The title for this short article is an old Indian proverb that I learned from a Paul Brunton book titled The Inner Reality: Jesus, Krishna, and the Way of Awakening. It captures, rather sufficiently, the inescapable truth that our greatest triumphs are born from our greatest tragedies. It also adequately describes the system by which we grow by overcoming the many obstacles, or challenges, that we face throughout the course of our life.
Life, and our own unique spiritual evolution through life, is about learning and growing. Lessons are delivered to us through experiences that serve as catalyst for this growth to occur. The catalyst varies and the severity is seemingly proportional to the value of the lesson to be learned.
One observation that I have made is that catalyst can and will repeat if the lesson has not been learned. Many things get in the way of us learning a lesson. The ego often gets in the way, with pride being an especially stubborn counterpart that tends to ignore the fact that we may be getting any lesson at all as the prideful would assume they need no lesson. I can personally attest to the repetition of catalyst when in the absence of growth, and to the propensity of their increase in severity.
All catalyst seems to be tailored made to the recipient. Our observed individuality can attest to this because no two people experience reality exactly alike. I was a product of the 90s, a teen made dependent on pharmaceutical treatments for supposed mental illnesses, most notably ADHD. As such, my personality was artificially modified, and in the worst possible way. As the years went by, pharmaceutical addiction would weave its way into every aspect of my life.
Being very good at software programming, and experiencing tremendous returns from my chemically manufactured vitality, where I could complete software projects in record time by not sleeping due to Adderall, I was respected to such a degree that I became very prideful and extremely arrogant.
My life was also a roller coaster of catalyst which I, in my unaware, pre-awakened, state misinterpreted as terrible bad luck. Put in the context of catalyst for triggering a spiritual awakening, there seemed to be a very aggressive attempt at getting me to awaken. I was, ultimately, brought to my knees with an exotic lung condition which required two surgeries and an emergency third to keep me alive. This finally brought me to attention and I was humbled rather quickly. Following that, massive growth began to occur, ultimately culminating in a full-blown spiritual awakening.
Being able to look at those events retrospectively has led me to conclude that there is, absolutely, a rhyme and a reason for everything that we experience at the time and place these lessons occur. If you examine your own life, you will most certainly see these same patterns and can reasonably conclude that you have become the person that you have become because of how you grew from those lessons.
As is often heard, when you hit rock bottom there is only one way left to go: back up!
Valuable lesson for all.