Work on oneself – The Economic Times

Don’t allow limitations to limit you. Use limitations to your advantage. In the process, someone may criticise you. Someone criticising you may come as a shock, and then you realise that you are on a worldly track. So, shift yourself to another track where you see the need for forgiveness and love, and treat hate with love and not hate with hate. This is the ‘B’ influence – spiritual influence.

You must be sensitive when someone criticises you, but to be sentimental is a downward track. Sentimental is reacting to what is, and sensitive is experiencing what is. ‘I am sensitive to the difference between dark blue and light blue. But if I react to the difference, it is sentimental.’ This is the error one has to rectify.

Don’t carry fictions of oneself. The fiction of oneself is the ‘imaginary self’. Then, life gets governed by the imaginary ‘i’. The object of working on oneself is to bring this inner transformation by observing oneself objectively. Let not the world put you to sleep but awaken you. A mechanical person is a person who is asleep. Someone says unpleasant things, and like a machine, we react, which is a reaction. This is a form of sleep, a form of error.

But if one is awake and someone says something, one will see the truth of what the other person is saying and allow the fact of the truth rather than the expectation of what you want him to say to guide you.