While we live in this world, we keep facing difficult times in different forms. Sometimes the difficult times come in the form of failure in examinations, change of school, bullying by colleagues, financial problems with parents, difficulties in relationships, health-related issues, loss of a job, difficult assignments, loss of a near and dear one, and so on. All these difficulties may be taken as a major stumbling block or a divine blessing. Some of us would be surprised as to how these difficulties may be taken as divine blessings?
In order to understand, let's take an example of video games. We all play video games. There are different levels of difficulties in the games. The difficulties keep rising as we keep clearing the levels. Do we enjoy these difficulties or condemn them as suffering? Definitely, we enjoy the next level. In fact, once we cross a level, it is quite boring to play the same level again. There is no thrill and fun. Wait, wait. That is the game and this life. How can life be equated to a game? That will be the next question which is quite natural. However, what is the difference between game and life? So, somebody will say that in life, there is a risk. If you are out in the game, you can play the next game but not in life. Is it actually so? Is it because we see life in a stand-alone perspective of one single life?
What if we just keep living one after the other lives? In that case, would it still make sense not to take the risks? If we know that we are the consciousness that is capable of giving rise to many such lives, would we still like to waste our lives playing at the basic levels of the game in order to avoid the risk of being out? Would life not become a thrill when we know that we have a fallback option and can play the game again? Definitely yes. In that case, what is stopping us from venturing into the quest to understand life? It just requires a little awareness of life. As we grow aware and start examining life with open eyes and minds, we start experiencing the truths of life that have been hidden from us because we kept our eyes closed.
As our awareness grows, our perception of the difficulties also changes significantly and we realize soon that almost all the difficulties in our lives are nothing but the grace of God to take us from narrowness to wideness. If we stay aware, we automatically keep choosing the path of wideness. However, when we lose awareness, we get stuck inside the well of our ignorance. We feel pleasure in the routine life and by holding on to our possessions like the frog in the well feel happy being inside the well holding on to whatever is there in the well. He does not have a vision of the wideness of the sky and the sea.
Difficulties force us to come out of our well. That looks very uncomfortable in the beginning and that is the reason why we feel great suffering whenever we fail in the exams, our friends say bye to us, our teachers criticize us, our parents scold us, we lose a job or get a bad grade in the annual performance report, or get a bad medical report or lose a near one. However, all these incidents helped us come out of the well where we were living happily otherwise. However, most of us do not understand the divine blessing and soon move to the other well rather than taking it as an opportunity to come out from the well of ignorance to the open sky of awareness. It's just a perception as to how we look at the difficulties and the perception changes significantly as we move along the spiritual path.
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