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Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions
Thoughts - Positive and Negative
Thought is the rust of reality. The basis of words is thought alone.
If thoughts are pure, the words will be pure and effective.
If I choose to think that I am a pig, I am a pig. If I choose to think
I am God, I am God - in a sense. At this level of human being, we are
what we are, or we are what we think we are. Therefore the power of
thought. Babuji Maharaj always emphasized the need for positive thought,
completely eschewing the negative side. That is the way of building
ourselves by the power of thought.
When you are always afraid, that which you are afraid of is coming
nearer and nearer to you. A man who is afraid of dogs and is walking
on the street, every dog in the neighbourhood barks at him. I mean,
this is a very true thing. Anybody can observe it. If you are not afraid,
they don't bother about you. It is because you are transmitting your
fear, and when you are transmitting your fear, there is something which
receives it and responds. So you see, it is absolutely important, necessary,
not to broadcast negative thoughts because we are inviting these negative
elements into our life.
I remember once, Master made one man a preceptor, and that fellow started
drinking and acquiring so many other vices, and Babuji once asked him,
"I understand you are doing these wrong things." He said,
"No, no, how can they be wrong? Even the idea of drinking, only
Babuji must give me." So Babuji said, "Suppose you murder
somebody, even that idea Babuji gives you?" He said, "Yes."
Babuji said, "You are a fool because God cannot give you wrong
thoughts. God cannot give you wrong actions. God cannot give you wrong
samskaras. God will not give you any samskara. Anything which comes
from the Master must be pure, must be divine."
What comes to us as base desires, base actions, base thoughts, come
from our samskaras, hidden inside us in our heart. This is what leads
to baseness of thought, baseness of action, baseness of attitude and
corrupts us into thinking that, everything that comes to us is from
the Master. I beg to tell you, that until we reach a certain level of
Divinisation, nothing comes from above.
If you want to proceed peacefully, effectively, swiftly towards
destination, you must stop thinking.
Worry
Worry is misdirected thought. For instance, worry - it is also a thought.
Because you find a man who is worried often thinks much more than a
man who is thinking of a problem. See, this is oriented, this is directional
towards a particular goal; the other one has no goal, it is just worry,
worry. About what - sometimes even we don't know! So worry is misdirected
thought, which means that thought has to be given a direction.
Feelings and Emotions
I will give an example from Master's life. Master was once in Madras
and he was leaving for Shahjahanpur by the afternoon train. About 60
to 70 abhyasis were on the station to see him off. Many were openly
weeping, and many were trying very manfully not to weep. But Master
was sitting next to the window just looking straight, nothing on his
face, nothing in his behaviour. I went to the Master and asked him,
"Babuji, so many people are weeping because you are going, don't
you have any emotions or feelings?" He said, "What I have
in my heart now is feeling - what they are all having is emotion."
And then He said, "Emotion in the beginning when we start sadhana
is a good sign. It means that the heart is becoming softer, but it must
stop with that. If it continues it can actually harm spiritual progress."
Temptation
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. If we accept this as true, a
beautiful object exists only for one who sees it as beautiful. So what
is real beauty? There is no such thing. Therefore there is no such thing
as attractiveness. It is attractive to the one who is attracted by it.
Similarly food, it is tasty to the one who finds it tasty. This brings
us to the consideration of the fact that nothing in these terms of value
exists in an object, except what we put into them. Let us deal with
a subject like temptation for example! The normal tendency is to say,
"Oh, so and so tempted me" or "Such and such a thing
tempted me," but wisdom says, "the temptation was in me,"
in the from of samskaras which had been already created by an earlier
action of mine or thought of mine, and which now responds in some mysterious
way to another object which it finds attractive. Now if this is a fact,
one who has advanced spiritually, whose tendencies, whose samskaras
have been cleaned off, he will be able to develop within himself the
ability to see or perceive totally, objectively.
The second thing is for such a person there can be no such thing like
attraction or repulsion, nor can there be such a thing as temptation,
because there is nothing in him to react to anything outside. If you
respond, don't forget, you cannot have control over the response, because
the response is because of a samskara. So my Master always said, "Our
life is our samskaras unfolding in front of us. That is, we carry our
life within us, it is not outside."
Temptation is not in the object, but in yourself, because no two persons
are tempted by the same thing. Six of us walk on the streets, one man
sees a bar and walks off into it. The other five are not affected by
the bar. Another sees a beautiful girl, and he whistles and goes after
her. Now four are left going. Why did this man go into the bar and not
after the girl, and why did this man go after this girl and not into
the bar? And why did the other four not go after either? So, you see,
temptation is not in the object, temptation is in us.
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