SEGMENT (1)
In these articles we wish to learn to develop a sattvic, strong, mind-field, and apply the same as guide to our daily indulgences, desires, practical life, relationships and emotions.
We cannot learn to use our minds in sattvic patterns, as described in the previous sections of this article, without first learning how our minds are formed, and from what sources is the mind derived.
- The true field of our individual mind is a wave of the universal mind. It is the purest crystal, the most beautiful place in the universe; nothing can be more beauteous, more glorious, more illuminated and calmer than this wave-field. It is closer to atman than any other entity in the universe.
- At the moment of being conceived into the current body, we bring from the past lives all our samskaras, imprints of past actions and experiences, whether they be sattvic, rajasic or tamasic.
- The mother-mind and the father-mind are infused into this wave of the universal mind which is patterned also by previous samskaras, subtly altering the pre-existent pattern, imprinting on it the mother-father-samskaras to a certain extent.
- From the moment of conception, whatever is happening in and to the mother’s mind is being passed on to the foetus’s mind. The foetus is not merely taking physical nutrition through the mother’s body; its mind is being constantly re-shaped.
- The kind of sattvic, rajasic or tamasic food the mother is eating renders that kind of prana field whose further essence is imparted as a constituent of the foetus-mind. So, for example, the food: (a) obtained by causing pain to creatures and eaten by the mother, will create a painful mind in turn prone to hurting living beings; and (b) cooked with anger, it will contribute to creating an angry mind.
- From the moment of conception the mind is constantly in a state of flux and change. It is never the same from moment to moment. A moment, kshana, is defined by the Yoga Sutras (YS) as the time it takes an atomic particle to traverse to an immediately contiguous next point in space. In that moment, each moment, the mind is re-constituted and it has changed from its preceding state. While the mother is poring physical nutrition and a subtle trickle of her mind into the foetus, the direction this foetus’s mind will take is being set. This is a person’s primary education.
- The processes that go into the making of a foetus’s mind continue after the child emerges from the womb. At first the parents, immediate family and others determine the composition of our minds; but later, throughout life we ourselves are choosing the constituents of our mind from moment to moment. Our attitudes, temperaments, inclinations, habit patterns, addictions, mental engagements, etc., are all being set in this way; some being weakened by making certain choices, some being strengthened by others.
Whatever we fill our minds with that is what we become. Yo yach-chhraddhah sa eva sah. These determine our pleasantness or unpleasantness; our social skills or clumsy communications; violent habit or a docile one; our success in marriage and in our profession or dismal failure - all depends on how we constantly constitute and re-constitute our minds, not daily but moment to moment – by the above definition of ‘moment’. Our happiness or suffering, success or failure, is not created by ‘them others’ whom we blame. They are of our own doings.
