Your mind and your karma.
You are born in this world, raised by your parents, and then go to school and college to gain knowledge. In the process of growing up and reaching adulthood, you may have learnt and observed so many new subjects and ways. You must have acquired knowledge, good and bad that you retain in your memory. All these self-acquired knowledge remain within you untapped and not awakened. All those knowledge are based upon your very own observation and experience. Those that you feel are myths; tales and hypothesis should be erased or ignored from your memory. For myths and tales, in fact deceive your mind into believing what may never be true and conflicting with your logical mind. Such hypothetical knowledge makes you weak and influences your logical mind into submitting to unreal realm of fallacy. For example, religious beliefs, rituals, magic and magical words, believing on these leaves you with a weaker mind and with depleted power of reasoning.
If you could read this book and understand it, it means you are grown up enough to take control of your mind too. It is therefore, time for you to build yourself through your mind. Mind and only mind allows us to perform deeds and activities. Find time to first bring up the hidden knowledge stored within you. The knowledge within you is like reference books and not all the knowledge is need at any one time, you retrieve that knowledge relevant to your need of the moment. To perform karma you need to ask your knowledge bank if it conforms to your true spirit and conscience. If your conscience connects you to your knowledge bank and gives a green signal, you go ahead with the karma, if not, you refrain from the act. It takes a fraction of a second for this process but it helps until eternity. Let me give you an example. You are very angry with someone and about to abuse him. It will take you a fraction of a second to hear your inner voice, abuse will beget abuse, and your anger will only kill you and not him. Remain stern but not angry and put him to realisatrion by your words so that he feels sorry for his act. Someone drops his moneybag you are tempted to keep it, your inner voice does not permit you to do so, you return it to the owner. These are but small examples. In life much serious and complicated situations may need you to use your mind of minds to protect and refine yourself through the life’s long journey.
Each day, when you get used to sharpening and putting your mind to test, you will see results in course of time. You will then build two section in your memory; one, those which you feel are significant, useful and truth and another, trifle, myth and which stem out of ignorance and therefore, useless. This is when you start your journey to reaching a preliminary stage of enlightenment and wisdom. Wisdom of your mind will instantly tell you bad from good karma.
We all know that our activities stem from the results of our thoughts from our minds. It is so simple and elementary, yet how many of us care to understand it and learn to control our mind for better. Most of us let our ignorance, our wrong judgment in life and emotions rule our mind instead the other way round. This way we only abuse our mind, the highest gift of nature bestowed upon us. How unfortunate we are, when we cannot respect and revere the glorious mind we are gifted with. How naive and ignorant most of us remain until our death, we die with our magnificent mind untapped and underused. It is therefore, imperative for each one of us to learn and keep learning until our last days and in the process teach and keep teaching till our last days. Learning and teaching is the only process that will get refined in course of time and will open up the world to knowledge that so far man has been deprived of. The more you learn the better your karma, the more you teach, the more others learn and better their karma and the better everyone’s karma, better the world for every one of us, as I said earlier ignorance is one of the cause for bad karma. Learning and teaching, here does not mean the academic learning, like those imparted in schools and institutions. Learning and teaching here means, learning from experience, observation and research; thinking and logically finding answers to life’s unsolved mysteries and equations and subsequently teaching those to others.
There is a great deal of difference, in the utilization of the mind in academic learning and in researching for seeking the truth.
Take for instance; two people with identical academic qualifications. The one, who is an academic teacher, oneself, learns from books what he has to teach, and on learning and revising those from the books, he repeats those to his students. In learning and in teaching he used a very small portion of his mind, because he did not make much of an effort in either learning or teaching, both was routine and stereotype. In comparison, the one who is into research in the same subject uses his logical mind to unearth the truth and pursue the subject from various angles to seek the truth. This way, he has to utilize much of his mind in a logical effort to seek what he is seeking. He then teaches these findings to others. This teaching too is not repetitive. Being in research, he has to be ready for new questions from different angles, for which he needs to provide the correct and logical answers, unlike his academic counterpart who has all his answers ready from available books.
Our mind is flexible and bendable, yet it may be strong and sturdy as steel. How varied our mind could be, is yet to be fully established. Whatever it may be, in simple language and definition, our mind leads us to perform our activities and remain in full control of ourselves until our last days here. It is essential we exercise our mind into thinking correctly, judiciously and impartially. It is an irony that only our mind can command itself into doing what we want it to do. The “we” here we talk of again is within our mind. Therefore, this “we” is our mind, what we command our mind to perform is our mind again and the command that is put to activity is our mind too! From this, we gather the significance of our mind, which should only perform karma that will benefit others. This is possible, when we command our mind to think of the selflessness, illusion and a temporary dream, that our world and we is all about.