Samskaras and Inner Space
Please understand: your body has an innate intelligence which we call 'bio-memory'. In Sanskrit it is called prarabdha. When you design your body at the time of taking birth, you clearly decide about your life, the kind of enjoyment you will have and the experiences you wish to have. Based on that, you decide and design your body.
The energy or the ideas with which you design your body is called prarabdha.
Your prarabdha is intelligent enough, powerful enough and efficient enough to run your life and expand your infrastructure. Any samskara which is operating in your conscious or unconscious layer is nothing but a hindrance to the fulfillment of your life. There is no such thing as good or bad samskaras. No samskara is good.
People come and ask me, 'I feel like coming back to your lectures. Is this samskara also bad?' Even wanting to come back to the discourse, if it is based on samskaras, only means that you have not understood what I said the first time! When you listen for the first time and understand it fully, your samskaras simply drop, and you will not feel the need to come the second time. You will not need to do anything.
But sometimes, without the play of samskaras, just out of a deep gratitude or ecstasy, you may come back. That is perfectly alright, but not as a habit! People who come and sit as a habit are clearly not listening but just hearing and passing judgment on every statement uttered.
And some of them sit with open eyes and sleep! Sometimes I have seen, especially in the modern day, our schools and colleges teach kids how to sit with open eyes and sleep. Their eyes will be wide open, and they will be sitting very straight, but you will see that their mind will not be with what is being discussed. The mind will be elsewhere. As I was telling yesterday, they will just be daydreaming.
If you are here out of habit, it is not going to help in the way it should. Because again, due to habit, even if the body is here, the mind will be elsewhere! That habit will also play along with the habit of coming here to listen. This daydreaming comes into play from the time you wake up.
Early morning when you wake up and put the toothbrush in your mouth, your mind is already in the office! When you are sitting in the office and working on your computer, the mind is already at the beach or in the club. When you are in the club, your mind is already in your house. By the time you reach your house and settle down, the mind is already thinking about what to do the next day. One thing is sure: if you are here, your mind is not here!
An inner space filled with samskaras is hell. An inner space without samskaras is heaven. So do not try to classify samskaras as good or bad.
A samskara by itself, by its very nature is negative, by its very nature is depressive.
I always tell people: if you come and sit here driven only by samskaras, after two days, even this will become boring.
Anything done out of samskaras will reduce everything to boring emptiness.
Anything that happens with a deep understanding, just out of your pure inner space, always adds value to you. Anything done out of samskaras adds more and more bondage to you.
From our young age we collect so many different samskaras in so many ways. We accumulate them and also reproduce them. Samskaras do reproduce themselves even without any further action from our part.
Samskaras get strengthened in different ways.
There are some samskaras which get strengthened only by action, when you repeat the action.
There are some samskaras which get strengthened just by receiving information with regard to them, when you receive input from the world about them.
There are some other samskaras that need neither action nor information, just remembrance is enough, and they get strengthened!
We collect these different levels of samskaras, engraved memories, and store them in our system and expand them.
Someone asked me yesterday, 'Why are you using all these modern things, modern infrastructure?' I told him, 'What is wrong? It is perfectly alright. If Buddha created ten thousand enlightened people without flights, cars, computers or laptops, without any infrastructure like website, internet etc, then when we have all these things at our disposal, we should make use of them and ensure that at least 200 thousand people are enlightened! All of this modern day infrastructure should be used to transmit the true science, not just inventions and discoveries of the outer world.
The science of enlightenment is an authentic science. Understand, the science of enlightenment is the most needed science for today because if you don't know how to keep your inner space pure, there is no point in running behind outer world discoveries and inventions.
All of the infrastructure should be used to spread the right ideas in society.
In the East, we have done almost ten thousand years of research and development in the inner science, in the inner space. So we should allow this inner science to be spread using the machinery and infrastructure of the outer science.