Today the way we live depends on the state of our mind. Every moment our joy, happiness and bliss depend on how we think. When our mind is soft, our thoughts and emotions are also soft and we feel peaceful and contented.
Most of the time we are immersed in materialistic desires, which make the mind hard and calculative. The very presence of thoughts in the mind makes it hard and resistant to divine grace. That is why we should stop thinking unnecessarily. The whole point of spirituality is not to think. How many of us can do this? Today, the biggest bane of human life is that we cannot control our thoughts.
So, the mind jumps continuously from good thoughts to bad thoughts and from necessary thoughts to unnecessary thoughts. If we look at our lives today, we feel that it is full of problems. How many of us get a job at the right time? How many of us get money at the right time? How many of us have children at the right time? How often do the right things happen at the right time in our lives?
We experience life tumultuously through the body and mind. When the body falls ill, we go to the doctor and have several tests and scans done to identify and cure the problem. However, when the mind functions wrongly, we do very little to remedy it and choose to continue living a troubled life. When we maintain a constant awareness of our inner state, we will realise that our outer life is nothing but a reflection of our mind. We can understand this better through a simple example. If we are specialising in physics, but enter an economics class by mistake, we cannot understand anything that is being taught there. So also, when our minds are in a state of constant turmoil, stress, strain and tension, how can we understand and experience a trouble-free life?
Most of us go to a temple or place of worship to pray for the removal of our problems.We pray: “God, many things are not going well in my life. Please set everything right with Your grace.” This is the right way of praying. After all when things go wrong, whom should we turn to other than God? We ask God for power, position, status, money and the fulfilment of many materialistic desires. God says, “Just offer your problems to Me, allow Me to decide how they should be resolved. Don’t fill your prayers with your own terms and conditions. When you truly understand Me, this is how you will pray. Unless you understand Me first, you will never be able to understand your Self”.
That is why we must offer our problems to God with devotion and surrender. Only then we stop carrying our problems in the mind. The moment our mind stops working, God starts working to make our life blissful and trouble-free and we get established in the state of being thoughtless.
ashram-india@ shrinimishamba.org