We live, to a large extent, in a world of imagined hurts and happenings. Something happens and our mind picks up the incident and our ego embroiders the incident until it becomes a great epic like the Mahabharata. Our mind goes into a mode of questions and answers, perceived insults and answers to the insults, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth and life for a life. Normal and simple happenings get blown out into gargantuan proportions when our ego is hurt and expectations are not fulfilled. In the darkness of the mind, the hurts are multiplied and a few simple remarks become a dense evergreen forest. We rarely perceive or accept the reality for what it is. What is and how we see it are two different things. The story of the man and the wild dogs given below will resonate well with most of us:
Once there was a man who lived in a house just outside a town near the desert. One day he called up the Sheriff at late night and screamed excitedly: There are hundreds of wild dogs howling outside my window. I am under attack!! Come quickly! Hurry! Hurry! The sheriff collected several townspeople and armed with guns, rifles and large powerful lights and rushed to the man’s house expecting a terrible scene of animal fury. Instead they found three wild dogs howling away!
The sheriff knocked on the man’s door and called him out. He took him out to the yard and showed him the three wild dogs. The man smiled sheepishly: Oh Sheriff! Every night when they howl outside my window, they sound like hundreds of dogs!
We must remember the next time someone hurts us, and we feel insulted and hurt a thousand times, the above story of the man and the wild dogs. In the dead of the night, tossing between sleep and wakefulness, a few dogs will sound like thousands of them howling away outside our window. In the vast and deep well of our ego, the problem gets blown out of proportion. In the darkness and gloom of our subconscious mind, the hurt is nursed and nourished and it mushrooms and grows into many thousands. Our hurt is not caused by the actual reality. It is caused by our imagination, thoughts and perception and our self- perceived importance and status.
Let us learn to observe our worries and hurts. When we attend to our worries they appear huge and solid. We feel it is impossible to break through them and solve them. When we probe into them deeper, we find hardly one or two issues which have actually happened and which makes us feel hurt. But our mind – the devilish culprit -- has the ability and capacity to multiply the hurt several thousand times.
We live life with a contorted logic. We have our own preconceived notions about what gives happiness. We tell ourselves that fulfilment of desires brings us happiness. In reality it is not so. A man wants to marry a particular woman and does not rest till they are married. After some time, he is miserable and unhappy and does not rest till they are divorced. We must constantly check our self- arguments and talks and see if they are valid or not. Doing this will save us a lot of misery as we see and accept reality for what it is.
Our mind needs to be disciplined. For that we need jnana – knowledge, and mantra – vibration of name of God. We receive the teachings from our Gurus about the mind and its working and how to observe, react and behave. We also have the initiation of the Siddha Mantra from the Guru. When we do regular japa, the vibration of the mantra shake loose the rigidity and wrong beliefs in us and cleanses and heal us. When jnana and mantra are applied simultaneously, it becomes easier to see and accept reality for what it is and deal with it in the right manner.
