The same thing can be both good and bad. Whenever you speak of good, bad is also present. The world is a mixture of both. There is not good without bad. They are both sides of the same coin. Both are necessary. We have been given free will and discriminating capacity to select what is beneficial to us and to avoid what is detrimental to us. Even Cobra poison can be used as medicine.
Interpretation
Good and bad are interconnected, and one cannot exist without the other.
This quote by Swami Satchidananda emphasizes the duality of existence, where good and bad are intertwined aspects of the same reality. It suggests that our ability to choose wisely, utilizing our free will and discernment, is essential for navigating the complexities of life, as both positive and negative elements coexist and play vital roles in our experiences and growth.
In practice
In a speech about resilience, one could use this quote to illustrate how challenges and hardships can lead to personal growth.
If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won’t find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99)
Begin with little things daily and one day you will be doing things that months back you would have thought impossible.
Anything that you throw comes back. All your actions are echoes.
. . . I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? (233)
When you win and the other fellow loses, what do you see? A losing face. There is great joy in losing and making the other person win and have a happy face. Who will be the happiest person? The one who brings happiness to others.
Yoga is not only learning to stand on your head but also learning to stand on your feet.
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
This is the secret of spiritual life: to think that I am the Atman and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings...scenes on a canvas...of which I am the witness.
There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
He sees with amazement that our defeats are but the stepping stones to victory and that all his victories are stepping stones to ruin. It was apparent to me that this bad man saw quite clearly the shadow of slowly and remorselessly approaching doom, and he railed at fortune for mocking him with the glitter of fleeting success.
He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.
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