How People Triumph

Is your mental strength lacking? If I were to say, go shopping with your beloved, everything on me, you'd leap up and head out this very moment! After a long day at the office, despite your exhausted body, you stay up all night watching club football and still manage to reach the office on time the next day! Yet many urgent tasks remain undone under the excuse of insufficient mental strength. What's really happening here? A shortage of mental strength? Or a shortage of mental strength for what you want to do? Someone who can reach the office on time through sheer mental force after staying up all night hardly lacks mental strength. Yet this very same person feels no enthusiasm for many tasks, citing insufficient mental strength! The matter gives rise to mystery!

Look back at the past. In life, you've accomplished many things that, upon completion, filled you with joy about yourself! Hasn't this happened? Leave aside whether others were pleased or not. When your success exceeds even your own expectations, what could bring greater happiness? Could you have invested so much effort behind that work if you lacked mental strength? When someone teaches classes continuously or speaks at seminars for hours on end, without any fatigue or irritation, surely the strength that enables them to perform such laborious work with a smile comes from the mind. With mental strength, humans can achieve the impossible. The impoverished mother who, despite weighing half as much, carries her disabled child—nearly twice her weight—on her shoulders while begging from place to place draws this strength not from her body, but from her mind.

What actually happens in the mind when reluctance toward any task arises? Can I even do this work? Will I be able to complete the task? Won't I have to abandon it halfway and flee? What if the purpose for which I'm doing this work fails? The root cause of all these thoughts is a lack of self-confidence. Such a mental state before starting the work prevents one from even beginning it. Here, one can take preparation and start the work. Starting is the most difficult and important step of any task. If it so happens that you attempted something similar in the past but failed, this too can create doubt in your mind about your own capabilities.

Look, if you've failed at the task even once in the past, I'd say you're already far ahead. The mistakes others will make, you won't make. How to begin or how not to begin—while others may not know, you do. Ensure that past experience doesn't weaken you but instead encourages you. You know everything, understand it all, have preparation too, yet still fear doing the work. Why this fear? What if a tiger devours you when you move forward? The tiger hasn't even come yet, but in your mind it has already arrived! The tiger of the mind appears before the tiger of the forest! No matter. The tiger hasn't come—you've brought the tiger yourself. Now just drive that tiger away! The question is, how will you drive it away?

Past failures diminish mental strength. Whose mental strength do they diminish? Those who learn to fear instead of learning something positive from the past. Circumstances don't remain the same. It's entirely possible that the circumstances under which you failed in the past are no longer the same now. Your experience and preparation may possess the power to blow away the new circumstances in an instant—something you may not even realize. If fear of past events prevents you from even starting the work, then how can you make the plans necessary to complete the work properly? The past you and the present you could well be different, couldn't they? Sometimes people themselves don't realize what they can or cannot do. Without people's awareness, many of their limitations simply disappear. Don't be afraid—make the start. Let that first step of the beginning be preparation. The rest will happen naturally.

You can do something else. Write two lines about the work in which you failed in the past. Write down what limitations you had then. Note in which areas the failures occurred. Write what you could have done then to avoid failure. In the current context, in what forms might those causes of failure reappear, and what other possible causes might emerge—write down everything on paper, one by one. Now take time to think and plan: what preparations can you make right now so that you can resolve all those potential problems? That's it! What is there to fear now? If you're completely prepared to face everything inevitable, what obstacle remains to starting the work? You can follow this method before starting any task. Necessary advance preparation increases mental strength. This doesn't make danger easier or harder—danger remains as dangerous as it is. It's even possible that no danger will come at all! But even if danger does come, that diary of yours will greatly help you move forward while looking danger in the eye.

What I think will happen may or may not actually happen—I don't yet know—but fear or apprehension about it keeps us paralyzed. In different environments and societies, people grow up according to different rules. What's fearful in one society might be normal in another. What's impossible in one environment might be easy in another. This means whether any task is easy or difficult depends entirely on people's various experiences of growing up, beliefs, and habits. Parents, relatives, friends, schools and colleges, wealth and poverty, religion and beliefs, customs, family and society—all these factors directly influence the formation of a person's inner structure. Therefore, what appears true to you may not appear true to me. What I fear, you may not fear. What you consider essential, I may consider unnecessary. Which is reality and which is imagination depends on certain individual particularities.

If our mind stays busy with only one part of a problem's comprehensive whole without analyzing it, two things can happen. If the solution to that part is easy for me, I'll consider the entire problem easy. Or if the solution to that part is difficult for me, I'll consider the entire problem difficult. It's entirely possible that the solution to one part exists in another part. Without knowing all the parts, how will the solution come to mind? Again, it's also possible that due to not knowing all the parts, I might consider the problem so easy that I don't take necessary preparation at all! Say you want to take the BCS examination. You don't know whether you'll ultimately get the job or not. Naturally, this uncertainty will create fear and doubt in your mind. How so? What if I don't get the job? The opposite 'what if' could also happen, couldn't it? Until getting the job, everyone lives in such a 'what if' like you. Does this mean no one will get the job? Among those who will get it, why wouldn't you be there? At this moment, are all of them more qualified than you?

What will happen if you don't get the job? Well, what will happen if you do get the job? Social respect, job security, good salary, everyone close to you will be happy, your status will increase in everyone's eyes. When there's hope of gaining so much, why does it seem that the path to get there should be very easy? In this world, anything that makes one's head held high with pride is never easily obtained. How will you get without a fight what others are willing to fight to obtain? You might think: what if I don't get the job despite so much hard work? What will happen then? What else will happen! You'll do another job! Since childhood until today, have you gotten everything you tried to get? Are all those living in happiness and prosperity BCS cadres? Will you die if you don't get the job? Have the lives of all those who tried to become BCS cadres but failed been destroyed? You know what happens—whatever a person thinks about excessively, they see constantly before their eyes and keep seeing it. Nothing else catches their eye then. Due to this temporary blindness, they forget that the achievement before their eyes isn't everything in life!

Your uncle lives in the neighboring house. Suddenly your aunt has a stroke! What will you do then? Run away? Show busyness? If you're truly human, could you do such a thing? Have you never been to a hospital? Don't you know how and where to admit a patient? Does anyone learn these things from their mother's womb, or do they learn by necessity when in trouble? You get fever just looking at English! There's a job exam ahead. You won't get the job without knowing English. What will you do then? Wait for the next exam? Is there even a single job exam that doesn't require English? Or will English become easier by the time of the next exam? Leaving other things aside, there are many people who, fearing the need to boil an egg, spend their lives eating bread soaked in water.

Those who always avoid work with excuses like "don't feel like doing it" or "it looks difficult"—their lives show the greatest lack of mental strength. Everyone has strength in their mind. If you consciously make your body do the necessary work even against your mind's wishes, it gradually becomes a habit. Then you no longer need to flee when you see work, and this very thing is mental strength. Circumstances become neither difficult nor easy—circumstances remain as they are. If someone else can handle the same circumstances while you avoid them, that's not a lack of mental strength but a lack of practice. Humans conquer the world not through physical force, but through mental force.

Make a list of all the things that seem difficult to you. From that list, choose the three or four most urgent tasks and keep doing them with sheer physical force — whether you like them or not, whether you feel like it or not, whether enthusiasm comes or not. First day, then the second, then the third, fourth — keep at it this way until you can penetrate into the work itself. Those who have no desire to read — if they can force themselves against their mind’s wishes to stay chained to chair and table for seven to eight hours a day, and simultaneously perform the beautiful act of reading and writing with full attention, then very soon they’ll find they’ve slipped unknowingly into the habit of study. Continuing this way, your interest and skill in the work will grow day by day. This is a kind of spiritual practice. Needless to say, no one in this world has ever achieved mastery by facebooking or fiddling with phones during their time of practice.

Ask yourself: which impulse works most strongly within you? Anger? Greed? Baseless pride? Envy? Criticizing others? Hounding someone? The bad habit of looking down on others? Answer honestly. Let’s say your answer is: envy. Now vow silently to yourself that no matter what happens today, you will not envy anyone. Even if death appears before you, even if some great loss befalls you, even if your mind rebels constantly — whatever happens, you will not let envy enter your mind. And if it does come, you won’t acknowledge it. When given acknowledgment, both anger and envy grow. Even if someone’s success, someone’s looks, someone’s progress, someone’s special qualities, someone’s fame burn you to ashes with envy — don’t express anything that would make your sense of envy happy and help it grow.

Pray for the person you feel like envying, think about their good qualities, talk with people about their prosperity. When does a person envy? When they consciously or unconsciously want something they don’t get. This can certainly happen. What should you do then? Follow the path of the person who has what you want. You’ll see that all your envy will automatically transform into respect. Keep doing this work of suppressing envy for two weeks without fail, with complete concentration. You’ll see that envy is slowly taking leave from within you. Using the same technique, you can easily free yourself from the grip of other impulses. This doesn’t happen spontaneously. There’s no point waiting for it to happen. You must consciously do this work yourself.

Keep yourself close to the books that inspire, the movies that inspire, the lectures that inspire, the people who inspire. Read those books, watch those movies, listen to those lectures, associate with those people. While doing these things, don’t intellectualize on your own. What kind of intellectualizing? Never raise a single question about the source from which you gain inspiration. The more someone judges in this world, the more they lag behind. The more one understands, the more one suffers. People who understand too much are, at day’s end, a burden to themselves and a burden to others. Avoid them. Accept inspiration blindly and apply it to your life. You’ll see many people research these matters and talk nonsense. Avoid them at any cost. Those who consider themselves learned cannot go very far in life. If you don’t believe my words, write down the previous sentence somewhere. Check it against reality ten years from now. Inspiration absolutely works! For those with little faith and much argument, inspiration works less. How it works isn’t important — that it works is what matters.

Life’s greatest treasure is called sorrow. Anyone who has no sorrow in life either lies or hasn’t learned to recognize sorrow. Learning to recognize sorrow is very important. Those who can’t recognize sorrow don’t realize when sorrow devours them. What should you do when sorrow comes? Run away? What if you can’t escape? What if the sorrow is intertwined with your very existence? What if the sorrow is the first step on the path to happiness? What if the sorrow comes from your most beloved person? What if removing the sorrow requires sacrificing something dear to you?

In this world, there’s training for many things, but nowhere is there training for enduring sorrow. This training must be taken from life itself. There’s no greater blessing than knowing how to bear sorrow. When you accept sorrow with a calm mind, mental strength increases. If you let sorrow remain within your mind, it keeps striking and striking at your mind’s interior. This creates the motivation to emerge from that sorrow. The more sorrow one can swallow, the greater one’s capacity to endure. You’ll see many people who remain cheerful even in adverse circumstances, who quietly endure mistreatment from others. Seeing them, we think they must have no sorrow, their minds must contain only happiness upon happiness! Actually, that’s not the case. They’ve endured such great sorrows in life that these small sorrows can’t even touch them. They know sorrow, and because they know it, they smile when they encounter sorrow. Living through sorrow brings more good fortune than living through happiness. This is why I often say: it’s better to receive sorrow in life than to receive nothing at all.

Someone you absolutely can’t stand, or someone who absolutely can’t stand you — make time one day to meet them. If you can’t meet, call them, ask after their welfare. Whatever they say, don’t react in any way. Grit your teeth and endure all their mistreatment. This technique works well for increasing your capacity for endurance. Think about the death of your most beloved person. While people may not fear thinking about their own death, thinking about a beloved person’s death makes them restless with terrible fear. No matter how awful it feels, keep thinking steadily about what might happen if that person really died. Think about the impact their death would have on your own mind. You’ll see that your mental strength has increased greatly. Many small matters will no longer be able to touch you.

Infinite power lies hidden within every person, and using this power, a person can conquer things they never imagined possible. This power can be consciously increased or brought forth through effort, and good results come from such effort. Rather than fleeing when seeing problems, if you stand face-to-face with them with patience and strategy, solutions emerge. However, problems whose solutions create other problems are better left unsolved. With mental power, many things can be accomplished that are largely inexplicable by ordinary logic. When there’s intense desire in the mind, power comes from ghosts! There are certain tasks that, given the opportunity, we make time to do even if our bodies aren’t very ill. (Ask yourself: what tasks are there that would make you jump with joy at the chance to do them!) Then we don’t lack mental power! If our mentality is to do things only if we enjoy them and not if we don’t, then becoming great in life is difficult — because most of what needs doing urgently isn’t enjoyable work. The importance of work isn’t determined according to our convenience, is it? Therefore, if we can’t create mental desire and strength for a task, we naturally won’t be able to enjoy the results of that work either.

When a person moves with mental power, they essentially let themselves float in a current of faith and thought that brings no exhaustion, that has no end. This is why a person can do what they love to do with extraordinary effort. What must be done to sustain one’s very existence can be accomplished with such demonic power and astonishing skill that it might not even enter the imagination of ordinary people. All these matters lie far above worldly experience. If you can awaken what’s within, if you can get the inner person to work according to need, if you can navigate yourself in the limitless flow of mental power, then a person can show the entire world astonishing works.