I don’t know how many of you follow basketball but the NCAA Tournament is going on right now in men’s and women’s basketball. This is the Championship of the colleges, and they have this Tournament every year, and they start with 64 teams and it goes down to the final 2. In women’s basketball, Connecticut has been undefeated for 111 straight games, and everybody thought that they were going to win the Championship this year. Last night was the semi-final and Connecticut lost for the first time in 111 straight games.
When they spoke to the coach afterward he explained to the reporter that the fact that they had won as many games as they had won this year and hadn’t lost was a miracle because they had many holes in their team. They had many things that weren’t as strong as people thought they were, so the fact that they had won had built up this fake aura around them that they were somehow invincible and somehow more than they really were. He knew that the whole time, he was just amazed that they kept winning. But we on the outside, everyone was thinking, “Well, they can’t lose.”
It’s like that in the world. We build up these imaginations about things through past experience, and we believe that this will somehow continue. We build up a belief system that’s very powerful, that things are going to stay that way. And those belief systems are built up both in a negative way and in a positive way.
If you’re a child, and someone constantly tells you that you aren’t any good, and you won’t amount to anything and that there’s no hope or future for you, you believe it. And then as you grow up the memory of those words, and the power of those words creates a self-fulfilling prophecy within you so that you continue to have difficulty in everything that you do because you create your own obstacles because you believe that there are obstacles there. On the other hand, if someone tells you you’re the greatest since you were little, you have a belief system that you can overcome things, and you constantly believe that things will go properly for you.
Neither, of course, are true, and any belief system that believes in a projected continuum of things just because you believe them has no basis because man proposes and Allah disposes. We think things will be a certain way, but Allah’s way is the way it goes…
