Believe and achieve! And in order to do this, faith is essential. It is a triple faith that men need today—faith in oneself, faith in the world around, which is not merely just but essentially good, and above all—faith in God. If you cultivate this triple faith, you are bound to succeed in whatever you do!
There was a man who had set out on a mission to go around the world on his bicycle. He came to meet my beloved master, Sadhu Vaswani and said to him, “I have been on the road for over a year now. And during this year, there have been occasions when my spirits have fallen very low. I have felt discouraged and frustrated. Give me a few simple words that I can inscribe on my ring, so that whenever I feel depressed, I can look at the inscription and feel my spirits rising!”
Sadhu Vaswani thought for a brief while and then gave him these words: “Believe and achieve!”
These three words spell the secret of success: believe and achieve! Believe in yourself, believe in the work you have undertaken, believe that you will succeed in your work. If you do not believe in yourself, how can you hope to succeed?
Believe in yourself—but which self? For you must remember, there are two selves within every man. There is a lower self, the ego self, the empiric self, the self with which we are only too familiar in our day-to-day existence. It is the self of passion and pride, of lust, hatred, greed, envy, jealousy, resentment, ill will, selfishness and misery. Unfortunately, we have identified ourselves with this self; we magnify it out of proportion in the course of our daily life. That is why in the world today, we have wars and violence, hatred and strife.
Throw out the ego self, the lower self; invite the big self, to come and take charge of your life. Surely, you will believe and achieve!
The lower self sits on the threshold of our consciousness, and easily catches us; it captures us, misleads us, leads us astray. And yet, it is just a tiny self. When you enter into the depths of meditation, you will realise that it is but a tiny speck of a speck of a speck of a speck. But because we have identified ourselves with it, we magnify it beyond all proportions and allow it to dominate our life.
But there is another self within each one of us—the larger self, the nobler self, the radiant self, the true self, the “self-supreme” in the words of the Bhagavad Gita. In the measure in which you identify yourself with this higher self, in that measure success will come to you like an ever-flowing, ever-full river.
Throw out the ego self, the lower self; invite the big self, the self-supreme to come and take charge of your life. Surely, you will believe and achieve!
Walter Davis was a great athlete who believed and achieved. As a boy, he contracted infantile paralysis, and the doctors feared that he might not be able to walk again. His mother’s loving care and attention put the boy back on his feet. As he began to walk slowly, he saw a boy doing high jumps and thought to himself that it was something he would love to do. So he began practising high jumps, until he became very good at it. But, his legs were still weak, and serious competition was out of the question for him. He, however, kept up his painstaking efforts to strengthen them. When he married, his wife understood his aspirations and said to him, “Walter, it is not enough to have power in your legs. You must have power in your mind!” She coined a new phrase for him: the strength of belief. This, she said, would bring greater strength to his legs.
Strength of belief took Walter Davis to great heights.
Eventually, it helped him create a world record. He cleared the bar at six feet eleven and five-eighth of an inch—propelled by his strength of belief. The boy they said might never walk again became the high jump champion of the world! Belief was his strength—he believed and achieved!
By Dada JP Vaswani
