Commitment:- Its importance and significance for happy living.

Commitment is a big word and a very scary word to many people nowadays. The word commitment means responsibility. The word commitment brings up our willpower. Many people think the word commitment is too limiting. We can sum up commitment in one word, righteousness. The path of righteousness is the path of one commitment after another commitment. In between the commitments is fulfilment of the commitment, which is another word for duty.

We are here to realise God within our self. We are here to resolve all the after effects we put in motion in past lives. We are here to manage our affairs so properly that eventually we do not have to come back into a physical body anymore. This takes tremendous commitment, and our great Hindu religion gives us the knowledge of how to be committed.

If your religion is not manifesting daily in your life, then basically you don't have a religion. You just have some sort of Indian culture which will eventually go away and be replaced with another kind of a culture, because it doesn't really matter to you. Someone asked me recently, "How do I know what to be committed to?" The answer: "What do you believe in?" Belief is a magical thing. It's like a vitamin; it permeates your whole system.

A belief can be taken away and another belief can replace it, or the belief can be strengthened through commitment. Be committed to your beliefs, or find beliefs that you can be committed to, then build on them. Then you will leave your footprints on the San Marga of time. Otherwise, you are just sitting in one place, making no progress. Nothing is happening in your life. The karmas aren't working right, and you are not able to face life.

If you feel, day after day, that you are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, then I would say you are a being who is fully committed to the spiritual path. If, day after day, you feel you don't know whether you are in the right place or not, and things are always "happening to you," that you are like a little boat on the great ocean of life being tossed around, here and there, then you should look within yourself and find out where you stand on the scale of life itself. What are your basic beliefs? What are your basic commitments? Ask yourself.

There are many things to be committed to. Youths should be committed to an education that prepares them for what they plan to do in the future. Mothers should be committed to raising their children, making them good citizens, though some mothers don't care whether their children are good citizens or not. They just don't care. They are not even committed to raising their own children. They give them over to somebody else to raise: "Here, you do it." Day-care centers are opening up all across the nation, though statistics show that children educated in day-care centers are terrible students when they get into school--discouraged, undisciplined, unruly students. Husbands should be committed to raising up their family, taking care of their wife and children. That is a commitment that they have to fulfil. If they don't fulfil it, they are making an unworthy karma. But many husbands are not even committed to that.

Commitment and righteousness are just about the same. Righteousness brings law and order into life, gives us rules to follow and guides us along. Where does commitment come from? Commitment comes from the soul. The intellectual mind is going this way and that way all the time, controlled or antagonised by other people's opinions most of the time and by how society is thinking. Commitment comes from the soul. It is a quality of the soul which you can teach to the next generation. Another quality of the soul is observation. Still another intuitive quality of the soul is creativity, which should be encouraged in every child. Through commitment, the soul dominates the intellect and the intellect dominates the instinctive mind. This is religion in action. This is living with God.

Main Source K.H.M (abridged-JK)

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