Your life is the product of the decisions you make. How do you make decisions? Well, you check the facts, right? Here's the problem with that. In so many situations there is a kind of fog of war. You don't always have all the facts and sometimes you have to guess. What do you do when a decision is due at a certain time and you can't avoid it? All too often people deceive themselves into thinking they can postpone decisions. Sometimes they can, but there's usually a very high cost to postponing a key decision and procrastination is in itself a decision. Procrastination is dangerous because it is a form of self-delusion. It's this idea of, "Well we haven't made the decision." Well, yeah, you've made a decision to lose time or resources through inaction, many times at a very bloody cost. This doesn't mean you should rush into things, but this is a cold-blooded reality which needs to be understood.
This also comes down to understanding that most things are not in your control, which is where a larger spiritual reality comes in.
MAKING DECISIONS
So the issue here is how do you make decisions? This goes back to insight. You get to a certain point and you still can't see what's up ahead.
So you have to guess and this relates to the subconscious part of the mind. Your subconscious is like Wi-Fi. If you have a Wi-Fi adapter and you drop it into the toilet, it probably won't work so well.
How do you improve the ability of your subconscious to work correctly? This gets back to something that is as old as history: the concept of prayer. We know that to many of our friends and readers, religion and prayer are controversial subjects.
However, it cannot be denied that the most successful program for overcoming addiction is Alcoholics Anonymous, a program that encourages submission to a Higher Power. They use the phrase Higher Power to refer to "a power greater than ourselves." This involves letting go of things you can't control. This involves recognizing that you can't always rely on just yourself or mere logic for making the big decisions, that there is something greater than yourself that can guide you, if you let It.
For many people, having a Higher Power can get them through hard times, such as war, poverty, chronic illness, addiction, trauma, oppression, or the death of a family member.
We ourselves do believe in a Higher Power. And we believe this Higher Power can guide people to the right decisions if people are moving in the right direction. This is where prayer comes in.
Prayer means asking the Almighty, a higher power, or whatever you believe in for guidance. You ask, "What do I do here? " It involves simply asking a question in your mind to the Almighty, and you wait, and think, and then make the decision as well as you can. You basically guess. It's like walking into a minefield. You're going to go right rather than left, and hope you don't step on a mine. That's a good analogy. So that's the point about making decisions.
WHY WILL THE ALMIGHTY HELP YOU?
Now there's a larger point in terms of a theological view of life. If you expect God to help you make decisions, why would He do that? Who are you? Who are you to the Almighty?
In the world of the spirit, it's like the real world in the sense you rarely get something for nothing. So if you want to be able to make the right decisions, you have to be leading your life in a correct way. It means having a sense of purpose and discipline.
ESTABLISHING A DISCIPLINED LIFESTYLE
We're not going to get into which religion is "the best." We're also not going to say that they are all the same, because they are not. But we'll list some religious examples that are familiar to us in this article.
Islam, for example, focuses on finding guidance via submission to the Almighty, the one God who has no partners. The autobiography of Malcolm X, for example, is a powerful story of his conversion to Islam in prison, and how his faith helped him triumph above the forces of racism and poverty.
In Islam, the adherents develop a set of practices and discipline to spiritually focus oneself so that they can connect to the will of the Almighty. This involves praying five times at certain set times throughout the day. This also involves cutting out things that cut down on a person's spiritual focus, like intoxicants, mindless sexual hookups, and other unhealthy behaviors.
This structure also exists in Hinduism, with the concept of Dharma, purpose and Karma of how you in your life do or do not move forward in terms of fulfilling your purpose.
Napoleon once described how this guidance works. He once said, "I feel myself driven forward by a force I do not know. While it is with me, nothing can stand against me. If it deserts me, I can be destroyed by a feather."
When you look around you, you see things that destroy an awareness of the supernatural power, and the vision, and the overall power of the Almighty. Drugs and alcohol are common problems as we mentioned above, but there's also a problem with people getting lost in the world of careerism, that their whole life is built around impressing the boss, the company, pleasing other people and some people are so lost in that they're spiritually dead. Spirituality is like exercising. If you don't exercise your body, you will get fat and it can't do stuff, and you can't even receive the guidance of the Almighty. You can't even though you are aware of His existence. This is very dangerous. It's like driving a car at increasingly high speeds with the windshield that's clogging up, or even worse, you see imaginary things in the windshield and you think you're heading to paradise when you're heading toward a brick wall. So there's a lesson to lead a disciplined life, a life of faith and then you are likely to get guidance.
MEANING AND SACRIFICE
A final point is that God is not an ATM machine. He's not your personal welfare office. The Almighty has a plan, and the Quran for example, very specifically states that if you follow that plan, you will enter paradise. That's the main promise. The promise of the Quran is not that you will have a painless life, and that you will have no problems, that you will have a life of endless pleasure that is here. No. That is not the promise, and you should think about it as being in an army. If you agree to serve in an army, what would the general say? "We're now going into battle, but nobody's going to get hurt?" "Nobody's even gonna be slightly injured?" Obviously if people are going to battle they're going to be horribly injured and killed, but this is faith in the future, and faith in the larger more eternal world to come, paradise.
You need to understand that all aspects of life are under the control of the Almighty. We don't understand and we're not going to understand exactly what He's doing here, and that's just who you are and who He is. But He is the ultimate source of power and that is the most important thing that you need to focus on.