Just think of a river: When you put your leg in the river the first time and take it out and put it in the second time, is it the same river? No! The river has changed faces, the same water is not there anymore; fresh water has flowed, is it not?
So don’t strive to identify yourself with anything; life is ever changing. Because of your narrow scope of beliefs, your spiritual growth gets stalled and curbed. You become like a horse that has only a limited view of the road ahead of it. A broad perspective is essential in life.
Our forefathers gave us a lot of food, but not the tongue to taste it. It is up to us to experience this world with joy. The joy is in the way you experience it, not in the outer world objects themselves. This has to be very clearly understood. Your mental setup is what makes your life joyful or miserable.
If you are happy with your current mental setup, it is absolutely alright. But if you feel that you need to prune it a little, then somewhere there’s a problem. You often try to prune your mental setup like pruning a plant. A plant that is pruned grows faster!
Either you live with your current mental setup or uproot it and create a new one. You cannot dye your mental setup like you dye clothing to make it look different. You cannot chisel your mental setup to correct it. A complete transformation has to take place, else there is always a danger of slipping into the old ways again.
When you have a clean mental setup, you will never worry. Only when you are confused with complex thought patterns and words, you will be worried always. I always tell people: When you are not sure of yourself, you will be worried about where the planets are! You will start analyzing which planet is centered where and how it is influencing you. The actual problem is you are not centered.
Work on your mind when you have time. Look in and house-keep it. After all, you are with your mind 24 hours of the day, is it not? Why not then keep it clean?
I have seen these ‘house-proud’ people who maintain their houses so beautifully. They use the vacuum cleaner and keep it absolutely dust-free. They cannot tolerate any speck of dust. They will clean the carpet till it gets a hole in it! What about cleaning the house in which you are living 24 hours? Your mind? You are with it 24 hours; every single thought or action of yours involves it.
You bring in Vaastu Shastra, Feng Shui etc. which are all sciences to keep the space inside your house in a pure and energized condition. But you fail to understand one thing: You need to continuously energize your home only because you are contaminating it with your negativity. This is the truth.
When you contaminate the space in your house with collective negative thoughts, with your worries, the space starts radiating the negative thoughts back to you and you get caught in a vicious circle of negativity the moment you enter your house.
How many times have you felt that you are perfectly alright until you entered your house?! The moment you enter, you feel gripped by a force of familiar negative thought patterns. This is nothing but your own thoughts that you have managed to fill your house with. What do you then do? You call an expert in vaastu shastra to change the layout of the house, or call a temple priest to perform some fire ritual and cleanse the house or you apply Feng Shui ideas to your house.
When these things are done with sincerity, they will no doubt do the needful to your house. But you have to understand one thing: These are only supplementary methods. The actual thing is, to clean your own self and radiate a blissful mental set-up so that automatically, the space in which you live radiates that.
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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.
Words from the Master
Mar 6, 2009 at 2:24 AM
Series: Words From The Master