The mind needs to be hammered into knowledge

The mind needs to be hammered into knowledge

The mind gets sucked into maya in some form or the other. Yesterday, some of you painted some designs on the wall. After five or six years, this wall will need painting again. So another painting will come on all the designs that you did. Similarly, when you grow something in your garden, weeds also grow along. You go and weed it out. Again, when the weeds grow, you cannot say, ‘Oh, I just cleaned the garden, and weeds have come again!’ This is nature. The nature of the body is to get dirty. After you take a shower, you can’t say, ‘I have taken a shower for the whole year!’ You have to keep taking showers, again and again. Similarly, the mind needs to be hammered into knowledge. It can easily slip out of these four pillars of knowledge, Viveka (discrimination), Vairagya(detachment), self-control, and honoring what you have (not grieving about what is not). And then, wanting liberation! So keep on hammering the knowledge back, again and again! Suddenly, you will find it is all there, anyway. Now, when you slip, then also remember that is another level. Knowing all this, suppose you still get caught up (in maya), then don’t feel bad that you got caught up; even that is part of nature. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I did not apply knowledge!’ or ‘Either someone else is wrong, or I am wrong!’ This tendency has been in our society, in our life, for a long time. We need to snap out of it. Many times you snap out of it, and sometimes you get caught in it, right? Snap out of it and see things as they are! In this moment, that is how it is, because this moment is all that is! In this moment, whether unpleasant things are happening or pleasant things are happening, I am a witness to it. And my mind is getting caught up in it, even that is a part of the happening; I am witness to that also.

This is how you rise above the situation! Maharishi Patanjali, who founded the yoga sutras, said, ‘You have to practice pranayama, meditation and knowledge for a long time’. The whole life itself is a practice, and when you practice with honor, then this knowledge becomes well-founded in you.

Om Namah Shivay