Incentive to Reflection
Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar
by the spirit Eugênia-Aspásia.
Once again you felt incapable. Unable to muster the ideal conditions to carry out your task you feel terribly bad. It would be great to keep yourself in the summit of excellence, all the time, in order to guarantee quality, in the highest possible level. You suffer, cry and get highly depressed. You even rebel against yourself, and get frustrated, when you remember the countless times you have tried to stay on the level you consider to be the best, with no success.
The issue, however, my son, is that you should consider the hypothesis of not being able to do what you want, at the level you desire. Think of the possibility of desiring a little less for you. Establish more plausible goals, so you can follow them with precision, without the agonizing stress of not corresponding to your own expectations.
The fear of making mistakes can block the creativity that promotes greater levels of success. Thus, why torment yourself so much with the fear of not making mistakes? Wouldn’t it be better, more pragmatic and even more spiritual – since you will evolve more efficiently – to set results achievable with the resources at hand right now?
Revaluate your models of success. Perhaps, what afflicts you so much is setting goals that are not aligned with your actual evolutional “status quo”. Of course that transcendence is the maximum impulse of life. But to outdo yourself, you need to respect the structure of psychic progress already accomplished, so that the mental building do not collapse for lack of sufficient emotional and moral basis.
Gather strength to start over, be persistent in the pursuit of your highest aspirations (always evaluating how much of ego or sincere ideal exist in them). But take advantage also of the moment of failure, to reassess whether or not you are, in fact, following your vocation and using adequate methods and tools to do it. A fall is mainly this: an incentive to reflection. This way, surrendering to discouragement, boredom, or, even worse, to desistance, is not only stupidity, but also destructive, since the reason for the increase in grief is exactly to stimulate learning, so that you can make better, lasting decisions in what regards the soul and its happiness, deep, serene, true happiness.
(Text received on June 19, 2000.)