Think!

“So how many meters of saffron cloth should I order?”

“What? You’re going into Chinmay mission? Did someone ditch you? Are you heart broken? ...”

These were the kind of reactions I got from my family and friends when I decided to join a camp organized by Chinmaya Mission at Zambavli in South Goa. People looked at me with sympathy as if I was going to die, go away forever. What was the camp about? I did not really know. Why was I going there? Well, the company of ascetics would certainly be bearable than my mom’s chiding over my addiction to TV and the internet!

Eat what they offer, hear out what they have to say and sleep as much as possible. Some minor misunderstanding with my parents had disturbed me a bit and I just wanted to be at peace. The last post I wrote is what I told at the selection interview for the camp.

I had no idea that my guesses will come absolutely true!

Gautam Buddha once said, “What we are now is the result of what we have thought. What we will become will be the result of what we think now”

Think about thinking!

Have we ever thought about the way we think? It is our thoughts that govern our actions. We have 60000 thoughts per day! No wonder at times we do or say things that we don’t mean. We have no control over our thoughts.

The camp focused on re-orienting one’s thinking and controlling one’s mind through meditation and contemplation. The moment we entered the camp premises, they threw a simple question at us

We are so careful about the raw vegetables we eat. We wash, clean and boil them- but how careful are we about the thoughts we entertain? We keep using a raw mind full of prejudice, likes and dislikes. Do we know how to clean it?

Swami Chinmayananda defines mind as ‘a flow of thoughts’ just like the flow of a river and the river banks give a direction to its flow. If the banks are not well built, there will be a chaos. If the river is polluted, it will affect entire nature around it

We derived a three point formula to clean our mind. It is called the M.P.L.

Minimize your thoughts
Purify your mind
Lend a direction to your thoughts

Minimizing the thoughts implies that you should not think about useless things. Think creative and constructive. Such a thinking is thinking pondering over useless thoughts is brooding. Think. Don’t brood.

Purify your mind. Be in the present-here and now. When you are doing a job give your hundred percent to it. When you eat, enjoy the food-don’t discuss other matters at lunch. This is called as one-pointed mind.

Lending a direction to your thoughts implies that you build an optimistic ethos. Suffering is a state of mind. Problems are just some situations –our mind labels them as problems. Just as no lock is manufactured without a key, there can be no problem without a solution.



To sum up I would only quote a guest speaker at the camp Mr. Nagraj Honnekeri

“Every successful person has a painful story. Every painful story has a successful ending. Accept the pain and get ready for success!”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Letter to dad

Dear dad, Yes, you work hard to give me the relative prosperity we have today compared to your times, yes, my life seems more comfortable in material terms, but I also face issues. Please, try to understand. Yes, you are right when you say, that today’s generation cares more about practical life than emotions and relations.   Yes you are right when you say today’s generation is confused. We are confused because we witness the differences that exist between the values you taught us and the ways the world operates. We are confused because we live in times markets and sociopolitical situations are fast changing. We value our culture with the same zeal and passion that you do but we do not hesitate to make pragmatic decisions and welcome that change if it benefits us.  Yes, I am always on phone or the Internet, Yes, I know its not always good. but dad, its the need of the hour.   The Internet has opened the doors to infinite knowledge. It h...
Read more

The battle over 300

Today I sit before my p.c. hammering my brain for ideas. My blog has led me into the jaws of wolves that disguise themselves under the sweet name of ‘fans’. Their demand for more writings on the blog is about to turn me into a seasoned writer! However, when I opened this blog, I had no idea that it would be such a great success. The credit of my success goes to a person hereafter referred to as ‘One Certain Official ( OCO ) to whom I also dedicate this article revealing the secret of my success. As the title suggests, it was the famous battle fought over the post ‘300’ that carved out my literary empire. The warring parties - ‘one certain official’ from ‘one certain department’ of Goa University, pitted against ‘the protector of innocent, defender of the weak, man of ladies, patron of studies, the one and the only, the great, Jay Joshi . OCO took great trouble to shape my career as a writer and to demonstrate that freedom of expression can be challenged and crushed in a departmen...
Read more

B2.1 The unfair game

I started learning German out of curiosity but it is becoming a hectic exercise as I advance throughthe levels. Teaching style of the Germans does not match my learning style. Six hours a day, six days a week, one just takes in new words, grammar and culture. While class work focuses more on group work, I tend to be more of a pause-think-observe-learn person. I am simply overloaded by the content and my classmates rush ahead with work while I am still busy thinking about how can one get more creative with the given assignments. One only finds time on weekends to focus and 'digest' the language, working in peace and solitude. However, the very teaching and assessment mechanism of the Germans works in my favor. They believe that language is learned best in a group as it gives you lots of opportunity to talk. It gives me lots of opportunity to observe. Secondly, while classes focus on group work, exams are held in a different class than usual. Oral exams are hel...
Read more