The Enemy Within

In a world full of glaring problems, it is often the case that we try to find someone or something around us to blame as the ultimate cause of the problems we often come across in our lives. In the garden of Eden, Adam blamed Eve for luring him into eating the forbidden fruit and since then this habit of ‘blame-shifting’ has existed with humanity up to date. It is rare for the average person to assume responsibility for not being able to achieve a particular goal.

We see this behaviour demonstrated in our schools where some students choose to blame their teachers or the school curriculum for their underperformance in and outside the classroom. Moreover, for many of us, we assume that the state and her hungry politicians are to blame for a country’s slow-paced development. Consciously or unconsciously, we have mastered the habit of blaming the environment – people, institutions, rules and regulations, government policies, culture, social inequalities, injustice, etc – as the enemy hampering our progress. Yes, there may be external causes but the truth that most of us have failed to recognize is that the so-called ‘Enemies of Progress’ can do us no harm without “The Enemy Within”. In this short but insightful article, I want to draw your attention to the other side of the coin – THE ENEMY WITHIN.

Indubitably, the most powerful and strongest thing God put into human beings is the mind. The mind together with the soul and spirit are the very foundations of our being. Everything we do begins and ends in the mind. It thus suggests that when things do not go the way we want, the first thing we must first confront is our mind (ourselves). How many times do we look within ourselves in an attempt to find out the causes of our problems? How many times do we examine our thoughts to find out if there is something wrong with the way we think? How many times do we assess our behaviour to find out if the problem lies in the way we behave? What if the enemy is not the environment but our own negative mindset? What if the enemy is our despicable behaviour? The bitter truth is that the enemy rarely lives outside of us. In most cases, the enemy is our mindset. The conditions we find ourselves in are the result of the way we think and react to the events happening in our lives. The state of our mind directly determines the state of our lives. Accordingly, we can never have a positive life with a negative mindset. Therefore, before we play the ‘blame-shift game’, it is incumbent upon us to first confront the enemy within, to wit our negative mindset and behaviour.

It is very saddening how most of us are given to blaming the environment for our disquieting and troubling conditions while failing to appreciate the fact that what is outside of us can only be a challenge depending on how we think of and react to them. It follows that much of what we consider as challenges are not necessarily challenges in themselves but we have labelled them as such. As people of Faith, our biggest enemy, in reality, is not necessarily ‘the devil’ or the unfavourable environment but our own evil thoughts and behaviours. If the environment is not favourable, then what are we doing to make it favourable because blaming the environment for not being favourable does not make it favourable. On the other hand, those who are given to blaming a certain devil for their distressful conditions should understand that blaming the ‘Devil’, ‘Lucifer’, or ‘Satan’ will not solve their problems. The solution lies within us. The solution is embedded in the way we think and behave towards these troubling situations. What most of us do not know is that our wicked and mischievous behaviours are the manifestations of the devil incarnate in us. Therefore, our fight with the so-called devil must begin with our evil thoughts and behaviours. The culture of our time is that most people are concerned with fighting what they consider as ‘Enemies of Progress’ to the point that they do not make time to deal with the demons and devils which exist in them. ‘Enemies of Progress’ do not only exist outside of us, more often than not they inapparently exist within us in different forms. If we have been long wrongly conscientized to believe that there is a devil outside of us who is responsible for all of our problems, and that anything bad is externally caused, then I believe by now we should get used to the fact that the enemy within, in most cases, is much more detrimental than the enemy outside.

In each of us there is a hidden enemy. Everyone has his or her own kind of devil. It could be the way you think, the way you behave, or the beliefs and principles which influence your actions. We cannot solve our problems by just blaming the environment, which is why our attention should be more centred on dealing with our devilish attitudes and behaviours because it is the only surest way we can gain a deeper understanding of the operations of what we refer to as ‘Enemies of Progress’. The reality is that the enemy outside of us cannot hurt us that much if we are not well positioned for it. Our outer world to some extent is a direct result of our inner world. Whether or not our problems are externally caused depends largely on the lens through which we perceive and interpret events happening in our lives. Maybe your biggest problem is not a certain devil but how you make sense of and react to the events happening in your life. We can pray and bind up the devil and all the demons in the world, but all of these would be USELESS if we do not bury our evil thoughts and atrocious behaviours, to wit: THE ENEMY WITHIN.