Inspiration can come from anywhere, Allah is everywhere. So, this morning I took a look at the comics from the Sunday paper, and Garfield, who is a rather obnoxious cat, was doing all of his obnoxious things; throwing food around, kicking dogs, and he said at the end, “New year, same old me.” In a few words, he caught the dilemma that we all face: we are who we are, and we are in the midst of trying to find out who that really is and finding out how it is that we can get to the essence of what that really is.
Yesterday somebody was saying, “I’m trying to figure out what kind of New Year’s resolutions to make, but it really doesn’t matter because I don’t keep them anyway.” There we are. We’re in the midst of a constant resurgence of who we are. It doesn’t take any specific arbitrary day on the calendar to start a new year; we can start a new year any day, we can start over every day, we are given an opportunity every second to begin again and to do it right this time. God is merciful in that He gives us time, until our last breath we can turn to Him; until our last breath we can ask for forgiveness and He will forgive us. We need to make the resolution and the intention in our own being to turn towards Him.
What does it mean to turns towards Him? What happens in turning towards Him? In my experience, I have found that if you take the world seriously, the world will take you seriously and you will become entangled in all of the difficulties that the world has to offer. Your mind will become entwined in illusion. All of a sudden, the small temporary things of existence will become the most important things in your life. For instance, your job can become very important to you, and all of a sudden it becomes the most important thing in your life. Your schooling can become very important to you, and all of a sudden it becomes the most important thing in your life. Your parents and their ideas for you can become very important to you, and all of a sudden they become the most important things in your life.
What happens when things become the most important things in your life? In the world, you react to them, and if they go the way you want them to go, or the way you think they’re supposed to go, then there’s happiness. If they don’t go the way you think they’re supposed to go, then there’s sadness. So, we’re constantly in a state of happiness and sadness dependent on how things turn out in accordance with our imagination as to how they should turn out.
So, what causes our sadness? Our thoughts. What causes our problems? Our thoughts. We imagine things should be a certain way, and if they go that way, we’re temporarily happy until we begin imagining about more things that should go in a certain way and they don’t. Then we become sad again. We’re on this roller coaster ride of apparent happiness, and apparent sadness as to, and in conjunction with, our imagination and how things turn out in accordance with our imagination.
Imagine not imagining. Imagine stopping to try and figure out what’s going to happen next and how it should happen next. Imagine just allowing things to go on…
