There are days when we wake up and our hair is in a mess. Eyes are disturbed due to lack of sleep. You look around in the room and see clothes crumpled and scattered around. Suitcases not fully unpacked after returning from the recent trip. New books that you have purchased for reading are still unopened while the old unfinished books are still in the periphery of your vision, trying to grab your attention.
You are also hungry and the kitchen has only a few green chillies, a tiny broken piece of ginger and an onion that has started changing colour from pink to black. Your mind is filled with the work to be done to set things in order and begin your work at office the day after. Hungry, messy and also angry!
Be thankful. The nature has given you yet another opportunity to expose the mess of the mind.
How much ever we keep cleaning the house or office space, there are these frequent bouts of mess and mismanagement exposed. This is just a vision that you are seeing around. In the quiet recesses of meditation, you breathe deep and recall what you just saw around you—you will realise that all the mess is just a thought. It is as much a thought as a spick and span room. However, a clean thought is any day preferable to a messy and tardy thought.
The distance between a messy room and a clean room may be a few hours and mugs of sweat away.
The distance between a messy thought and a clean thought is zero. It is purely a matter of perception. Awareness is the key to transformation. When the mess within the mind in the form of a thought is cleared, the mess outside too gets cleared in no time. Energy will flow. Strength will come. People will gather and change will be made visible.
Whether it is our room, our office, our shop or our street, city, country or the world—the way to clear mess is to dive within, deep into meditation. The gross physical condition may also drive you to deep sleep. It is okay to curl up amidst all that chaos and enter into the blissful cosmos of sleep.
You will wake up and don’t expect any magic to happen and things are in order. The energy you have gained in those moments of rest and quietude will propel you into inspired work.
And what seemed such an incorrigible condition would have turned magically into a clean environment with lamps, flowers and incense that transports your mind to the divine in an instance.
The author is Acharya, Chinmaya Mission, Tiruchi (www.sharanyachaitanya.
blogspot.in)