Go behind the mind... & beyond it🔗

To have a relationship with yourself, you need to have the courage to go behind your mind. You are ready to give appointments to everyone but not to yourself. You give appointments to others because it is ego-fulfilling. You don't give an appointment to yourself because you are afraid that the truth might surface and you might not be able to take it. You are comfortable searching for bliss in the wrong places and complaining that it is eluding you. If you really want to find bliss, you will find it. But you need courage.

Actually, we are all searching for the same thing… that is bliss. But we are continuously searching for it in the wrong places. If I ask a youngster what it is that gives him happiness, he might readily say 'drugs'. He is also searching for bliss, for everlasting peace, but in the wrong direction!

We have moved so drastically away from our path, that our original thinking system has been completely replaced by negative thought patterns. Our life is drastically different from what it is supposed to be. By consuming drugs, can you find bliss? By consuming drugs, you are escaping from yourself and also, your health will be in trouble.

Taking drugs might sound obviously foolish to you because it is something drastic. It hits the morality scale and so it hits you. But your other subtle activities aimed at finding happiness, are also similar attempts but on a different scale, on a not-so immoral scale, so you don't think they are foolish. Whenever you get time, if you do housekeeping of your mind, you will know what I am trying to say.

Worry can cause you to make a lot of false assumptions. For example, when your son comes home late on just one day, you assume that he has probably been with some bad company and that is why he is late. This becomes a recording inside you. The next time, even if he comes home late after attending classes, this recording in you will surface and you will accuse him.

Your son will not only get frustrated but he might also resort to truly wayward ways simply to defy you. You need to understand that everyone is evolving and fluid and that it is not going to help if you are in your own frame of imagination.

It is easy to live with imagination. But I tell you: 98% of what you believe is wrong. You will realize that there is a big screen between yourself and the other person. If you wear spectacles tinted green, you will see the whole world as green.

Mohammed Nabi says, 'When you see the world as something, that something is You.' You complain to me about someone claiming that you are worried and so you are telling me these things, but actually you are clearly showing your own mind because you see things only as you want to see them, never as they are. When you see only what you want to see, you miss so much.

Let me tell you something that actually happened:

A few years back, I used to travel everyday with the same driver from the ashram to the city center in Bangalore.

One day, I wanted to go to a particular street and recalled the street to the driver by referring to a mosque that was near the street.

He claimed that there was no mosque in that place.

I tried recalling to him a famous hotel near the mosque, but that also he failed to acknowledge.

I finally told him that there was a Hanuman temple in that place.

His face immediately lit up with recognition.

He then went to that street and I showed him the mosque that was right there next to the temple and five times as big!

He was shocked.

He was such a staunch Hindu that he had not even seen the mosque in all those months.

Don't be with a single frame of mind.

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, has 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 curbed. You become like a horse that has only a limited angle view of the road ahead of it. A broad perspective is needed 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 set-up is what makes your life joyful or miserable.

When you have a clean mental set-up, you will never worry. Only when you are confused with complex thought patterns and words, you will be worried. 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, are you not?

I have seen people who maintain their houses so beautifully. They use the vacuum cleaner and 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.

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. 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 be useful. 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.

A man was asked what the difference was between his past and present.

He replied, 'Earlier I used to sit on the floor on a mat and eat. Now I sit at a table.'

You see, in the past and the present, his mouth is the same. If there is no radical change in you, your life will seem only this much different. Just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, taste lies in the tongue that experiences it. Your mental set-up defines the taste of your life.

Most often, we know that we need to change but somehow we fall back comfortably in the present set-up of ours. We get caught in the same wheel again. One side of us tells us that we need to change and the other side unconsciously slips into the familiar patterns again. Even if you are presented with many opportunities to change, you feel cozy in your present state and choose to remain there.