Be liberated! Drop your samskaras!

IN SOME parts of India, if some one sneezes as another person is about to leave on an important mission, it is considered a bad omen, and the mission is aborted. People may call this superstition.

Some people must do everything by a set routine. Before leaving home they will check half a dozen times whether the lights are off, whether doors are locked and so on. Psychologists call this obsessive compulsive neurosis.

You wear a blue shirt once to an important event and you are successful. From then on you always wear blue for any critical event. You call it your lucky charm.

You tend to follow what worked for you in the past; what someone tells you worked for them in the past; what, therefore, you believe will work for you in future. Your mind stores these past impressions and memories, as well as the emotive reactions associated with these experiences continuously, whether you remain conscious of these experiences or not.

Mind never sleeps, not for one moment. Data stored by the mind based on past experiences with an emotive overload are called samskara in Sanskrit.

Your samskaras define you. They lead your life. Samskaras drive you to take illogical, unconscious and irrational decisions. Samskaras keep you in bondage. They are the root cause of all suffering. When Buddha said desires are the root cause of suffering, he was referring to the effect of these samskaras, these unfulfilled desires that drive you irrationally, blindly. The problem is samskaras drive your actions unconsciously and without your awareness, letting you believe that whatever you are doing is rational.

Your ultimate liberation lies in infusing silence, injecting light, bringing thoughtless awareness to your unconscious zone. When the unconscious samskara arises, when you remember something that disturbs you, you create an energy clot, an energy block within yourself; you contract; there is less space in your Being. When you meditate on your inner space or inner silence you expand. That is possible only when you do not have samskara, no energy clots within you, which disturb you.

These samskaras can only be eradicated through meditation, through awareness; by being witness to and not being a participant in thoughts. You have nothing to lose but your samskara, when you meditate! Drop your samskaras and be liberated!