Just like a common language is the key to communication of knowledge, a common faith is the key to living happily in a group as a family or friends.
Love and faith are interconnected. If there is no faith, there can’t be any love. Even the most intimate love can’t withstand the onslaught of adultery, lying and cheating. Once you lose your love, it can never be brought back. If your beloved loses faith in you, it can never be restored.
Even if you do nothing, say nothing and be nothing, there will still be many who will criticise you. It is much better to be criticised for success than be condemned for failures because success rids you of the many miseries of life.
Most people lead miserable lives because in their attempt to win the rat race, they try to excel in the area for which they don’t have the potential. Hence, they fail not only in achieving success, but end up making their lives miserable as well.
Your potential is a hidden treasure. You may not be even aware of it till you discover it. However, it is not easy to find your potential when you are following others or trying to achieve success in an area which is the most sought after.
Most motivational speakers typically use anecdotes rather than statistics to prove their point. They don’t speak about the thousands of failures of millions of hapless men and women but always tell the story of one successful person to prove their point. They make great promises akin to a good salesman out to sell his wares. Many people follow their advice and unfortunately discover that they still are not able to achieve the promised success.
If you wish to be happy, you have to choose happiness over wealth, power, success or fame. You have to accord happiness the highest priority in life.
Even though we remain the same person, we have different types of relationships with our parents, children, spouse, relatives, friends, teachers, students, colleagues and neighbours. Each type of relationship fulfils a need which other relationships can’t fulfil. A happy person is one who maintains all types of relationships in life.
It is only through self-knowledge that we can understand reality 'as it is'—a living force which is dynamic and changing with time. Bookish knowledge is like a photograph. It helps to identify the person amid many other human beings but does not have the quality of the ‘real’ person—because a living person has feelings and flexibility.
It takes a long time for the spiritual and cultural knowledge to sink in our subconscious mind and become a belief. Our beliefs also change with time, but the change is quite slow like the changes in the body of a person. Even the most progressive person doesn’t want to change his beliefs though he may always be ready to acquire new knowledge.
A family which stays together for selfish reasons and not out of love does not stay together for long. When the family is humoured for convenience and necessity, its utility gets over soon. In such cases, children don’t need their parents when they grow up. A wife does not need her husband if she earns her livelihood. A husband may be attracted to a younger and more beautiful woman to fill his life. Parents do not want to waste time and money in bringing up their children who may leave them on growing up and won’t be available in time of need. An investment in a bank would perhaps be more reliable for old age than investment on children.
If you are not happy today, it is because you have not performed the right actions at the right time in the past.
A trustworthy person will not promise what he can’t deliver. However, you can’t deliver what you promise, unless you know yourself, know others, know the rules of the world and take the right action at the right time.
All goals take time to be accomplished. Think a hundred times before setting up your goals. However, once you decide, don’t change the goal in a hurry. Don’t abandon goals after you have travelled a long distance on them.
You must have certain principles in life to ensure that you follow the right path and do not deviate from it at the time of difficulties. Principles are not meant so much for the easy times, as for the difficult times, when you are tempted to follow the easy path to avoid the pressing problem.
When time changes, the law also changes to suit the new rulers. Often the same people who were being accused of heinous crimes like treason according to the then laws, become the martyrs and messiahs when the laws are changed.
An unfortunate reality is that most people are unhappy most of the time. Unhappiness is so widely pervasive in the modern world that if you tell someone that you are happy, people are unlikely to believe you. It is because we have stopped accepting that it is possible to achieve happiness
You must plan your life in such a way that at the time of your death, you own nothing, and have given everything. You can’t carry anything with you to the other world and everything shall be left here in this world after you are gone. All that will remain of you will be your good work.
Long-term goals are like planting a tree that will bear fruits only after a few years. These trees take a long time to grow but they provide lasting benefits. Unlike the seasonal crop that gives you benefits only once, the trees keep bearing fruits year after year without much effort. However, you have to constantly work for a couple of years even when no fruit is in sight. You must have faith and the motivation to be able to put in continuous effort for a long time.
When we close our options at some point of time, we learn to be happy with what we have. However, when we keep our options open, we are rarely happy with what we have as we find the grass greener on the other side of the fence.