It is a privilege that you are allowed to think whatever you want. It is even bigger privilege that the flow of thoughts can swim through the seen and unseen direction effortlessly.
The greatest privilege is to be able to witness these thoughts. Not stopping the thoughts but just watching them closely.
Even as you read these sentences a stream of thoughts and scores of images are conjured inside. This unceasing flow of thoughts inside with each passing moment has two streams: internal and external. Let’s see how the thoughts are generated, how they attract the things that are in outside world and how this spawns a life or many lives.
We have been conditioned to think that this woven thought-web is life and we are leading it. We take this view point for granted forever.
We think whatever, in reality the flow never stops. Everything changes.
Children become adults, eloquent speakers turn into bed-ridden oldies, well-educated professors turn into care-dependent cancer patients, high-school dropouts end up as billionaires and ugly ducklings grow into showstoppers. Still we have this innate tendency to frame everything in our frozen opinions. The most beautiful fact is that everything is changing every moment at cellular level. The fact is that each thought created by us create a new cell in our body.
Science says that cells in our bodies are constantly dividing, regenerating, dying and getting born again. This cycle of reincarnation at cell level undoubtedly has chords attached to our thoughts.
Your birth certificate might claim that You are 30 years old, but how old is your body, really? You can’t come to know because every cell has a different regeneration cycle; some regenerate in moments, some in days, some in a few months and some takes lifetime.
If you look at closely the same is the case with your thoughts, habits, nature and belief systems at the larger scale. No one else has explained this better the Nobel Prize winner biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins. He said: “A cell has a history; its structure is inherited, it grows, divides, and, as in the embryo of higher animals, the products of division differentiate on complex lines. Living cells, moreover, transmit all that is involved in their complex heredity.”
Humanity is both blessed and cursed with an almost boundless generation of thoughts – it is a boon and the doom both.
However, the good thing is that our cells are always open to learn. The moment you go through an experience, it is a new learning for your cells and just like a good student they record the information. In our cells, there is a limitless possibilities to learn, store and also to unlearn or replace the information.
If we experience a positive effect achieved through love, respect, compassion and kindness, those behavior patterns will become stabilized within the cells and will recur again and again. Same goes for negative experiences.
This efficient system is responsible for giving us this body. How?
Our minds run on a programming of judging everything it sees. When you form judgments and opinions over a big period of time, these condensed thought-forms become your habit and tend to become a repeated pattern.
After over a period of time, these habits or behavioral patterns become core nature and take a form of rock-solid belief systems in the subconscious mind. These belief systems are the ones called “Samkara” or “Sankhara”in Pali language. This is a prominently used term in Buddhism. The word means ‘that which has been put together’ or ‘that which puts together’.
“The word samkara is explained in various ways. But in short it means something that is made up, prepared, or concocted by way of intention.” says Katukurunde Ñāṇānanda, in “The Mind Stilled:33 Lectures on Nibbāna.”
In simple words, Samkara means the soldififying of your thoughts with the cement of intention.
I call them ignorant determinations. You determined something on the basis of half-awareness.
Who can cross over with such burden? Who can attain salvation with such heaps of belief systems?
If one thought turns into one cell then imagine what form these concrete belief system take. The answer is: your body!
The human body is collection of trillions and trillions of cells. You got it now!
Reincarnation is another kind of regeneration of our consciousness.
Our thoughts, desires, judgments are what shape our beliefs; our need for reincarnating, our craving to be right, a longing to feel part of everything, an appetite for being loved and a thirst for being accepted. It is those motivations we need to tap into to make a change, whether within ourselves or in others.
We can exhaust the previous accumulation of thoughts by meditating or healing of subconscious mind.
Healing is not anything else but releasing the unwanted collection of thoughts and patterns.
Meditation is to watch them being released.
Many a times people tell me that they saw something in meditation and now they want an interpretation. This is silly!
Why you want an interpretation or meaning? To create more thoughts and hence beliefs!
What good it will bring to you? Another kind of baggage.
The moment you look for meaning, you miss the whole idea.
You refuse to be an observer and become a thought-generator again.
When you witness, you become a true part of nature and when you judge, you exclude yourself from the existence.
You create another illusion for yourself. You hop from one thought to another.
A limited version of shallow opinions.
You contract when you judge, you expand when you witness.
The truth is pure witnessing has become a rare phenomenon. When you actually witness, you live in the constant burst of bliss. This burst has no end and it is unshakable.
But no one longs for witnessing. Everyone is looking for just interpretations and not the highest truth. We have become accustomed to finding meaning for absolutely anything we want to believe with a simple click of the mouse. We go to tarot websites, angels, gurus, psychics and mediums to validate our elusive beliefs. We assume there is an external force hovering over us and creating our life.
The humanity has been suffering from the obsession with thought-generation. Meditation is the cure to attain self-realization beyond the veil of thoughts.
But we often refuse to see our own inner mechanism and instead opt an eternal grapple in the mud of interpretations, predictions and opinions over the glimpse of self-truth.
We are required to shake off this tsunami of information, explanations and connotations and stand once for self, stillness and that witness within.
Romshri Ashesh
Founder
Awakening Love Academy
https://awakeninglove.co/upcoming-courses/