Look at a way to build a new inner self
Any belief that makes us powerless is brain washing. Any belief that makes us powerful is washing the brain. Society has done years of brainwashing on us. We need to question the answers we have been given to distinguish between ideas or beliefs that makes us powerful versus those that makes us powerless.
The importance of the perception you have about you
Your life is not made of the situations outside, but, it is made of the stuff you are made inside. In boiling water, if you put a potato, it will become soft. If you put an egg in the same boiling water, it will become hard. The outer situation is not going to decide how you are going to be, but the stuff out of which you are made, your inner self, that is going to decide how you are going to be with every situation. Let us now look at a way to build a new inner self.
What does it take to build a new perception?
- We need trust and belief in what has been preserved by a culture, their sacred texts or scriptures.
- We need to see a contemporary person living those truths. This is the role of the Guru. He or she is the embodiment of the spiritual truths alive, in action.
- We need to work from those truths to experience the reality that they point us to. To achieve something in the outer world, we need to work “for” them. To achieve something in the inner world, we need work “from” them.
Beliefs that makes one powerless
- I am this body : If you believe you are one hundred percent made of only bones, flesh and blood, then you can never conquer death or the fear of death. As long as you think you’re just the physical body, your ambitions, your aspirations, your desires, your fears – everything will be so immature. It will not have any depth, and all it takes to please you is physical pleasures. All it takes to destroy you is not getting what you want.
- I have only one life : This is a limiting cognition of life. You can have one body at a time. How can life itself be limited to just one body?
Know that who you really are is much, much bigger than what these cognitions limit you to believe.
Beliefs that make one powerful
- You are energy that is immortal : Upanishads declare, “Life energy moves and expands itself”. This phrase should be clearly understood. This phrase declares the essential immortality of all beings. Upanishads say very clearly, ‘Consciousness is the space where life energy, “Maatharishva” (मातरिश्वा), moves and expands’. It does not say ‘where it dissolves or dies’. No! You moved and expanded, moved and expanded, moved and expanded. Although the body may have died, you, the life energy, never took birth and never died.
- You can never be violated : Violation means something external can put me in suffering; that feeling is violation. ‘Violence can happen to me’, – that feeling, that belief, itself is violation. I cannot feel violated! Why I cannot be violated? Because I am there in everything that exists, and everything exists is there in me. The sixth verse of the Ishavashya Upanishad states “One who indeed lives by seeing as it is, all existing beings in the self, consciousness itself and the self within all existing beings, thus, does not feel violated by virtue of not separating oneself from anything existing”.
- I am body also : When you understand that you are body also, immediately, so much clarity and new cognition will start happening in you. “If I am body also, I am also something more than the body, so what finishes the body cannot finish me off. What is that ‘me’ that is not the body?” This intra-analysing about “I am body also,” makes you go beyond the body.
Work and live based upon the truths that make you powerful and make them your reality, your direct experience.
