IMPROVING OUR MINDS
Do not change your mind because you cannot change your mind despite how much you try. Because with what are you going to change your mind? What other tool have you got to change your mind besides your mind? Here, we will delve into the realm of self-analysis. If done constructively, self-analysis is very good, and rationalisation is excellent. Still, the only tragedy is that through rationalisation and self-analysis, people develop a more significant amount of guilt.
Through self-analysis, they start diving deep within their minds, not their Spirit; they start diving deep within their minds and stir up all the contained dirt. Stirring up the dirt in the mind serves a helpful purpose, but all techniques are based on the mind only; I would not recommend them. Because, with the stirring up of the dirt in the clothing thrown in a washing machine, there has to be a solvent; there has to be the soap powder that will absorb the dirt.
Anything stirred up in the mind must first have a background of the Spiritual Force that we can draw from. In the process, the spiritual force must be awakened through meditation and spiritual practices. At the same time, you could go into analysis so that whatever dirt the analytical mind draws up to the surface level would spontaneously and automatically be dissolved by the spiritual forces generated in you. These spiritual forces are activated through meditation, diving deep within, and analysis must also have an active base.
When you analyse something and come to an inevitable conclusion, and if you do nothing about it, those thought processes become more deeply embedded in the mind, causing the samskaras, or the impressions, to become stronger. In that way, you are not helping the analysis.
You must tackle all mental decisions, rationalisations and analysis in two ways: to draw forth the spiritual energies from within oneself, which could be equated with Gurushakti or Grace. Returning to your washing machine to dissolve the negativities in the mind also needs a release. The soap has removed all the dirt from the clothing, but the washing machine still needs a pipe to let out the water. In our case, we do our spiritual practices that dissolve the dirt, and the second step would be to release the energies built up in us.
People who do certain forms of meditation for ten to twelve hours do not perform the necessary physical actions. By physical actions, I mean mental actions as well because that is also physical action. Thought processes are also physical but at a subtler level.
So, one way to tackle the problem is through spiritual practices; the other is to put into action the analysis or results we have brought. Here, we are cleaning and dispensing; that is how the mind gets clarified.
CLEANSING THE MIND
You must have heard of the word ghee. Ghee is clarified butter. There is a straightforward way to make ghee. You take butter that you buy at the supermarket, put it in a pot and bring it to a boiling point; it has to boil, boil, boil, and, as it boils, all the substances in the butter that do not make it pure butter comes to the surface, and you skim it off. Then, you have pure clarified ghee and pure butter, which can last for months without refrigeration, while butter can never leave outside the fridge for longer than a few days.
That is the process of cleansing the mind. The boiling process in the mind is critical. Sometimes, people go through many emotional turmoils and indecisions, thinking it is not good. They can make it bad if it is bad. They can make it worse if they want to, but in reality, it is something delicious; the emotional turmoil you go through is something delicious because if you shut up those emotions, repress them, and inhibit them, then you are soon on the way to the lunatic asylum.
So, let the emotions come, let them tumble around, let them do what they want to, but having the strength of awakening the spirituality within, we can stand apart from the emotions, we can objectify those emotions so that it does not affect us as it is affecting a person today.
When a person allows emotions to affect them, be they good or bad, they manifest themselves through the physical body. It could take various forms of organic diseases or psychosomatic diseases. For everything in life, from the minutest atom to man and even up to the stage of the godman, the living God, everything is forever trying to express. This expression means expansion, as the entire universe forever expands within itself. The universe is going through the same process you are going through, for you are a universe in miniature.
As the saying goes, if you understand the workings of a grain of sand, you will understand the entire universe. The secret here is this: as the mind becomes more and more clarified by spiritual practices and right thinking and right action, then whatever emotions a person goes through, be it pain or pleasure, because man, being in an embodied state and having a mind, is ruled by the law of opposites. You are bound; that is the bondage that man goes through.
Lately, scientists have discovered that in this polarity, this was said by ancient Vedic sages thousands and thousands of years ago. Still, scientists have also proven that if you touch one end or create any disturbance, good or bad, on one end of the stick, the other end will feel its effect and respond accordingly. Here is a process whereby positiveness on the one side will lead to positiveness on the other side, the other end of polarity.
POSITIVE THINKING
That is why you have teachers telling you about positive thinking. Positive thinking is not drowning or pressing down negative thoughts. You cannot do it; it is impossible. The more you fight negative thoughts and turn them into positive thoughts, the stronger the negative thoughts will become because you are fighting against them, and that is the true meaning when the scriptures say, “Resist not evil.” Those are the meanings behind these various injunctions, deep meanings which most people fail to understand. There is only one thing that could be done; it is to use those same negative thoughts and develop a new perspective to it—using the same negative thoughts and turning them around so that they automatically become positive.
The mind cannot expel negative thoughts. If you take a jug of dirty water, you do not need to throw out the water but put that jug of water under a running tap, and as the clean water goes into that jug, gradually, all the dirty water will be out, and you will end up with a jug full of clean water.
The mind works similarly. As we pour and allow the mind to be permeated by these powerful spiritual energies within us and drawn from deep down through our practices, we will find the dirty water in the jug transforming itself into clean water. We are not fighting with dirty water; we are constantly pouring clean water.
People will often tell you that if a negative thought of hate comes into your mind, then turn your mind to thoughts of love. If a thought of ugliness comes into your mind forcefully, think of beauty. This is easier said than done. Try it. You have tried it, so I do not need to tell you. It is not something you can switch on and off, which is what psychologists and people like Norman Vincent Peale and all these guys forget to understand. I will challenge them on any public platform. They fail to realise that you cannot switch it off. You cannot switch off a negative thought and get a positive thought. It is a gradual process of using the same negative thought, and with discrimination and the spiritual force you draw upon, convert the negative thought into positivity.
TURN THE MIND INTO POSITIVITY
There are many other methods to achieve a positive way of life. One of the methods is to have a true guru, for example, who could teach these things. That could teach positivity, that teaches of love and hope and not the doomsday preachers. They are not needed, for they are dooming themselves, but teachers who teach love and hope are good to listen to, for they give you something to think about. In the absence of a teacher, you cannot have every day with you; you revert to books of such a nature that will fill your mind with good thoughts. You are helping yourself that way, and when the mind is filled with good thoughts, you feel that exhilaration, and there is no time for all that moping and the emotional crisis one goes through.
I have often been in people’s homes, and they show me around, and I would see on the bedside table a detective story or a ghost story, all kinds of romantic idealism, things like that. Why not have a book there at your bedside like God Calling or something like that, something good? Before bed, if a few passages are read while you are asleep, they work on the subconscious mind. Suppose you go to bed with good thoughts or a good image of someone whose teachings you follow, perhaps as a symbol. These are all little helpful devices that can turn the mind into greater and greater positivity.
To repeat, you cannot switch off. It is impossible! If you have a toothache, it is straightforward to stop thinking about it and get your mind busy with something else; it is effortless to say that. It just does not happen. Your thoughts always revert to the spot of pain unless you are as innocent as a child. A child has a toothache, and you get engrossed in some game that the child likes. The child will forget the toothache. But how many of us so-called grownup children have that ability? That would require primal innocence, and we have lost that innocence! We have lost that naiveness that we were born with. I tell you, you were better off when you were a child than what you are now.
THE SPIRITUAL PATH IS A PATH FOR HEROES
People think that the spiritual path is easy. No, it is not. As Vivekananda would say, it is the path of heroes where you are determined to reach the goal. You do not have happiness in mind that I want wealth, health, and all that. No, your mind dwells upon Divinity, and all these happiness come on their own. You do not need to seek it. The more you pursue happiness, the further it runs away from you. I quoted a passage the other day from Nathaniel Hawthorne, I think it is, where he says that if you try to catch the butterfly, it will fly away from you, but sit still, and it might alight on your shoulder. That is the secret of happiness: not to seek happiness, but to seek Divinity, and in its turn, happiness and ecstasy and joy dawn upon you, where you become established within the Self. As the Gita would say, first, you must be based in Yourself and then perform. You all know that injunction.
AIM AT “THAT”
Our meditation and spiritual practices are to find that stability within us to uncover and unfold the real I, the Divinity, the Heaven within that is there. Once that is reached, all else is added unto thee. People, especially those on the spiritual path, must aim at That. Capital T, Capital H, Capital A, Capital T. THAT!
I am not pulling this out of my hat. This is what all the sages have said over and over and over again. For that is the royal road. Show me one person who has chased after happiness and found it. Not a single person in this four-thousand million people we have on earth. None have found it—the only way to find that happiness, another word for positivity, is to seek another direction. When we try to pursue happiness, we will sometimes find little pleasures, not happiness, and when we see these little pleasures, be sure to know that pain will follow. The opposite will always exist in any situation. In every situation, be it of pleasure or pain. The opposite quality will always be contained, for this is the law of nature. This is the law of relative nature, and all nature is relative. So, the idea would be to go beyond that, and then real joy would be found – absolute joy would be found in that way.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1980 – 14
