By Late Roy Masters
May 7, 2023
As your life unfolds before you, do not resent seeing what you have done wrong in the past. Do not cover-up the mistakes of the past, but willingly suffer the agony of your soul.
The repentance that results from this pain is a godly sorrow. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
To be honestly sorry for what you have done requires that you recognize what it is that was wrong. When this happens, you will learn your lesson and be relieved of the burden and the need to make up for past mistakes.
The nature of true love does not require you to be lashed into the impossible agony of “making up” for all your past mistakes.
Have you noticed that you can solve everyone else’s problem, but not your own? That is because emotion drives out understanding and common sense, replacing them with rationale.
Knowledge and intellect are often substitutes for understanding and wisdom, just as pleasure is a substitute for happiness. Psychologists use the word “compensation” to describe the attempt to replace a spiritual emptiness with the nearest physical equivalent.
The feelings of fear and tension, and the desire to forget, draw to the alcoholic the idea, “If I had a drink, perhaps I would feel better.” Later on, he says to himself, “Perhaps if I had another, I would feel better still.”
Smokers and excessive eaters are similar; they think with their feelings—their feelings cause them to think.
We all compensate for our “dis-ease” in millions of similar “iffing” ways. “If I had someone to love me…if I had lots of money…”
When we cannot give love, we need love. When we cannot understand, we need understanding. It is very frustrating, because no one has any to give us.
We usually try to bring ourselves ease, relaxation and peace of mind through external or material endeavors, and that is impossible.
These substitutes are not truly fulfilling, and only make us crave more of what does not fill; nothing really satisfies.
All kinds of daily irritations keep alive and revive unpleasant memories which should have been long forgotten. If we dissolve the emotion, we no longer have that problem, and our negative thoughts, deprived of emotional support, begin to dissolve.
Nobody but you can overcome your problem. You have one because you allow people to trigger you emotionally, thereby giving their words and actions the power to direct you. You must learn to lead your own emotions.
For the more you become emotionally upset, the less it takes to upset you the next time.
“The nature of true love does not require you to be lashed into the impossible agony of “making up” for all your past mistakes.”
The more you are influenced by the situation, the less you can lead yourself from the framework of reason
Tense, guilty and confused by your inability to control yourself or the situation, you resort to compensations and fall captive to compensatory illusions—your daydreams may become more real to you than the actual facts of the situation.
Observe how emotion affects thought, and thought affects emotion. When we feel hungry, we think of food; but also when we think of food, we can feel hungry.
When we become upset, we are caused to think negative thoughts. This in turn causes us to feel a secondary emotion, which produces foolish behavior that bypasses reason.
This leads to guilt…then to the excuse. We become more irrational, and soon we are upset again. Now, we feel bad, so we begin to worry.
The more we worry, the more we feel. The feeling affects our thoughts, the self-defeating cycle goes around and around—and anger turns the wheel.
Because we cannot forgive, we may try to make up for our guilty feelings by bending over backwards to coerce people into liking us; then they merely take advantage and we are angry again.
Here we try to compensate for our inability to love, for as long as people are good, we can feel and think “good” toward others. We even boast about this terrible weakness.
We will give in to avoid an argument and being upset, slowly giving up all our inner principles in the process, and then call ourselves “easygoing
guys;” but we are still nervous volcanoes inside, now in conflict with ourselves instead of with others.
Usually a resentful person is one who conceals and suppresses their anger in various ways. To allow this hostility to build up until you have to let it out on another person is a greater injustice.
Now you hurt others for the same reason the bully hurt you, because you could not cancel your impatience and judgment with love.
People without true identity think without reason and control. What they feel like doing seems right, and what they do not feel like doing seems wrong. All of us are driven by self-made fear, anxiety and excuses for their actions.
No thought is lasting, whether it be positive or negative. It must have emotional energy to keep it alive. Negative, morbid thoughts are created and kept alive through the daily feeding of irritations.
The nervous businessman may take a trip to leave the source of his aggravation behind. Soon he begins to feel better, but when he returns, things are more depressing than ever.
Granted, getting away from the problem helps temporarily, but the real and permanent solution lies in learning to be calm in the face of all that besets us.
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