12 How to Make a Right Decision
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1 Are You Being Drained?
People grow on you;
they also get under your skin. If you don’t know what has come over you lately
and you are not yourself any more, you had better read on.
People attach
themselves to you by the way you react to them. Slowly but surely, they drain
the life out of you. There exists a class of people who cannot exist unless you
die to them. Strangely enough, the victim experiences those reactions to the
temptation as life for, not from, him. For this reason, they will not give up
what appear to them as only human feelings. Surely you have experienced the
feeling of being drained by seemingly nice but oppressively demanding, people.
For some strange reason, your body is unable to say no; and you are unable to
deny them any request. Their sickly love fascinates you and you give your all.
If it is true that people do live on one another, what is the reason for this?
Doesn’t everyone have his own life source? The answer is no; we do not!
Let us assume there
was a time in you life when you knew what was right: You were fair and honest and
as long as you held fast to what was highly principled and honorable, the life
motivation to act and be was not very far behind. Alas, the day you doubted
yourself and believed that the selfish world was right, the moment you were
tempted to do what was wrong, you fell away from that gracious way of moving
and being and could not get back to where you were. Your nature adapted and you
found yourself obliged to follow where you should not go. You also found that
you needed to be motivated like an animal or you could not move. Your identity
became a displaced, corrupted one and the body that developed around it became
more and more animal than human.
You found yourself
needing excitement to grow in the only way you knew how–like a beast and at the
same time, that excitement also served to help you to forget the truth of what
was happening to you, to save the face of your pride which was failing.
It is clear that
most people have never had much choice to be any different from what they are.
They came into the world preceded by overwhelming pressures that compelled them
to react. If you look very carefully at your emotional reactions, you will see
that they represent a failing and a stranglehold on your life. By continuing to
react, you edge a little closer to hell and you lose a little more real life
while you gain a little more worldly identity with its brutish life. Inside,
you are not yourself; you are something else!
The closest you
might have come to the truth is knowing about the way you were. You may
remember knowing better but never doing any better. You may remember that long
ago you doubted yourself and then somehow you lost consciousness. For years you
were cut off from Reality, you wandered through life in a dream state; but now
the pain of this aimlessness is bringing you back to the truth you left behind.
A person who does
not have a life centered in Reality is compelled to drain the emotions of
friends and enemies; such an egocentric soul needs friends as well as enemies
to fulfill his craving for life. A craving for vitality begins at the ego level
and goes on to express itself in a variety of destructive ways. As long as you
need people, you will hurt or be hurt by friends and lovers; you will also
compel enemies to go on being enemies.