How to Use Law of Attraction – 4 Secret Keys

Hello there. I’m not sure of what you are asking when you say how would you simply deal with it to make it work. If you are asking how to you make it work in your life, it is as simple as thinking it, believing in it and taking actions in the direction of what you are seeking and the universe take care of the rest. We have to act on faith, that we believe the Creator is listening to us and will grant us exactly what we want. It may not come right away or happen in the way we picturing it happening, but it will happen. You just have to be aware of the doors that open and help take you one step closer to your dreams.

There has always been power in what we think and this is why we ultimately have the power to shape the lives we want for ourselves. Ive done it. I know many others who are doing it as well. It isn’t a secret or limited to any one group of people. We ALL have this power, we just have to ask God for guidance and tap into that inner strength and power that resides in us all.

Not sure if I answered your question at all but hope I managed to make a little sense;)
References :

Excellent question, because it seeks the practical way, not mere verbalization. But who told you that there exists a law at all like that? Please don’t mind. Your question shows that you really have a good QUEST. That’s why I feel motivated to give an answer.

The End of Failure

Success and Failure Defined

Success refers to the achievement in relation to a specific goal. If there is no goal set in advance, then, however much the achievement, it can’t be called success. On the other hand, if there is no achievement and there is also no goal, then such non-achievement can’t be called failure. Again, if there is no achievement at present but there is a promise of an achievement in the future, then the absence of achievement can’t be called failure at present. The reverse case should also be considered: that if there is an achievement that involves the possibility of a loss which is supposed to result from that achievement, then such achievement, given that the possibility is in the awareness, can’t be called success. Therefore, you may have made the wrong conclusion if you have concluded that you have become successful or have failed in a specific situation without giving the matter a clear thought.

Factors of Success

There is no failure in the long run. This is beyond all doubt if it is said in relation to a person who consciously pursues success. Only this Universal Law of Success, as I call it, needs to be kept in mind: Success and failure originate from each other. Each is defined from a specific point of view. As a result, any success may be called a failure from a particular point of view, and vice versa. Given this law, we’d better recast the mindset and have a fresh look at the concepts of success and goal. In doing so, we’ll need to throw light upon the following set of concepts: ability, aptitude, values, intelligence & creativity, knowledge, priority, sacrifice, and strategy. These are the variables that assume different values for different individuals. But if success or failure has ever to be analyzed and interpreted in a consistent, fruitful way, then they must be defined in a uniform way.

Ability

By the word ‘ability’ we here refer to the mental or physical skill needed to do something. Our success or failure is a function of our abilities. Because you can increase your abilities by conscious efforts, you can also choose between success or failure. However, you must always keep the following questions in mind:

 1. Do my abilities permit me to set the goal/goals that I have in my mind?

 2. Are my abilities backed by sufficient experience?

 3. Is my goal somewhat above the range of my abilities?

 4. Are my abilities increasing day by day?

 5. Have I ever clearly listed all my abilities and deeply thought about them?

6. Using my present abilities, what other abilities can I acquire?

You must think again and again about your goals until you have positive answers to the first five questions.

Aptitude

Ability is founded on aptitude. This word refers to the natural ability or skill, especially in learning.
Most of us have different abilities but a limited focus of aptitude. This is why you may have acquired many abilities but may not feel very much interested in using all of them or relating the goals of your life to all of them. This is where your nature and instinct come into play. In order to achieve success in what you intend to do, you should do the following:

 1. Find out which of your abilities conform to your aptitude to a great degree. Base your long-term goals on these abilities.

 2. Discover what more abilities you could acquire if you spent more time and energy to develop skills on the basis of your aptitude.

 3. Be on the lookout for setting and resetting your goals in light of your aptitude, and not your other abilities. This you must do if what you’re doing at present is not firmly supported by your aptitude.

The natural direction of your fascination for work will always be influenced by your aptitude and not by your abilities. If your goals are not set in light of your aptitude, then you may even get bored of your abilities. In that case you’ll probably have to use your real creativity and intelligence in amateur projects and be like a machine or slave in your profession. However, it is true that you’ll never be hundred percent satisfied with your profession, but a hundred percent satisfaction means a barrier to further development. So you need not worry about it. Your latent creativity will always give you a push outward, thus giving you some trouble in the form of indecision and a feeling of being in uncertainty. This is not necessarily bad.

Values

Your values are your ideas (or notions) about what is important in your life. Both aptitude and values relate to your instinct somehow or other but there’s a sharp distinction between the two concepts. While aptitude pertains to your natural ability to learn and inclination to learning, values pertain to your natural or instinctive choices of objects or instruments. The former involves development while the later involves enjoyment. Hence the former can hardly be deliberately changed until its demand has been satisfied but the latter can be changed and does change depending on the demand of the situation or the stage of development of the mind.

Values differ from person to person, country to country, culture to culture, and above all, religion to religion. It is your values that provide the motive force for your mind. Your values even influence your learning, understanding, world view, and mode of building relationships with others. Nothing influences you in your ideas about success and failure, happiness and sorrows, and satisfaction and dissatisfaction, more than your values do. Only when you have successfully identified what values have motivated your choice of action can you properly interpret why you are so happy or sorry as you are. So you can easily infer now that your values directly influence your goals and even modify your ideas of goals.

The five factors that most often set our values from behind the curtain are the following:

Necessity
Concept of the mission of life
Understanding
Concept of the ‘self’ and ‘others’ and
Ability to endure difficulties.

Necessity limits our choices. Our understanding, perception, and capabilities  none of these can escape this limiting force of necessity. Again, the prevalence of the same necessity over a considerably long period may form a mindset of a relatively permanent nature. The worst possible consequence of this phenomenon may be that it happens to germinate wrong values in the short term that may not remain attractive or active enough in the long term. A good way of avoiding such myopic vision is to react to the necessity with all efforts and skill while keeping an eye on something completely different  the mission of life.

One’s mission of life is one’s conscious and subconscious way of thinking about death. So this is one of the most basic issues of life, though often left unattended or kept covered under the shadow of the domestic movements of the mind. We often believe that we’re aware of the missions of our lives, but actually what we’re aware of are our desires and honesty and kindness projected to the world phenomena, and probably not of the real mission. For the real mission to be perceived, life must be juxtaposed with death only for a while and thus the distant, invisible goal identified. We often mistakenly cherish the notion that the mission of life is a product of erudite contemplation of life vis-à-vis the nobleness of the mind. But this is really a trick of the mind. The mission is everything that the life is for and can’t be constructed. Rather, it has to be discovered and felt. And one can’t do it successfully until and unless one has stood face-to-face with death and used death as a mirror.

One’s values are also influenced by one’s power of understanding. Understanding is a broad concept which encompasses the concepts of intelligence, creativity, knowledge base, predisposition, and intention. However, it is also influenced by one’s awareness of how understanding takes place in the mind. It must not be confused with reasoning, however. Reasoning, being an impersonal process of thinking, is hardly colored by personal factors, while understanding is. An awareness of how understanding is taking place in the mind, which can be called meta-understanding, can help one a lot to overcome this limitation.

Sometimes we are caught in what I would call the values trap. By this term I mean the quandary one is in when one has the grudge expressed in a question like this: "My values are noble and good. Why then can’t I have them realized?" The arising of this kind of thought in the mind suggests an anomaly somewhere that needs to be mended. If the cause of such a feeling is not searched for and taken care of, it may become the cause of lack of enthusiasm and inferiority complex. A set of rules applies to values, which are as follows:

 However noble or ideal a set of values are, they must be pragmatic.

All materialistic values must also be accompanied by some idealistic values. Otherwise the values themselves will jeopardize the equilibrium of the mind as well as the environment. For example, if someone has the values that prompt them to say "I believe that money and financial freedom is a precondition for happiness in life," they should also be cherishing the values expressed by this conviction: "I believe that only honesty and fair play can ensure the realization of the desire for financial freedom."

 Values must reflect one’s concept of and plan for "others" of the society or system. For example, the desire "I want money" will work less effectively than the determination of "I will create a lot of material value in the system I belong to."

 All short-term values must be backed by corresponding long-term values. This is because our desires usually arise from our present needs and so embrace our short-term commitment to ourselves. When we look at the future we look with the eyes of the past through the glasses of the present. As a result, though some things change in keeping with our desires and efforts, some things that also should have changed do not. This is due to our failure to attach long-term values to the set of short-term values we pursue. With the increase in affluence, are we getting increased security, for example?

If the set of values that an individual pursues is not balanced, then understanding will be onesided and clouded by intentions and feelings, rather than by logic. A holistic understanding necessitates one to feel and think at the same time. The logic of understanding comprises the following:

 Pure logic
 Emotional logic
 Logical emotions and
 Pure emotions.

Pure logic is the impersonal basis for thought. Logical emotions are emotions checked against their too-personal or narrow overtones. Emotional logic is logic systematically and irrevocably merged into emotion. Pure emotions are pure mental energy that set goals for themselves without any calculation.

One’s understanding also influences and is influenced by one’s concept of the ‘self’ and ‘others’. This concept is so crucial that it serves as the dividing line between any set of two attitudes. In fact, it is this factor that has determined and will determine whether we will be happy on earth. The attitude resulting from the clarity of this concept forms the basis for what we call religion. In this sense, even atheists follow some kind of religion. However, whatever be the religion that we follow, it must be based on the principles of patience, sympathy, self-restraint, sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of individuality (or personal freedom).

The differences in people’s values can also be correlated with their ability to endure difficulties. There can be no life without difficulty. There are ups and downs in every life. But if we form our values only in view of one side, we will surely first create more ups and downs in our mental states and then in the external reality. Changing values means changing decisions, which is good only when the change takes place upward  from the material level to the conceptual.

The more materialistic the values, the narrower and more self-centered they render the mind, while the more conceptual (or ethical) the values, the wider and more comprehensive they render the mind. Therefore it would be very prudent of us if we looked at our values, especially those of material nature, and judged them anew in light of our respective manner of reacting to phenomena.

Intelligence and Creativity

Intelligence is the mind’s ability to successfully react to changing situations. The word ‘changing’ should be considered with special attention. It implies time and speed. So we can say that intelligence is a mixed measure of the speed, success rate, and range of the mind’s problem-solving ability.

Creativity, as opposed to intelligence, refers to the mind’s ability to find new, unpredictable solutions to old problems or effective solutions to completely novel problems. Up to a certain level, both intelligence and creativity may mean something very similar or the same. The definition that we have considered also corroborates this opinion  both of them center on the concepts of a problem and a solution. However, beyond a level, creativity may have nothing to do with problems and their solutions, though it may still successfully relate to them. In the general sense, creativity refers to the mind’s ability to escape set patterns and thus overcome limitations. In the applied sense, it refers to the mind’s ability to create new ideas.

Our success or failure is a function of our intelligence and creativity. But there seems to be a sharp dividing line between their involvement in practical life: highly creative people are often seen to be more successful than highly intelligent people, but after a longer period of hard labor and perseverance. Conversely, the more creative a person is, the less successful they are in the short-term, while in the long term the reverse case is often likely to be true.

Those who are more intelligent than creative tend to define success in pragmatic terms  that is, with measurable references. On the other hand, those who are more creative than intelligent are usually prone to view success in terms of the number of events their ability can create, rather than the output of the events. Consequently, creative people may have to suffer the initial consequences of being creative ___ the extraordinary responsibility to sacrifice efforts and defer the rewards to a later point in time. Fortunately, those who are creative have the necessary patience and broadness of mind.

Before making or accepting a decisive comment on whether you have succeeded or failed in something, therefore, look back at yourself once again and discover whether you’re more creative than intelligent. Success in not any end-product, so you should never measure it too hastily.

Knowledge

Knowledge is a factor of success. You must have sufficient knowledge of the related parameters and variables if you want to be successful in achieving a specific goal. However, there are hidden traps here. No knowledge can necessarily ensure good performance or achievement unless the nature of knowledge is known first. Even experts have begun to say that Knowledge Management, one of the latest issues in management, has failed drastically. Actually, human knowledge couldn’t be more vitiated by anything than the knowledge that is founded on the audacious belief that knowledge can either be fully measured or bought or sold or developed or acquired or coded or even defined. Knowledge is simply part of the being. The word ‘part’ also doesn’t fit in this context. Rather, knowledge itself is the individual, which is why it is beyond all limits and measurements.

However, because our focus is not on the philosophical interpretation of knowledge, we’ll only touch on its most practical and psychological dimensions. Here are the 20 Laws Of Knowledge (LOK), as I would call them.

 1. We can manage ourselves only by managing our knowledge.

 2. Knowledge is ignorance when it’s not aware of its limitations.

 3. Our knowledge of our ignorance can always increase.

 4. If we prove to be laggards in acquiring knowledge, repeated failures will come to provide us with the knowledge that we haven’t acquired.

 5. Unutilized knowledge becomes the cause of delirium.

 6. Knowledge never fails; what fails is the person’s belief of their knowledge.

 7. Knowledge never gets old; what makes it seem old is our intention to use it for the same purpose or for similar purposes repeatedly.

 8. Knowledge is not a mere instrument. Instrumentality is one of its dimensions, of which we reap the benefit.

 9. Everything is the beginning of knowledge, its end being lost forever.

 10. Because knowledge is not a cheap product to be sold at wholesale prices, it need not be applied to be considered important. It is more than technology. It is life.

 11. All knowledge accumulates into self-knowledge. As a result, beyond a certain level, knowledge itself is the best reward that we can ever have.

12. There’s a dimension of knowledge in everybody of us whether we’re aware of it or not, which can neither be acquired nor distributed.

 13. Knowledge is the direct result of personal sacrifice.

 14. Everything in the universe can give us something  knowledge. Even death gives us the greatest possible knowledge if we don’t look for knowledge consciously.

15. There’s knowledge in being satisfied with anything.

 16. Knowledge forgives none. Everybody will have to acquire knowledge, today or tomorrow.

 17. The fool who fails to acquire knowledge quickly enough becomes the object of experiment and thus adds to the knowledge of the wise.

 18. Knowledge should never be given away unasked.

19. If knowledge is available in the market, it should never be purchased at low prices.

20. One who doesn’t acquire newer knowledge every day is a fool.

Priority

Only knowing and doing can’t ensure you success. You must prioritize some activities over others. Many a plan ends in a failure due to the absence of prioritization. Although it is easy to understand theoretically, it is not so easy to establish practically. I have learnt the truth of this statement by deliberately being a defaulter in this regard. Of the things that are important in achieving a goal, some are more important than the others. The concept of ‘more important’ is often misinterpreted. So let’s see in how many ways something can be important to the achievement of a goal. However, we can’t proceed further very successfully without having the word ‘importance’ clearly defined. No dictionary definition of the word clears the obscurity we find ourselves in about it. For example, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English transfers the definition to the definition of another word, ‘important’, saying that importance means ‘the quality of being important.’ It then defines ‘important’ in the following words: ‘an important event, decision, problem etc. has a big effect or influence on people’s lives or on events in the future.’ But only the concept of ‘big’ can’t picture the nature of importance very clearly. We need to know why and in how many ways something important has a big influence on what it’s important to. For this purpose we’ll define importance in a more logical and pragmatic way. The importance of something to something else is indicated by its involvement in the latter. This involvement may have the following patterns:

A may be important to B because:
 A is needed for B’s existence;
 A makes B useful in some way;
 A gives B the ability to acquire more abilities;
 A enables B to achieve its goals;
 A directly helps C, which directly helps B;
 Among A, D, E, F, and G  the factors of B  as far as a given goal is concerned  A must be active first (or second …) for the others to be active; etc.

So you should not only identify what you must do or possess to achieve a goal, you have to find out how and why those events or things are important to it, too. Once you have done so, you can prioritize what has to be prioritized and add surprising leverage to your activities.

Sacrifice

There’s nothing in life that can take place without sacrifice. Everything we achieve or receive can be traced as a result of some sacrifice. This we all understand, more or less. But only generalized understanding may mean superficial understanding in many cases. Understanding, unless it pervades all dimensions of the mind, emotions included, can’t activate the mind strongly enough so as to help make choices.

Making choices is a precondition for making decisions, for decision making means limiting the number of choices with reference to certain standards. And this is where the concept of sacrifice becomes very relevant. In fact, making a choice involves making a sacrifice.

The concept of sacrifice, which doesn’t necessarily involve a religious overtone, can be more effectively understood by comparing and contrasting it with the concepts of expenditure, loss, and wastage.

Expenditure can be defined as an investment waiting to be discovered as either a gain or a loss.

A loss is expenditure that has lost its promise. Wastage refers to the loss of resource due to inefficient management. While loss is investment identified as unpromising, wastage is the loss of resource in a way which was either not predicted or not meant to be an investment. In other words, loss is the decrease in the input and wastage is the decrease in the output. Among these three concepts, sacrifice can’t be compared with any, though it can be contrasted with all of them. Sacrifice is neither expenditure nor loss, nor wastage  it’s investment that never fails.

If you want to be a knowledgeable professor, you must sacrifice a lot of time, effort, pleasure, sleep, convenience, etc. If, likewise, you want to be a good leader, you’ll need to sacrifice ease of life, rest, personal desires, narrow emotions, and so on. Those who believe in the Hereafter do, because they must, sacrifice much in this life. Those who are atheists sacrifice, at least in the eyes of believers in a Hereafter, something greater than anybody else does  that is, the life of eternal peace and enjoyment in the Hereafter. If you want to enjoy what you call chastity (whether you’re a man or a woman being of no special concern), then you have to sacrifice the pleasure of free sex. On the contrary, if you want to enjoy free sex, then you must sacrifice chastity. In a word, there’s sacrifice everywhere.
So if you want to have a long-term plan for success in life, then you have to sit with a piece of paper and a pencil to make a list of:

 what you’ve already sacrificed without any motive  that is, wasted;

 what you’ve sacrificed with definite purposes and what you’ve achieved;

 what things you should have sacrificed but you haven’t;

 what things you shouldn’t have sacrificed but you have;

 what things you need to sacrifice in the future to achieve certain goals; and

 if you make the required sacrifice, what important things or opportunities you may have to lose in the future.

Remember that you can consciously or unconsciously sacrifice the following:

 material resource
 time
 opportunity
 mental states
 freedom
 relationships
 fame
power
 security, and above all
 life.

The Final Judgment

Success is never final, true, but your judgment of whether you’ve been successful should be decisive. And, interestingly, if ever your judgment is to be of pragmatic value, then it must be no other than this conviction: "I’m successful in certain areas and a failure in certain areas. I can always achieve more success in some areas by accepting failure in some related areas. For example, if I fail to be dishonest, I’ll be successful in being trustable. I can be more and more successful by managing my ideas of failure and success and then translating the ideas into action."
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The Strength of Weakness

It is only weakness that can be transformed into strength. In other words, nobody could ever be strong if they weren’t weak. And what I’m saying is not quibble or mere word-work for encouragement. Rather, it’s as true and trustable as any proven scientific theoryor more reliable than that. So, my dear reader, rejoice in all the weaknesses that you have. It’s only after five minutes that your weakness will prove to be the most important gift of your life.

Man’s weakness is the only cause of his intelligence, creativity, and knowledge.

Think about a dog. It can identify some things by the smella capability that you can’t even imagine. Even so, it’s a dog and you’re a human being.

Think about a bat. It can `see’ even without eyes. That’s why it can see in the dark, whereas you’re afraid of losing your eyesight even in a tender age. Still you’re a human being with an unlimited possibility of development, while the bat is not.

Or think about any fish or bird. They can live in the water or fly in the sky but you can’t. On the contrary, you only dream of flying and are afraid of drowning. Nevertheless, those animals are subservient to you and you’re their lord!

The dog has an extraordinary ability but it doesn’t know that it’s extraordinary. It doesn’t even know what it knows or doesn’t know. But you know that you don’t know something and the dog knows it. This means that you know what you and others know as well as what you and they don’t know. This means that you’re knowledgeable even without a particular ability like the ability of an animal. If you had no inability and weakness, you couldn’t know what the difference between ability and inability is. As a result, you couldn’t have knowledge. If you didn’t have knowledge, you couldn’t use the ability of others and capitalize on the inability of theirs.

When you see that the bat sees without the eye, you ‘see’ even what the eyes can’t see  that is, you know what seeing and not-seeing mean. This knowledge is so powerful that it goes beyond eyesight and sees something that the eyesight can’t see.
You can’t swim like a fish and that’s why you can make a huge ship. You can’t fly like a bird and that’s why you can make a huge airbus.

Your past  the memory, and future  the dream, exist only because you can’t keep everything in the same plane of consciousness like a computer. If you were able to visit the past, you wouldn’t have sweet memories. Similarly, if you were able to visit the future, you couldn’t dream, because in that case you wouldn’t have an unknown world and unfulfilled desires.

Humans are intelligent, creative, and wise only because they are weak and have a long period of childhood. In a sense, we’re children all through our lives  whatever our age is.

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Sacrifice

There’s nothing in life that can take place without sacrifice. Everything we achieve or receive can be traced as a result of some sacrifice. This we all understand, more or less. But only generalized understanding may mean superficial understanding in many cases. Understanding, unless it pervades all dimensions of the mind, emotions included, can’t activate the mind strongly enough so as to help make choices.

Making choices is a precondition for making decisions, for decision making means limiting the number of choices with reference to certain standards. And this is where the concept of sacrifice becomes very relevant. In fact, making a choice involves making a sacrifice.

The concept of sacrifice, which doesn’t necessarily involve a religious overtone, can be more effectively understood by comparing and contrasting it with the concepts of expenditure, loss, and wastage.

Expenditure can be defined as an investment waiting to be discovered as either a gain or a loss.

A loss is expenditure that has lost its promise. Wastage refers to the loss of resource due to inefficient management. While loss is investment identified as unpromising, wastage is the loss of resource in a way which was either not predicted or not meant to be an investment. In other words, loss is the decrease in the input and wastage is the decrease in the output. Among these three concepts, sacrifice can’t be compared with any, though it can be contrasted with all of them. Sacrifice is neither expenditure nor loss, nor wastage  it’s investment that never fails.

If you want to be a knowledgeable professor, you must sacrifice a lot of time, effort, pleasure, sleep, convenience, etc. If, likewise, you want to be a good leader, you’ll need to sacrifice ease of life, rest, personal desires, narrow emotions, and so on. Those who believe in the Hereafter do, because they must, sacrifice much in this life. Those who are atheists sacrifice, at least in the eyes of believers in a Hereafter, something greater than anybody else does  that is, the life of eternal peace and enjoyment in the Hereafter. If you want to enjoy what you call chastity (whether you’re a man or a woman being of no special concern), then you have to sacrifice the pleasure of free sex. On the contrary, if you want to enjoy free sex, then you must sacrifice chastity. In a word, there’s sacrifice everywhere.

So if you want to have a long-term plan for success in life, then you have to sit with a piece of paper and a pencil to make a list of:

 What you’ve already sacrificed without any motive  that is, wasted;

 What you’ve sacrificed with definite purposes and what you’ve achieved;

 What things you should have sacrificed but you haven’t;

 What things you shouldn’t have sacrificed but you have;

 What things you need to sacrifice in the future to achieve certain goals; and

 If you make the required sacrifice, what important things or opportunities you may have to lose in the future.

Remember that you can consciously or unconsciously sacrifice the following:

 Material resource
 Time
 Opportunity
 Mental states
 Freedom
 Relationships
 Fame
Power
 Security, and above all
 Life.
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The Mystery and Power of Patience

In the very beginning, let me tell you that patience is not a virtue. Nobody who wants to have patience in order to cultivate a virtue by following others have it cannot have it at all. Rather, the truth is that those who are already virtuous can have patience when they feel they should. And those who think they have little patience and try to have it by inculcating determinations repeatedly, hoping that they may acquire this extraordinary skill, repeatedly fail to do so, and either get disappointed or rationalize their frailty by saying that the bold need not have it. The result is predictable – self-denying impatience. So until and unless one clearly knows what patience is, one cannot have it.

There are many people who think that they have patience or who want others to think so. Maybe that is one kind of pretence or non-assertive weak-heartedness. Merely tolerating something or keeping silent does not mean patience in any way. The truth is that patience is not a virtue that can be acquired; rather, it is a state of the mind that can be and has to be discovered. It is a state of mind that helps feel and meaningfully react to the external reality without the person having to alter the choices that they have already made.

If that is so, then patience does not mean something that can be called a special virtue. If is there in everybody. Literally everybody.

And it is not a virtue that needs to be acquired. It is part of life, part of living.

Let us move slowly. What is patience? Does it mean holding oneself back even when the mind has decided to express an emotion, such as anger, sorrows etc., and thus remaining peaceful? Partly yes, and partly no. Yes because patience is a field of energy that can hold the streams of energy within its boundary for a specific time of emotional upsurge. And no because such a holding back is actually impossible in the long term, patience being no emotion itself. If patience were an emotion, it could be expected somehow or other to nullify the effect of one or more other emotion acting in the opposite direction. But it is not an emotion. It is … what is it, really?

Nor is it the state of the absence of emotion. If it were, then it could not contain and host other emotions. What is it, then?

Metaphorically, if emotions are waves, then patience is … not the shore nor the sea-bed nor the water nor the current, but the entire sea!

Patience is not the absence of emotions or a state of the mind resulting from the training of emotions. It is the totality of emotions. Surprising as it may sound, it is the fact. So let us move steadily, without losing patience.

What does it mean to have patience? Does it mean to postpone a decision until a latter point in time? Not necessarily. I want to kill somebody. I change my decision and decide to kill them after one month. Is it patience? Not necessarily. Patience is not doing or not-doing something. The deference of a decision to resist an undesirable stimulus is not necessarily patience.

Let us take specific examples and judge the issue in light of them.

Suppose that somebody hurts me physically. I get hurt and feel like paying the person in their own coin. However, I feel that I will not be able to go unhurt if I hurt him too, as I am weak. So I decide not to avenge myself of the hurt. Is that patience? Certainly not. Patience means refraining from expressing reactions even when one thinks that one is well in a position to do so.

Or suppose I am in utter poverty. A very pious person says, "Have patience. Maybe God will change your situation very soon." By way of acting up to his advice, I decide to have patience. Now the question is – What do I do when I have patience? Wait? Waiting is half-patience. However, I think we can anatomize waiting now.

When one waits, one only expects to achieve a purpose in the future. So, while the probable achievement is in the future, the desire is present in the mind. This is waiting. So waiting implies remaining active in the mind toward the fulfillment of an objective. However, waiting means expectation if the thing desired for cannot be achieved now for some reason or other. If, on the other hand, the desired thing can be achieved at present but still the achievement is deferred to a future point in time, then that waiting involves patience, though, in my opinion, it is still not patience in the purest sense of the concept.

Often we relate patience to anger or excitement. That is why we hear people saying, "Don’t be angry. Have patience." In this case patience refers to refraining from being activated by anger. In other words, patience means refraining from reacting even when the emotional movement temporarily demands that very reaction. But, truly speaking, external reaction cannot be managed unless the internal reaction is managed. Again, internal reaction cannot be managed if it is not understood in its totality or if it is not dissolved by love arising from the heart naturally.

However, often there is seen to be little difference between love felt naturally and instinct.

Therefore, acquiring proper knowledge about emotions, their causes and consequences helps the mind automatically get liberated from the trap of automated reflexes or habits.

Talked of in connection with anger, patience involves unconditional forgiveness. If I think, "I’ll react only when his behavior exceeds a limit but until then I’ll have patience", then that non-involvement can hardly be called patience, because it is a planned overlooking, which is only a strategic move toward the achievement of goal. Patience, if it were equated with waiting, would mean accumulating or storing the intention to do something in the future. But accepting this concept creates a contradiction. So patience is not conditional forgiveness. After all, forgiveness can hardly be conditional.

So we see that as long as patience is considered in relation to anger, it involves forgiveness, which is attributable either to knowledge or to love.

Likewise, patience has a direct relevance to sorrows or sufferings, as we have alluded to in an example. I am suffering a lot for my neighbor’s activity or conduct. But I am told to have patience and I do have patience. In that case I have to forgo some convenience. This is sacrifice. But truly speaking, such sacrifice may sometimes get transformed into a feeling of superiority or nobleness and thus become a business transaction. This is patience in the selfish sense of the term, not in the pure sense. Then what is patience proper?

At this point we can enjoy the old story of the thirsty crow which flew around in search of water and, after a long time, found a pitcher in which there was a little water at the bottom. It was very intelligent and so dropped some pebbles into the pitcher, which he collected with effort. However, when the water level rose in the pitcher he found the water muddy and instead of drinking it, flew away, disappointed.

However the second part of the story begins here… And another crow that was also thirsty observed this from a nearby place and came to the pitcher as the first crow departed. He waited until the water became clear and then drank to his fill from the pitcher. His patience made his intelligence meaningful and effective.

Patience means waiting until the situation changes in such a way that there is eventually no need to have patience. More appropriately, patience means waiting in such a way that the very act of waiting changes the situation. One who is not angry does not need to have patience for anything, nor can he do so at all. But if one who is angry wants to have patience, then he must wait until the person or situation he is angry with changes completely, so much so that he does not have to have patience any more. Thus patience, rather than being a hibernating emotion waiting to be expressed in the future, must be a self-fulfilling state of mind. In fact, patience is prayer and benediction. It is love waiting to be transformed into knowledge. It is energy that will change the definition, not the word. It is the desire not to change oneself so that the other party or the situation changes. Patience is the best performance of personal duty and social responsibility. It is intelligence pregnant with creativity, light that does not move.

One who claims to have patience must be convinced that it is his patience that will change the world that interacts with him and until such a change has been brought about, he should not think that he has ever had patience.

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Source:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9781581124842&itm=4
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If you don’t actually DO something to work toward goals, then they remain unreachable. Dreaming works fine when it’s coupled with doing.
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