Tyranny of the self

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

—*This transcript was automatically generated by AI and may contain errors. *— [00:00:13 - 00:00:22] My brother and sisters, there is somebody called Ed Battista and he has written some things [00:00:22 - 00:00:27] very eloquently and he has coined his phrase called the tyranny of feelings, the tyranny [00:00:27 - 00:00:35] of feelings and he describes it as follows. He says the tyranny of feelings consists of believing [00:00:36 - 00:00:42] that my feelings are justified because they are my feelings. My feelings are justified because [00:00:42 - 00:00:49] they are my feelings. My feelings at this moment take precedence over all other considerations. [00:00:49 - 00:00:59] I have the right to express my feelings any way I see fit and if I believe that you are causing my feelings, [00:00:59 - 00:01:08] you are obligated to modify your behavior in order to align with my desired emotional state. [00:01:10 - 00:01:20] Now effectively it means that he says that as we said here my feelings are supreme and [00:01:22 - 00:01:30] if I'm not feeling good and if I believe that you are the reason for that, then you must change [00:01:30 - 00:01:38] your behavior so that I feel good. Now Ed Battista says this very nicely. He says that this is the [00:01:38 - 00:01:46] benefit of the newborn child, of a very young child because that child is actually incapable [00:01:46 - 00:01:53] of taking care of itself. If it is left, it will perish. So it needs to attract attention [00:01:53 - 00:02:06] and it needs to dominate the moment and force the caregiver, whoever it is, to give it care. [00:02:07 - 00:02:16] So the child will do anything that it takes to get that attention and to get that caregiver [00:02:16 - 00:02:26] to do what this child wants. So this is the problem. Now therefore, [00:02:30 - 00:02:34] however, the problem is when you carry this forward into your adulthood, [00:02:36 - 00:02:45] adulthood, with a young child one understands this but with adults this becomes a major problem. [00:02:45 - 00:02:51] Now if you see, if you think about it, what does this have to do? For example, [00:02:53 - 00:02:57] I'll tell you ways in which this is counterproductive and bad. For example, [00:03:00 - 00:03:10] if you encounter a person who disagreed with you or if you encounter somebody who gives you some [00:03:10 - 00:03:18] adverse feedback, your teacher, your parent, your superior, your friend, your colleague, [00:03:18 - 00:03:24] gives you some feedback about your behavior which is itself negative and they tell you that, [00:03:24 - 00:03:29] this kind of behavior is not good for you, not good for anybody else, it's going to cause you hurt. [00:03:32 - 00:03:39] The tendency of people is that I'm no longer your friend because you are not saying things to me [00:03:39 - 00:03:47] that I like. I don't like this teacher because the teacher is not giving me supreme importance [00:03:48 - 00:03:55] and so forth. So you close the doors to your own development, you close the doors to your own [00:03:57 - 00:04:05] learning. I give you a short, a very, very quick self-test to see whether you are in this [00:04:06 - 00:04:10] state of mind rot. I call this the entitlement state of mind. [00:04:11 - 00:04:19] And the simple test is that when you encounter, say for example, an argument, you disagree with [00:04:19 - 00:04:26] somebody, what is your first response? Is your first response, I don't like what you're saying, [00:04:27 - 00:04:33] I dislike what you're saying or is it to say, okay, so that's one way of looking at this, [00:04:34 - 00:04:39] I have a different way of looking at it and you are very objective about it. It's not a question of [00:04:39 - 00:04:50] like and dislike. If for example, you suffer from the inability to concentrate, you have a short [00:04:50 - 00:04:56] attention span, you have an attention span deficit,