The Force Of Overcoming, Part 1

Question: Our life requires us to continually overcome our desires, fears, anger, and crises in finance, personal and family life. This struggle begins with birth.

While being born, a baby already has to overcome much pressure and stress in order to emerge, and the mother also needs to overcome the pain to deliver it.

So it continues throughout human life from early infancy. As he develops, the child is forced to overcome physical and psychological difficulties. Even to get to his feet and learn to walk, he is required to overcome a lot.

In this manner, it continues to the end of his life: kindergarten, school, education, marriage, family, children, and work. Our entire life is a continuous strip of difficulties and overcoming them, from which it is impossible to escape. Why is our life is arranged this way?

Answer: Indeed, our life is a continuous chain of overcoming, and when a person runs out of the power to overcome, he dies. All of life is a struggle. The very process of human birth is the first overcoming. The baby must breathe, expand his lungs and take in air. This is his first action in this world from which continuous breathing begins: the compression and expansion of the lungs.

These actions, pulsations, comprise our entire life: breathing, heartbeat, and metabolism. These processes occur in us unconsciously, instinctively, at the order of nature. The same thing is happening in every state on a conscious level where my desire acts. Indeed, I must survive, and my life is in this overcoming.

If I want to live, I must overcome myself in each case more and more. Our nature is complete egoism that seeks only rest, but “rest” means not just to lie, but to do only what we want.

To do what I want, I do not want to use energy, spiritual energy. Although, I spend a huge amount of calories as a child running around the room, unable to stop. For him it is rest.

We tell him, “Stop running, sit and rest!” However, he does not understand what we say because he is resting by jumping and bustling. In other words, overcoming is simply not possible to measure by an external view of a person. If a person overcomes his desire and does something against it, it is called overcoming.

Since we are created from the egoistic material, the desire to enjoy, then we are drawn to pleasures all the time. If I am enjoying, it does not matter whether I am running or lying, I am resting.

The question is what should I do to act against my desire: get out of bed, go to work, work hard, carry heavy things from one place to another, make money, bring it home and feed myself and my family?

Of course, this is not consistent with my desire, so how do I overcome myself? I do this for several reasons. Either society or parents oblige me to go to school to study, then get married, start a family, and work. My parents’ and society’s desire is stronger than mine, and that is why I comply.

Or, I suddenly find myself in an environment that affects me and changes my desire. For example, my parents sent me to a children’s sports program. Before that, I did not like sports, but, looking at my playmates, I began to envy them, got impressed. Friends pass me their desire, and instead of sitting at the computer, I begin to run and play sports with them.

It turns out that I can take desires and needs from the environment. Thus, I change my desire for a greater one acquired from the environment, from friends, and I can commit myself to such actions that I previously did not think about at all.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 5/27/14