Thursday, February 15, 2007

FUNDAMENTALLY IMPORTANT LIVING.

Our Physical personality consists of the Perceiver and the actor. Our forms of perception, driven by the sense organs of Taste, Touch, Smell, Hear and See, help us understand the physical world. The actor executes the actions based on our perception.

The Emotional personality has the Feeler in us which involves handling our emotions, and the discriminatory personality has the Thinker in us that defines intellect which further branches into the gross and the subtle. The gross is involved in worldly boundaries and worldly thoughts and the subtle is the contemplator in which lies the spiritual personality.

We now live in the age of speed and instant gratification; we have everything instant starting from noodles, to messaging.

The media today constantly exposes our minds to speed. We have 15 second advertisements showing achievements which might take a lifetime and giving us a false sense of instant possibility. This has driven focus from what is fundamentally important to what is urgently important thereby causing anxiety when one discovers things do not work the way they want it to and it surely doesn’t work in 15 seconds. We begin to live on expectations from our actions which causes internal stress rather than on accepting the results of our actions.

When the mind is racing with thoughts of expectations and encounters roadblocks anxiety increases and when anxiety increases it leads to stress. Stress is therefore the speed of the mind. To reduce stress we need to decrease the speed of the mind. This is the yogic definition of stress.

So, the percolation of stress starts in the mind which affects our breathing (observe your breath in moments of anger or fear) which affects the way we look (body language in times of anger and fear) and finally affects the individual organs leading to various ailments.

When our intellect is inattentive due to external stressors the mind goes wandering, making the senses run helter skelter which causes the body to be under constant pressure and finally break.

Therefore to control the speed of the mind we need to first control our intellect which means focusing on our contemplative intellect and seek to understand the greater purpose of our journey on this planet which is fundamentally important rather than get carried away by our gross intellect making us seek temporary accomplishments which are short lived and thereby carry the message of being urgently important to do.

For a start, to reduce the speed of the mind, focus on the contemplative you and start the journey of discovery within.

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