Self reliance presumes that each of us is responsible for the decisions we make, after carefully considering the advice offered by those we deem to be trustworthy. I have altered my understandings often after listening to the experiences of wiser acquaintances.
The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly. ~ Gandhi
Gandhi was a committed Hindu with a background in Christian teachings that he had acquired when living in South Africa with a Christian community. Gandhi, for many years engaged in a correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author from whom Gandhi learned much on the life, and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth perhaps explaining why Gandhi was willing to discuss the role of the Holy Spirit speaking to us from within our interior life.
6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.
Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you ~ Matthew 6
Our Father invites us to speak with Him whenever we feel dejected, and devoid of hope leading us to slide into a pit filled with our depression. It takes patience, time, and growing trust for each of us to believe, then to engage in a conversation with The Father's Spirit listening to our every word, responding with advice leading us out of our desert filled with desperation.
I often quote the words of the Oxford University don, C. S. Lewis knowing well that his experiences encouraged him to begin trusting the inner voice when his life was going off track. C. S. Lewis would learn from from bitter experience that the answers to his dilemmas were best addressed in his conversations with God's Spirit.
"Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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