The Knife (Power) in Your Hands
The power to create a good life for our ourselves and others is our birthright. This power comes from the infinite intelligence within. Let’s think of this power as a knife in our hands. All of us already have the knife (power) in our hand from birth. All that is needed is to learn how to cook good food (good life) for ourselves and others using this knife. As your birthright, there are no preconditions necessary for you to get this power. You need not be a good person, enlightened, wise, right-minded, conscious, strong, or learned to get this knife, but you need all of those to cook good food and make a good life using this knife. The people who cooked bad food (had a bad life) or used the knife to hurt themselves or others did not have the right-mindedness, salvation, wisdom, truth, enlightenment, and so on. The bad food is a result of their ignorance or lack of proper skills to use their knife. In this group, we also have people who are unaware that they were born with a knife in their hands. Therefore, they cannot cook for themselves and their families; hence they sleep hungry, and they are poor and beg others for leftovers. Their ignorance produces lack and scarcity. They don’t have the knife only because they don’t know they were born with it. Both of these groups live in illusion, suffering, and doubt. The doubt of whether you have this knife or power in your hand also makes you suffer. Wisdom, truth, right-mindedness, consciousness, and enlightenment remove these doubts from your mind.
How big is that power? It is infinite. You see it doing miracles, healing the sick, and in people who changed their lives from rags to riches. You see this power in the works of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Henry Ford, the Wright brothers, and all other inventors, entrepreneurs, poets, philosophers, writers, musicians, sages, and spiritual leaders and in many other people from all walks of life.
On the other hand, you also see the work of this infinite power destroying lives, creating bad lives for others, in the works of Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and in extreme poverty, suffering, pain, sickness, failure, and misery. Just like the knowledge of using the knife to cook good food or cook bad food, the outcome depends on your skills and choices.
The knife is infinitely powerful but cannot teach you how to cook, and it does not come with instructions and does not come with automation to cook for you by itself. How fast is the knife to cook? It is infinitely fast and infinitely powerful. But the speed of the cooking depends on your skills of using the knife. You can go extremely slow or fast. The speed comes with your level of enlightenment, right-mindedness, consciousness, and knowledge of the universal laws. All this means the same thing—how well you can use your knife to cook good food.
You have to give back this knife at the end of your life (death takes it away). The length of time you keep this knife depends on your skills, which in turn determines your health. You need good health and right-mindedness to cook good food in the shortest time possible. Speed and good health are important factors; the sooner, the better. Bad health and old age reduce your speed and skills but do not take away the knife from your hands.
You cannot give your knife to another person. We were all given the same knife, but you can teach others how they can use their knife skillfully to cook good food (have a good life for themselves and others).
The Relationship between Your Dhabbinn and the Knife (Power)
Holding on to your dhabbinn means holding on to your skills, integrity, peace of mind, and so on in order to cook the best food. So, love, contentment, enlightenment, being one with life, and so on are all the necessary skills to become a good cook or have a good life.
When you are stressed, perturbed, hateful, and full of guilt, fear, and regrets and other low energies, you will not be able to cook good food, and you will not enjoy the cooking and eating. You will just waste your life or time in the kitchen. It means you wasted your short time in the kitchen (on this earth) on low energies and pain, hating, and complaining, not paying attention to your cooking, which resulted in bad food, and you ended up not enjoying your dinner. You just wasted everything. Finally, you will go to bed (death) with all this heaviness, filled with low energies. Why? Yet not everybody is lucky like you to see their bed (old age). Some lives were taken by others’ knives or their own. Some others could not finish the cooking because of bad health or other factors, and others left before even knowing how to hold their knife and did not get any time in the kitchen or had no time at all (died young).
Others wasted their lives or time in the kitchen, just standing there with their knives in their hands, confused, doubting themselves, afraid to cook and analyzing everything in their lives. There is just too much on their minds. They cannot cook, and before they know it, their time in the kitchen is up. They beg and eat others’ leftovers. They never had any proper dinner or good food. They never cooked, or some started but stopped the cooking at some point (they never or barely tried to do something in their lives). They never complete anything in their life. They never or barely used their knives.