A Lesson from a Shock
Absorber
Make negative experiences grist to the mill of your own
personality development. Nurture yourself on what they teach you.
If you are standing by the roadside when a car passes by, you will observe that its wheels continually move up and down over bumps in the road surface. But, if you were sitting inside the car, you would feel as if the car were running smoothly. How is this possible? It is because the car is fitted with shock absorbers thanks to which the shocks remain confined to the wheels and do not reach the passenger.
A spiritual person is one who has an inbuilt ‘shock absorber’. Such a person can experience any undesirable event he faces without any disturbance either to his emotions or to his thinking processes. For such a person there will frequently be problems and unpleasant situations that he shall have to face, but because of his ‘shock absorber’, his mind will remain unaffected. In a world which is constantly administering shocks of one kind or another, he can live in a state of perfect equanimity.
In our society, there is no one who does not have to suffer negative experiences of one kind or another. These negative experiences generally give rise to complaints. And when the mind becomes exclusively taken up with complaining, there can be no spirituality. Spirituality and complaints cannot go together. Considering that there is no escape from such negative experiences, what should one do? The answer is that if you want to live as a spiritual person, you have to install a ‘shock absorber’ in your mental makeup. With this ‘shock absorber’ taking every shock upon itself, your spirituality will remain intact.
You are bound to live in society and much as you may want to change society, you have no power to do so. That is because social laws work independently of us. Then, what to do? You shall simply have to condition yourself to think positively, even in negative situations
Constant complaining is the greatest enemy of spirituality. But the complaint culture is a part of social living. Indeed, society is awash with complaints. It is a veritable ocean of complaints. And just as a fish cannot live out of water, its natural environment, man cannot live outside of the society to which he belongs. Therefore, rather than trying to change society, change yourself . Make negative experiences grist to the mill of your own personality development. Nurture yourself on what they teach you.
The best way to cope with the problem of complaints is to take it as a challenge. When you take a problem as a challenge, you do your best to meet it. You try to deal effectively with it, rather than try to eliminate it altogether from society.
This course of action is quite possible. For example, if a bird is sitting on the wall of your house and you throw stones at it, it will fly away from your house, sit on a nearby tree and continue its chirping. The bird always lives in a non-complaint culture. If this culture is possible for a bird, then why not for man?
Unpleasant experiences are not an evil. They cause you to think realistically. They enhance your ability to make correct judgements, increase your creativity and make you sympathetic towards those who have adopted a way of proceeding that is unfavourable from your point of view. This is the positive outcome of an unpleasant situation.
It all depends on how you look at things. Problems arise when you look at things from the wrong angle. Adjust your viewpoint and very soon you will find that everything will turn out to be in your favour.
