Thoughts that create life

It has been a very long time since I wrote a post on my blog. It seems I’ve been too caught up in ‘doing’ things all the time. Though there is always a reflective under current to my state of mind, none of it has made its way into writing for so long. Unfettered, unedited writing is the mark of a free mind flowing without stopping to examine the thoughts along the way.

Over the past few months there has been an accelerated learning about the lessons of life in general, without actually going through that many variety of experiences. It seems when you’ve learnt the lessons, or actually, remembered that you already know it, then many of the experiences that are meant to teach you those lessons become unnecessary.

One of the greatest learnings for me or rather unlearning a concept that was quite deeply ingrained in me, was about the idea of free will vs fate. Some books I read such as ‘Journey of souls’, ‘Destiny of souls’ & ‘Conversations with God’ have contributed immensely to this new found clarity.

My earlier understanding on this topic was to somehow shirk away from responsibility of all kind by attributing everything to ‘fate’ as an extraneous factor over which I have no control. This helped in many ways to learn acceptance of events, people & circumstances without fighting to change them. This could also be because none of the recent events have been adverse, implying there was no real need to struggle against the tide.

But the current understanding is that there is such a thing as free will. It is just that this free will acts in an unconscious way for most of us, most of the time. In fact, if there was no such thing as free will & if everything was pre-ordained then there would be absolutely no purpose for life. What fun is the whole drama if every single thing is already scripted? Even in theatre or a movie, the actors improvise on spur of the moment actions to even surprise the director. So the questions becomes, is there free will consciously? The answer to this is that most of us don’t employ free will consciously because we don’t observe & control our thought patterns which constantly create life for us. By bringing our whole mind under the radar of conscious observation, we can really become masters of our own destiny. Hold a thought, any thought long enough & it becomes powerful to create the reality we seek. It is another matter that sometimes, bringing the thought into physical manifestation may need another lifetime, which makes it appear that free will has failed.

If I examine my own life for some such ‘thought patterns’ which led to circumstances or events which I couldn’t explain, I clearly see a few such examples. For instance, for a long time I used to hold the thought that I hate computers & everything that goes with it. This led to a need to get away from computers as something evil. This thought manifested itself as pain in the hands during intense hours of work (within normal hours of duty!). I had even written a blog about this at http://anandanubhava.blogspot.com/2006/11/suffering-due-to-computers.html .While one can spend lifetimes digging into research material on the mechanics of physical injury due to computer usage & its prevention, none of that is practically useful as long as one doesn’t change the primal thought generating behaviors & circumstances for its outward expression. So the cure is extremely simple – to just hold the positive thought that one is healthy in all ways. Care should be taken to see that one doesn’t hold the negative of the negative thought – such as ‘I am not ill’ since this doesn’t work like Maths to make it a positive affirmation.

Yet another example in my life is the reinforced thought due to prevalent literature & studies based on statistical evidence, that running can be injurious to the knees. Just adopting this thought since it is so widely prevalent leads one’s own body to start running in such a way, unconsciously, as to produce the effect of knee pain. I now realize why I sometimes used to get knee pain – it didn’t matter how much I ran, where I ran, what I wore, how frequently I ran or what warm up/cool down exercises I did as much as what I thought running would do to my body. Then one has to go to great lengths to retrain the mind & the body to consciously run with the proper posture. It is so much easier to just observe one’s own mind & remove this negative thought.

Until one becomes a master in observing, controlling & changing one’s own thought patterns to create the desired circumstances in life, one has to be incredibly careful on what material the mind is exposed to. For example, most people read incredibly bad news which is all there is in the newspaper, first thing in the morning. So the thought gets ingrained into their mind that ‘it is a tough life’ or ‘how meaningless life is’. Then they struggle through the day since difficulties inevitably get presented to them & they find it hard to discover any meaning for why they must struggle so much. Without washing the mental cloth each day, the fabric of the mind becomes so dirty that to imprint one’s own thoughts on it becomes a challenge.

So what thought should one hold? To each, his / her destiny, hence each person should hold the highest thought they are capable of. However, in the relative world, the highest thought one can hold is about oneself, rather than any other object. That highest thought about oneself is ‘I’m self realized & I’m infinite’. This is no new thought, nor is it born of fiction as it is a primary thought expressed in the Upanishads as ‘Aham Brahmaasmi’. Only now do I even comprehend clearly what the steps of the Upanishadic self enquiry mechanism involve when they talk about ‘Shravana, Manana & Nidhidhyasana’. Shravana is simple & many of us do it – it is being exposed to such lofty thoughts input through the senses – listening to discourses, or reading scriptures. Manana is to constantly circulate such a thought in the mind & Nidhidhyasana happens when the Manana has become deep & constant, leading to self realization upon reflection on the highest thought.