Words from the Master

When you are dependent on external sources for energy, it only means that you are psychologically handicapped. When you need physical support, you are physically handicapped. When you need psychological support, you are psychologically handicapped, that’s all.

With physical handicap, you know that you are handicapped because you can see it clearly, but with psychological handicap, you don’t even know that you are handicapped. You are not even aware of it. When you are not aware of it, you will not know the consequences that it can give rise to. When the consequences or dis-ease happens, you will wonder what the reasons are.

If you have seen children play, you might have seen them building castles with cards. They will place the cards at a certain angle to each other and build several layers of such patterns in a pyramid shape. It will be beautiful to look at. But if you remove even one card from the castle, from anywhere, the whole castle will collapse! The higher the castle, the more the chances of collapsing.

Just like this, we build our own self-image like a castle, out of people’s opinions of us. We collect certificates or signatures from our father, mother, boyfriend, girlfriend, teacher, friends and what not, and arrange all these certificates and signatures and build a castle to form our self-image. The image will look beautiful and we will feel happy.

But if even one person withdraws their certificate or strikes out their signature, what happens? The castle collapses! You start feeling miserable about yourself. You feel depressed. You feel that the whole world has come to an end.

You see, at least in the case of the children, they build their castles with their own cards. But we build our castles with others’ cards, with others’ certificates! We don’t have control over the castle because it is built with other people’s certificates!

So what do we do? We start working hard in maintaining the castle; in guarding it well. We start behaving in such a way so that people don’t remove their certificates or signature. We start doing things to get their continuous approval, because their approval becomes our bread and butter.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.