Psychologists talk about the influence of genetics and the influence of environment. And all of us live in some kind of an environment, and that environment has some kind of influence on us. When they say environment, they’re not talking about the temperature. They’re talking about the parent, the parental units and their influence on us and the cultural biases and those influences on us. So, each of us are born into some sort of culture. We’re born to a set of parents. We go to certain schools. We have all of this input that is constantly thrown at us from the time that we are babies, and we have to deal with it. In other words we are constantly in the midst of circumstances, one kind or another, but we’re constantly in the midst of circumstances. And we have to somehow react to these circumstances in order to go on with our daily existence in this world.
The interesting thing about circumstances is they can be real or imaginary. We can create circumstances for us that have nothing to do with the intention of the people around us. We just imagine them. Some people call this the inability to communicate appropriately. But we’ve also been taught that this life is an illusion and that only Allah is real. So, here we are in the midst of all kinds of circumstances, some real, some imagined; yet, we’re told that in our belief system that even the ones that are real are in fact imagined. So it puts us in a sort of dilemma as to how to react to things and how to find an equilibrium in our being. First and foremost is to be grounded in the understanding that circumstances should not affect our being.
