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!”

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