Last Sunday one sis requested me to visit her home. She told me that her computer was out of order and it should be fixed. From her explanation, I could understand that there was hardly any possibility to fix it but I agreed to visit her because I had another interest, study her a little bit. She is a good subject matter to study the different sides of mind as she maintains a very complicated state of mind and attitudes. I visited her according to the promise I made and after checking computer began to speak casually. She is a beautician and DTP operator having enough experience in both fields. She failed in all the attempts in which she tried to run a successful business. She sees her husband an unsuccessful one. Speaking to her is a big task; never see subjective sides but sees everything objectively. When coming to the case of other persons related to her, she sees their subjective sides, the subjective faults. Her husband has the habit of drinking liquor, she blames him not his situations; because of his faulty character, it happens so. Means in her husband’s situation she won’t allow to apply objective factors, only husband’s subjective factors. In her failures, see the double standard, she won’t allow applying this subjective side but completely objective means situations and other peoples.
Anyway, I told her that she should change, knowing that she won’t agree. Suddenly her expression and emotion changed and a nonverbal blistering question could be seen on her face and in her eyes; Me?
Why this expression and emotion?
If we check the lives of each and every one of us, we can see these conflicting attitudes prevail in our personal lives too. We have to understand some facts, some principles, first to overcome this attitudinal conflict and to move ahead. We cannot completely reject the fact that there are objective causes (causes other than personal attitudes – subjective) exist. But in life, there are no absolute objective causes that impede our going ahead. Behind every such objective obstacle, there will be subjective elements or Element. To break such obstacles which often cover us as shell, we have to outgrow them. It is not fighting against them (but in some other meaning we are fighting against them) but ‘grow to break’. What is that or how is that?
Consider a hatching egg. The embryo in it grows daily receiving energy or food from its environment. When its growth quantitatively reaches a particular level there will be a qualitative change or transformation in its life and its existing objective situations cannot stand as an obstacle in its life, so it breaks the covering shell of impedance and enter into a new stage of life, to a new world. In the case of this embryo, the obstacle is natural and it never fights against it but grows. Neither the shell acts as a harming element in its growth but protect until it reaches a specific level of growth. Otherwise, the obstacle is a protection up to a certain level in which the subject achieves a certain level of ability or maturity to face new situations in the next level.
In each and everyone’s life, there will be such shell exists as an obstacle. I f anyone feels it as an obstacle, means he wish to come out to the next stage without growth; means without personal changes, qualitative changes or subjective changes. Even though someone could come to next stage without such growth, he will not be able to survive there. The one who cannot make or who doesn’t willing to make such qualitative changes, subjective changes, always see objective causes in their problems. Means they see the shell that protects them as an obstacle. When the qualitative changes in us culminate to a specific level, obstacles will become obsolete and weak therefore they shall fall away. We needn’t blame and criticize them. So when you fail, make introspection to know where you want to get more strength or more growth.
This is a universal law. Look into the stages of a butterfly from the stage of a larva. It becomes pupa at a particular stage of growth then began to grow inside the pupa the strong covering with silk threads. But whatever the strength of pupa that doesn’t matter at another particular point of growth, breaking the covering, it comes out as a beautiful butterfly.
A seed’s interior goes through changes, grows internally, and at a particular time of growth it breaks the outer shell and come out as a sprout and again to grow to face another stage of change and again transforms. (John 12:24)
So if the obstacles (it may different in types like social, political, financial, and educational so and so) exist against us, it means we have to grow to break it. Obstacles mean the need of growth, need of change.
How to grow to break such obstacles and get transformed to next stage of growth or success?
Use this above-mentioned principle in personal growth. As the growth of inner being of a person at a particular stage breaks his shell, all his personal limitations, and transforms to a new personality bestowing best performance in new areas so this transformed, grown, personality overthrow social, political, economical or any other barriers or limitations.
How to make changes internally to transform personally? Most important thing, the thing deserves first priority, is ‘always be positive’, always try to fill your mind with positive emotions. It is not easy but to say it is very easy. The best way to practice it is to practice meditation; if you are a believer then it is easy. Otherwise, practice autosuggestion. Think always about positive things and peoples and cooperate with such people, keep distance with negative people and emotions. Participate in all programs which contribute positive attitude and thought. Maintain positive emotions such as faith, hope, love, enthusiasm etc. Hear music a few minutes every day. Read good books which give us positive attitudes, especially about persons who rose up from failures and humble beginnings like Gandhi, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mandela etc. Whenever you face hardship, take it positively and believe it is a transition point, you are on the cross; resurrection is nearby and works for your goals. Most of the failure occurs at the transition point because it is the time of hardship, none will be ready to go through and imbibe energy from it. So give up at this point because as I mentioned earlier we try to see matters objectively, reasons in the environment, not subjectively, within us. Don’t give up but imbibe energy from it. In each failure there is a seed of success or a hidden success, try to find it out. If you can continue this way a few months, sometime a few weeks, you can see the improvements in your life. Without your awareness, many mental abilities and qualities will have been developed in you amazingly, enough to break your obstacle shell.
If your ‘inner being’ cannot break your personal limits, you will not be able to break the limits and obstacle around you. So don’t focus on your personal limit but unlimited possibilities which the ‘inner you’ offers. Human thoughts, imaginations, confidence broke his limits so that he could break the limit of the sky; now he travels to the unlimited space.
Helen Keller is the everlasting example for this fact. In full Helen Adams Keller (born June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Ala., U.S. died June 1, 1968, Westport, Conn.) American author and educator who was blind and deaf. Her education and training represent an extraordinary accomplishment in the education of persons with these disabilities.
Keller was afflicted at the age of 19 months with an illness (possibly scarlet fever) that left her blind, deaf, and mute. She was examined by Alexander Graham Bell at the age of six; as a result, he sent to her a 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan (Macy) from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, which Bell's son-in-law directed. Sullivan, a remarkable teacher, remained with Keller from March 1887 until her own death in October 1936.
Within months Keller had learned to feel objects and associate them with words spelled out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame. During 1888–90 she spent winters at the Perkins Institution learning braille. Then she began a slow process of learning to speak under Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, also in Boston. She also learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled out for her. At age 14 she enrolled in the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, and at 16 she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. She won admission to Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904.
Having developed skills never approached by any similarly disabled person, Keller began to write of blindness, a subject then taboos in women's magazines because of the relationship of many cases to venereal disease. Edward W. Bok accepted her articles for the Ladies' Home Journal, and other major magazines—The Century, McClure's, and The Atlantic Monthly—followed suit.
She wrote of her life in several books, including The Story of My Life (1902), Optimism (1903), The World I Live In (1908), My Religion (1927), Helen Keller's Journal (1938), and The Open Door (1957). In 1913 she began lecturing (with the aid of an interpreter), primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she later established a $2 million endowment fund, and her lecture tours took her several times around the world. Her efforts to improve treatment of the deaf and the blind were influential in removing the disabled from asylums. She also prompted the organization of commissions for the blind in 30 states by 1937. Keller's childhood training with Anne Sullivan was depicted in William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker (New York opening, October 19, 1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 and was subsequently made into a motion picture (1962) that won two Academy Awards.
This is the true life of a lady of a blind, deaf and mute who had only limitations nothing else in the world. But her ‘inner being’ the undying spirit outgrew all her personal limiting obstacles and conquered the world and became a heroine in the history in her own way. Don’t focus on limitations but focus on the one that resides in you who can overcome any personal limitations and obstacles and thereby overcome all barriers that stand against you in your social, political or financial environment.
