The Power of the Mind
Carmen asks Swamiji why the mind is important, and why he has often said that it is the mind that needs to be engaged, not the body. She also asks whether people need to physically disengage from society and live in Ashrams, or caves, etc.
Swamiji replies, “Actually, many people think that it is the action that determines consequence, but really it is the intention behind the action that shapes consequence. In this material world we judge people by what they do, and we do that by trying to work out what they were thinking before that did the action. But the divine nature, the Paramatma, (he quotes a Vedic verse) lives within the heart of every individual soul, and therefore any thought that you as an individual has, the divine laws, the spiritual laws, gives you the exact, appropriate consequence to the way that you thought. So your fate, your destiny, your future, is determined by the way that you are thinking now, and how you are now is determined by how you have thought in the past.
So, when you go to an Ashram or a spiritual organisation, or whatever it might be in terms of trying to connect with the divine, just doing rituals, like in India for instance where they waive the flame (arti) before their ideal of God, or in churches where they have similar kinds of things but in different ways – if you’re doing it as just a ritual where your body is waiving the light, but your mind is on a cricket match, or on a rugby match, or on what you said yesterday or what you are going to do for lunch a bit later – then there is no spiritual benefit to you at all. It’s just a ritualistic good deed – but even good deeds bind you to the wheel of birth and death.
When when you go near the Master, or you are doing your meditation, or your devotion, your mind has to be associated with the one upon whom you are communicating with, or meditating on, or listening to (chanting, talk, etc.). So, just going physically to such personalities, or doing prayer, etc., yet your mind is not present, then it is just an action. It’s where your mind is that gets the consequence, the results. And so there is a verse (quotes from Bhagavad Gita) ‘Your mind can take you so high you can cross the wheel of birth and death (Maya) and realise the divine nature. But the same mind, through ignorance, can keep you bound in the material nature, within the wheel of birth and death, where you never come to know the nature of the ‘I’, the soul, the atma.
Carmen says that in future conversations she hopes Swamiji will elaborate on this.
Swamiji continues, “Well you know, these conversations that we are having here, they are just throwing out a proposition with the intention to awaken you, to challenge you, to encourage you to go deeper. And that’s why I have an online series of courses where people can sequentially work through these deep things, in their own time. And I present them in such a simple way that you are absorbing it without even realising it. This discussion is a kind of bullet point one.”
Carmen expresses that the way Swamiji presents the knowledge, he brings in his humour, his Australian and New Zealand mannerisms into it. But that it is always quite pure and authentic.
Adding to this, Swamiji says, “Well firstly, about humour. If you look at Lord Buddha or my Guru – these personalities have such a purity of being that laughter flows so easily. Just because you’re ‘spiritual’ doesn’t mean that you are always serious or too scared to live in life. That’s just nonsense, absolute nonsense. Knowledge has to be part of your being, however it is also serious too. If you look at life, just driving a motor car, how serious a business is that? Just eating the right food is serious. Getting the right amount of sleep is serious. Being honest and open to others is serious. If you start telling lies, cheating and deceiving, the consequences are that you will have no friends. Life is serious whether we like it or not. And the sooner we understand that, and start to learn what the Sages and Saints have got to say about it, and assimilate it and become wise – then the humour can flow because you are not losing all your energy being buffeted around by anger, greed and jealousy ‘he said that, she did that’. It frees you from that and you become more sublime, contented, and more focused in life.”