itself is the individual, which is why it is beyond all limits and measurements.
However, because our focus is not on the philosophical interpretation of knowledge, we'll only touch on its most practical and psychological dimensions. Here are the 20 Laws Of Knowledge (LOK), as I would call them.
ï½ 1. We can manage ourselves only by managing our knowledge.
ï½ 2. Knowledge is ignorance when it's not aware of its limitations.
ï½ 3. Our knowledge of our ignorance can always increase.
ï½ 4. If we prove to be laggards in acquiring knowledge, repeated failures will come to provide us with the knowledge that we haven't acquired.
ï½ 5. Unutilized knowledge becomes the cause of delirium.
ï½ 6. Knowledge never fails; what fails is the person's belief of their knowledge.
ï½ 7. Knowledge never gets old; what makes it seem old is our intention to use it for the same purpose or for similar purposes repeatedly.
ï½ 8. Knowledge is not a mere instrument. Instrumentality is one of its dimensions, of which we reap the benefit.
ï½ 9. Everything is the beginning of knowledge, its end being lost forever.
ï½ 10. Because knowledge is not a cheap product to be sold at wholesale prices, it need not be applied to be considered important. It is more than technology. It is life.
ï½ 11. All knowledge accumulates into self-knowledge. As a result, beyond a certain level, knowledge itself is the best reward that we can ever have.
ï½12. There's a dimension of knowledge in everybody of us whether we're aware of it or not, which can neither be acquired nor distributed.
ï½ 13. Knowledge is the direct result of personal sacrifice.
ï½ 14. Everything in the universe can give us something ï¾ knowledge. Even death gives us the greatest possible knowledge if we don't look for knowledge consciously.
ï½15. There's knowledge in being satisfied with anything.
ï½ 16. Knowledge forgives none. Everybody will have to acquire knowledge, today or tomorrow.
ï½ 17. The fool who fails to acquire knowledge quickly enough becomes the object of experiment and thus adds to the knowledge of the wise.
ï½ 18. Knowledge should never be given away unasked.
ï½ 19. If knowledge is available in the market, it should never be purchased at low prices.
ï½ 20. One who doesn't acquire newer knowledge every day is a fool.
Priority
Only knowing and doing can't ensure you success. You must prioritize some activities over others. Many a plan ends in a failure due to the absence of prioritization. Although it is easy to understand theoretically, it is not so easy to establish practically. I have learnt the truth of this statement by deliberately being a defaulter in this regard. Of the things that are important in achieving a goal, some are more important than the others. The concept of 'more important' is often misinterpreted. So let's see in how many ways something can be important to the achievement of a goal. However, we can't proceed further very successfully without having the word 'importance' clearly defined. No dictionary definition of the word clears the obscurity we find ourselves in about it. For example, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English transfers the definition to the definition of another word, 'important', saying that importance means 'the quality of being important.' It then defines 'important' in the following words: 'an important event, decision, problem etc. has a big effect or influence on people's lives or on events in the future.' But only the concept of 'big' can't picture the nature of importance very clearly. We need to know why and in how many ways something important has a big influence on what it's important to. For this purpose we'll define importance in a more logical and pragmatic way. The importance of something to something else is indicated by its involvement in the latter. This involvement may have the following patterns:
A may be important to B because:
ï¡ A is needed for B's existence;
ï¡ A makes B useful in some way;
ï¡ A gives B the ability to acquire more abilities;
ï¡ A enables B to achieve its goals;
ï¡ A directly helps C, which directly helps B;
ï¡ Among A, D, E, F, and G ï the factors of B ï¾ as far as a given goal is concerned ï¾ A must be active first (or second ...) for the others to be active; etc.
So you should not only identify what you must do or possess to achieve a goal, you have to find out how and why those events or things are important to it, too. Once you have done so, you can prioritize what has to be prioritized and add surprising leverage to your activities.
Sacrifice
There's nothing in life that can take place without sacrifice. Everything we achieve or receive can be traced as a result of some sacrifice. This we all understand, more or less. But only generalized understanding may mean superficial understanding in many cases. Understanding, unless it pervades all dimensions of the mind, emotions included, can't activate the mind strongly enough so as to help make choices.
Making choices is a precondition for making decisions, for decision making means limiting the number of choices with reference to certain standards. And this is where the concept of sacrifice becomes very relevant. In fact, making a choice involves making a sacrifice.
The concept of sacrifice, which doesn't necessarily involve a religious overtone, can be more effectively understood by comparing and contrasting it with the concepts of expenditure, loss, and wastage.
Expenditure can be defined as an investment waiting to be discovered as either a gain or a loss.
A loss is expenditure that has lost its promise. Wastage refers to the loss of resource due to inefficient management. While loss is investment identified as unpromising, wastage is the loss of resource in a way which was either not predicted or not meant to be an investment. In other words, loss is the decrease in the input and wastage is the decrease in the output. Among these three concepts, sacrifice can't be compared with any, though it can be contrasted with all of them. Sacrifice is neither expenditure nor loss, nor wastage ï¾ it's investment that never fails.
If you want to be a knowledgeable professor, you must sacrifice a lot of time, effort, pleasure, sleep, convenience, etc. If, likewise, you want to be a good leader, you'll need to sacrifice ease of life, rest, personal desires, narrow emotions, and so on. Those who believe in the Hereafter do, because they must, sacrifice much in this life. Those who are atheists sacrifice, at least in the eyes of believers in a Hereafter, something greater than anybody else does ï¾ that is, the life of eternal peace and enjoyment in the Hereafter. If you want to enjoy what you call chastity (whether you're a man or a woman being of no special concern), then you have to sacrifice the pleasure of free sex. On the contrary, if you want to enjoy free sex, then you must sacrifice chastity. In a word, there's sacrifice everywhere.
So if you want to have a long-term plan for success in life, then you have to sit with a piece of paper and a pencil to make a list of:
ï½ what you've already sacrificed without any motive ï¾ that is, wasted;
ï½ what you've sacrificed with definite purposes and what you've achieved;
ï½ what things you should have sacrificed but you haven't;
ï½ what things you shouldn't have sacrificed but you have;
ï½ what things you need to sacrifice in the future to achieve certain goals; and
ï½ if you make the required sacrifice, what important things or opportunities you may have to lose in the future.
Remember that you can consciously or unconsciously sacrifice the following:
ï¡ material resource
ï¡ time
ï¡ opportunity
ï¡ mental states
ï¡ freedom
ï¡ relationships
ï¡ fame
ï¡ power
ï¡ security, and above all
ï¡ life.
The Final Judgment
Success is never final, true, but your judgment of whether you've been successful should be decisive. And, interestingly, if ever your judgment is to be of pragmatic value, then it must be no other than this conviction: "I'm successful in certain areas and a failure in certain areas. I can always achieve more success in some areas by accepting failure in some related areas. For example, if I fail to be dishonest, I'll be successful in being trustable. I can be more and more successful by managing my ideas of failure and success and then translating the ideas into action."
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The Psychology of
Thought, Intelligence, and Creativity:
Thought As the Greatest Promise to Creativity and Intelligence
Life is a bundle of thoughts. We earn knowledge only when we think about our thoughts. Often we claim to be free-minded, without, however, being free from the limitations of the mind. Our desires arise in us as streams of thoughts. When we use our reasoning in favor of them, we lose the validity of our reasoning ability. The best thing to do in this case is simply look at the thoughts. Thoughts face-to-face with thoughts create knowledge. Knowledge is not a bundle of data. It is the result of the judgment of thoughts with thoughts. The thoughts that tend to sweep the mind with gushes of desires are only automated algebraic machines. They do not create knowledge unless they are encountered with a serene mind and firm intention.
One cannot create anything. You need two to be one of the two. Both the two are in you. You only need look inside and . . . keep looking. That you must do until you eventually come to perceive who is seeing and what is being seen. You are the source of all knowledge.
Form Intelligence to Creativity
Life is an ongoing process of confronting problems and solving them. This act, essential or not, adds to our intelligence. I have the hunch that intelligence is one kind of database without any raw data; from this point interrelationships among data. Form this point of view, intelligence can be considered one kind of memory which supports other types of memories. In other words, it is the pointer to data files and structures. Creativity is the ability to play with a set of such pointers.
If what has been said thus far makes sense then it must also be meaningful that we can convert our intelligence into creativity by some practices that may be intellectual, mental, or spiritual.
Let us investigate some of the many possible ways.
Change the process of solution:
Given that a particular solution to a problem is correct and need not necessarily be questioned, we can be wiser by finding a new way of finding the solution. For this enterprise to be meaningful, we have got to think about what we really mean by a solution.
What is a solution? Asking the same question to yourself twenty times will make you wiser than you are now. That is because we tend to keep ourselves in a lot of darkness by not asking this question: Why do we think that we have found? If, fortunately, we ever happen to ask ourselves this question, we happen to look at our notion of a problem. In fact, our notion of a certain situation as a problem influences our idea of the solution that we are looking for. This goes to mean that the reason why we call a situation a problem is hardly ever investigated with a fresh look. Therefore, we can be wiser simply by looking at our idea of problem in the first instance. And if it turns out that being aware of our idea of a problem gives us knowledge and untangles our intelligence, then we can profit by our ability to consider a situation a problem from more than one angle of view. If something is a problem, then it could well be a set of problems.
Armed with the knowledge of what a problem may be like, we may now turn to our idea of a solution. Now that a situation can be called a problem from a number of angles of view, it can also be approached from a number of ways in order to solve it. Surely, a picture of all or a number of such problems and solutions is a better description of what we might call the reality. So let us dig deep into the possibility of the concept of problem first.
A problem is a situation that needs a solution. It is a situation that needs to be known? That’s because any ignorance of mine of this situation will become a limitation for me. How do I know that this for me? I know that because I am aware of the knowledge that this situation is essentially an object of my thought but somehow or other my thought has happened to be dependent on it.
I call a situation a problem only because I know something about it and also do not know something about it, with the result that my knowledge also contains the awareness that it cannot be effective enough unless it has overcome the ignorance. In this sense, a problem is the knowledge of a situation that has locked some knowledge.
Now, why do I need to know that? Or what is the same thing, why do I think that the solution will pay me? I think so because I have an intention ï¾ to do something physically or mentally. Our necessity gives us the opportunity to be wise.
If that is the case, then why do we not have the intention to do more things with the same thing that we thought we could use for one purpose? The more the purposes that we want to serve with something, the more knowledge it will provide at a very low price in terms of effort and time.
A problem is our awareness of a situation, which points to the difference between our knowledge of it when we intend to do something with it and our knowledge of the possibility of doing it completely. For example, you are going somewhere by a bicycle. You see that the road you are moving along has be crossed by a canal over which there is a broken bridge, such that you can now cross the bridge without the bicycle but not with it. This situation is a problem to you because you. Want to go to your destination taking the bicycle with you. You know how you could cross the bridge with the bicycle, so the broken bridge seems to be a problem.
But is not the bicycle itself a problem now, in one sense? Surely it is, if you must go to your destination. And if you decide not to move ahead any more then that cannot be called a solution because you have changed your purpose. Now identify the problem in your thought only. How are you going to describe it? Can you not say that in this case the problem is your notion of getting over the other bank vis-Ã -vis your awareness that there is an impediment?
If the broken bridge can be regarded as on impediment, then the idea of the bridge could also be regarded as such. So you could find a possible solution by imaging yourself in a situation where there was no bridge at all. Then perhaps you would look for a boat.
Because this is a common situation, we hardly need to think much to find a solution like this. But the fact is that we often take a long time to think in this way in abstract situations.
Often our idea of a problem and its solution gets colored by our choice of the process of solving the problem. That is why the attempt to find newer ways of solving a problem may offer a huge potential of knowledge and intelligence. This attempt comes from our creativity. So we must be intelligent in a creative way.
Changing the process of solution pays a lot even when you already know the solution to cases, we are satisfied with solutions without knowing such about the problem. The search for an alternative solution can open our wisdom eye in such cases. Let’s do some exercises:
Do a Thought Experiment by Considering The Problem a Solution:
I believe that this is the most effective approach to understanding the nature of a problem. By solving a problem, we only acknowledge it as a problem and so our attitude to it gets fixed. This kind of thinking means calculation only, which, no doubt, has its use in life, but in its broader sense thinking means judgment, which is certainly more than mere calculation. As far as thinking means calculation, machines outdo humans. But we are the creators of machines and should not forget it.
Considering a problem only a problem can make us clever, not intelligent. If it ever makes us intelligent in some cases, then it still can’t make us wise. Most of the time our concept of problem makes us so narrow-minded that we only look for the solution and remain satisfied with it. We all can remember many chases when we’ve become foolish because of our ability to be satisfied with small things. Any thought that is a product of such a mindset loses its effectiveness in the long term or receives a surprise by confronting situations that declare it invalid or back-dated. Humankind has suffered a lot by clever in this way. History supplies ample evidence that every time a group of humans has stepped into the domain of a new epoch, it has not only jested at its predecessor’s mode of thought but rejected it too. We can’t escape being surprised in this way because we don’t look at problems in a different way. Because our interest or survival is involved in solving a problem, we seldom consider it a solution. In fact, every problem appears as a solution to another problem if it was left unsolved in the proper way.
Discover your Real Strength:
There is truth in the statement that to each kind of strength that you have, there is a corresponding weakness equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. If you can successfully discover it, then you will surely be better off than before with respect to creativity. Your awareness of your weakness will prove to be strength more meaningful. Let us delve deeper into this mystery.
The Strength of Weakness
It is only weakness that can be transformed into strength. In other words, nobody could ever be strong if they weren't weak. And what I'm saying is not quibble or mere word-work for encouragement. Rather, it's as true and trustable as any proven scientific theoryï¾or more reliable than that. So, my dear reader, rejoice in all the weaknesses that you have. It's only after five minutes that your weakness will prove to be the most important gift of your life.
Man's weakness is the only cause of his intelligence, creativity, and knowledge.
Think about a dog. It can identify some things by the smellï¾a capability that you can't even imagine. Even so, it's a dog and you're a human being.
Think about a bat. It can `see' even without eyes. That's why it can see in the dark, whereas you're afraid of losing your eyesight even in a tender age. Still you're a human being with an unlimited possibility of development, while the bat is not.
Or think about any fish or bird. They can live in the water or fly in the sky but you can't. On the contrary, you only dream of flying and are afraid of drowning. Nevertheless, those animals are subservient to you and you're their lord!
The dog has an extraordinary ability but it doesn't know that it's extraordinary. It doesn't even know what it knows or doesn't know. But you know that you don't know something and the dog knows it. This means that you know what you and others know as well as what you and they don't know. This means that you're knowledgeable even without a particular ability like the ability of an animal. If you had no inability and weakness, you couldn't know what the difference between ability and inability is. As a result, you couldn't have knowledge. If you didn't have knowledge, you couldn't use the ability of others and capitalize on the inability of theirs.
When you see that the bat sees without the eye, you 'see' even what the eyes can't see ï¾ that is, you know what seeing and not-seeing mean. This knowledge is so powerful that it goes beyond eyesight and sees something that the eyesight can't see.
You can't swim like a fish and that's why you can make a huge ship. You can't fly like a bird and that's why you can make a huge airbus.
Your past ï¾ the memory, and future ï¾ the dream, exist only because you can't keep everything in the same plane of consciousness like a computer. If you were able to visit the past, you wouldn't have sweet memories. Similarly, if you were able to visit the future, you couldn't dream, because in that case you wouldn't have an unknown world and unfulfilled desires.
Humans are intelligent, creative, and wise only because they are weak and have a long period of childhood. In a sense, we're children all through our lives ï¾ whatever our age is.
The last section has been taken from the author’s book “Secret Death and New Life” (search www.bn.com for ‘zakir’), and the rest of the articles comes from another book not yet published outside Bangladesh and India.
Author of ‘Secret Death and New Life’:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781581124842&itm=4
Or Search www.bn.com
for ‘zakir’
.....................
Source:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781581124842&itm=4