FREUD says: all your thinking is association. If you see a dog in the street, you start thinking about all the dogs you have seen from childhood. Then you remember your childhood, you remember a teacher when you were a child. There is no logical connection.

When you start verbalising you miss reality. Every day the sun rises; every day the sun sets; every day something new happens. To you it’s one more Friday, one more Saturday, another Sunday. The moment you label it as Friday, you think you know everything about that day. You just take it for granted. Because you take people for granted you don’t enjoy your relationships. You judge people first and collect arguments to support your judgement.
You can never step into the same river twice, because by that time it has moved. People also move, they change, they are not the same as who you met before. By the time you meet them again your husband/wife has changed; something is added to them; either intelligence or foolishness. But you don’t agree. You hold on to the same mental setup.
Sushruta wrote 5,000 years ago. He talks about open heart surgeries and transplants. He was a great enlightened Master. He said: every six months your liver replaces itself completely. Not even one part is same. Once in 21 days your intestine replaces itself. Modern day physiologists agree. Every cell is replaced continuously.
Sushruta says: your mental structure plays a major role when these changes take place. A disciple asks him: why do we carry diseases over a number of years? Why does the new liver carry the same disease? Sushruta replies: you don’t believe you have changed, that’s why. You carry the same mental frame despite body change. That mental frame retains the disease. You don’t let go of that frame, you don’t let go of that disease. You don’t let go of your samskara. Samskara is the powerful mental root that drags you to travel the same path.
Like Pavlov’s dogs which came running and salivated even when no food was served but the bell was rung, whenever you remember that past situation or person you react the same way, you move in the same rut. In the morning you worry about office, by evening you worry about your wife and children, unconsciously, without reason. The mood remains low even if you do not realise why. You do not live based on intelligence, you live based on information.

• SRI PARAMAHAMSA NITHYANANDA

Nine out of ten people, if asked where their mind is, will point to their head, where we think our brains are!

Brains are not where our minds are. Mind is all over our body; within each cell, within the cell structure, embedded in the intelligence of the DNA and other building blocks of the mind body system that we are. There is as much mind in our little finger as there is in our head or our heart.

Mind is not fixed and permanent; not our cells as well. Cells die and are recreated every second. Our entire mind body system undergoes renewal every so often. What we are now is not what we were a year ago, not what we will be a year from now. Our mind body hardware is constantly renewed.

Yet, we behave the same way as we did a year ago or ten years ago, by and large. We are just as greedy, just as angry, just as depressed as we were a year or many years ago unless we have taken dramatic measures to change. We seem programmed in our behavior pattern.

We are programmed. We are programmed in our belief systems and attitudes based on our past experiences and memories of these experiences. It is these memories that drive us in all our actions. Unfortunately, all these memories lie in our unconscious mind.

We are driven by our unconscious, not by our rational mind as we wish to imagine.

We call this software of emotion filled memories that lie buried deep in our unconscious, samskara. Samskara are the embedded memories of our past, sometimes of previous lives, that drive us into action in the future (Karma). Since samskara are from the unconscious, we are unable to do anything to stop them, to control them or modify them. Unless, a big unless, we learn to penetrate the unconscious.

We can indeed penetrate the unconscious and dissolve our samskara, so meticulously built by our mind since childhood.

All we need to do is to bring ourselves into the present moment. In the present moment, no samskara exist, as these are products of our past. In the present moment, we have neither regrets nor anticipation. We just are.

Meditation leads us into the present moment. Meditation leads us into awareness of our samskara and from there into their dissolution. Meditation gives us control over our life, taking it away from the embedded software of our mind.

Nithyananda

www.nithyananda.org