Nature of the mind

The nature of the mind is to accumulate. A gross mind wants to accumulate things; an evolved mind wants to accumulate knowledge. When emotion becomes dominant, it wants to accumulate people. The mind’s basic nature is to accumulate. The mind is a gather – always wanting to gather something. The mind of a person on the spiritual path starts accumulating ‘spiritual’ wisdom. Maybe it starts gathering the guru’s words but until one goes beyond the need to accumulate – whether it is food, things, people, knowledge or wisdom – it does not matter what you accumulate. The need to accumulate indicates a feeling of insufficiency, because somewhere, you got identified with limited things that you are not.

If you bring awareness and sadhana into your life, slowly, the vessel becomes empty. Awareness empties the vessel. Sadhana cleanses the vessel. When these two are sustained for a long period, then your vessel becomes empty and only then, grace descends upon you. Without grace nobody really gets anywhere. If you need to experience the grace, your vessel has to become totally empty. If you are living with a guru just to gather his words. Your life has been wasteful.

If you do not experience the grace, if you do not empty yourself to bear the grace, then the spiritual path needs to be pursued for many life times to come. But if you become empty enough for the grace to descend, then, the ultimate nature is not far away. It is here to be experienced, to be realized, going beyond all dimensions of existence, into the exalted state. It becomes a living reality.

The Attitude that wherever you go, you must gather as much as you can, has become part of you. your education gas always taught you how to gather more and more things in order to make a living. With this gathering, may be you can enhance the physical quality of life around you to some extent. But all this gathering is incapable take you even an inch closer to the ultimate nature. Only sadhana or inner work can bring the awareness necessary to constantly cleanse your vessel. Innocence, too, enables absolute surrender. But surrendering is not something that you do; it happens when you are not. When you lose all will, when you have become absolutely willing, when there is nothing in yourself, then also, grace descends upon but I would insists, stick to the path of awareness and sadhana.

The web of bondage is constantly being created only by the way we think and feel. Whatever we are calling, as awareness is just to start creating a distance between it that you think, feel and yourself. What we are referring to as sadhana is an opportunity to raise your energies so that you can tide over these limitations or these mechanisms through which you have entangled yourself to your thought and emotion.

Mind always has the tendency to waver and to be unsteady. As often as it inclines like a horse, to roam unrestrained over the pastureland of sense-objects, so often should be careful to bridle it down and bring it under control.

There are many solutions for a man to realize truth, has included in them the vital message pinpointing that mind is a person’s best friend. Equally true is the statement that it is also his worst enemy. Hence to be always happy it is necessary to “be friend” it by taming it. If the mind remains “stagnant” and “Empty” worldly desires will rush to fill it up and then keep agitating, till its demand are met. A mind with no such desires will not be in need of anything. On the other hand, it will always seek the grace of God. A spiritual soul will never relish material pleasures.

The soul, which has fallen into the foul sink of object worldliness, should be redeemed by a mind, which is absolutely free from all affinities. The mind will be friend of the soul that has full control over the “Self.”

A man who keeps check over the mind will not be perturbed by the mundane opposite love and hatred, heat & cold, happiness & misery honor and dishonor. He will be respected by all. Such control can be achieved by assiduous practice, when he will be steady and even while he faces worldly sufferings, he will not be impatient when there is delay of his success. He relinquishes his desires, regulates his sense, and attains complete dispassion. Being volatile, it is difficult to have pin-pointed ness of the mind.