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Heaven and Hell Within 04

The Heart 01

Om Namah Shivaay

This book has become possible with the Grace of Lord Shiva and every valuable word in this book is only due to his Blessings. This Book is dedicated to the advancement and development of the good in people. The primary aim of this book is to make our lives as well as those of others, better and better by improving ourselves continuously.

Om Namah Shivaay

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this book are author’s views, based on his knowledge; and they are not bound on anyone to believe. Some of the views expressed in this book may not appeal to some natives or they may not agree with those views. This is absolutely normal as each and every individual has a right to stand by his own views.

Hence this book should not be seen as an effort to force author’s views on other people and it should be seen as an effort to make people aware of author’s views about certain specific topics, based on the knowledge he possesses.

Contents :

The Heart

Contact Me

 They Come First

After bowing to Lord Shiva, let me take this moment to thank the person who has been an influence so strong and supportive in my life that she is second only to Lord Shiva for me. She is none other than my respected and adorable mother, Smt. Jeewan Lata. So much can be said about her contribution to my life and her support in making me what I am today, that a whole book can be written about it! But, I will consider her like Lord Shiva and hence move onto the next person, after bowing to her, as even an ocean of words can’t describe her real contribution in my life and for this book.

Second on the list of acknowledgments is my dear and respected father Lt. Sh. Bodh Raj Shangari. Though he left us when I was nine only, the mere fact that he along with my mother brought me to this world, makes me indebted to him for this life as well as for many lives to come. God Bless your soul father, wherever you are! Even though you are physically not with me anymore, you have always been present in my mind, through all the sweet memories of my childhood, and you will always be.

Prelude

The first two parts of this book dealt with the things like the basic working of the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, the aura, the transfer of energy, the theory of karma, the formation of good and bad habits and some other concepts.

From the third part onward, we’ll try to look deep into our existence and we’ll try to understand the working of the entities which are responsible for making us what we are at any time; as these entities lie at the bottom of each and everything we do and even at the bottom of each and everything we even think of doing.

Through this part as well as through some other parts of this book, we’ll discuss such entities in our existence, which collectively define what we are at any point in time, during the journey of the soul. These entities are the body, the intellect, the emotions, the ego, the conscience and the soul.

We’ll dig deep into the working of these entities and through that working, we’ll try to understand the actual role of each one of these entities in our existence. We’ll also discuss how these entities influence our overall personalities and how we can choose to shape up most of these entities the way we want.

For instance, this part explains the working of heart and it also explains the role of heart in our lives. The book is written in easy language and it is full of day to day life examples so that the concepts explained in the book should be understood well. For instance, a day to day life situation is mentioned and then it is discussed how you may handle this situation; based on which one of the important entities dominates your personality.

Hence your response in this situation is considered if you’re a person dominated by heart; and such response is discussed in details. It means the things like what you may do in such situation; why you may do them, how the other entities like intellect may try to counteract the response generated by your heart and why you may finally choose to go with the response generated by your heart; are discussed. Even when you do so, what may happen inside you after this and how different entities within you compete with each other; before and after such response.

Then your response is considered in the same situation if you’re a person dominated by intellect and all these possibilities are considered in details; once again. Hence you may get an insight into how these entities compete within you for each and everything you do or even think of doing and how a specific one of them may win this battle; based on your personality type. Likewise, your responses are considered in cases when you’re ego dominated or conscience dominated.

Through these situations, this book explains the continuous battle for supremacy between your intellect and your heart; as well as the continuous war between your ego and conscience. The scope of study is advanced from third part onward and we’ll deal with some of the deepest secrets of human existence, through this part as well as through some other parts of this book.

With this, I now take your permission to lead you to the book.

 

Lord Shiva Bless You

Himanshu Shangari

 

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To be precise, your ego and conscience hang in such balance inside you that the sum total of their percentages in your personality at any time is 100. Hence your conscience and ego are inversely proportional to each other, which means as one of them grows, the other one drops. Accordingly, if you have 70% ego at a point in time, the percentage of your conscience is 30. This percentage is different for different people and it may be different, even in the case of the same person at different points during his journey of spiritual growth.

It means a native can have 80% ego and 20% conscience at a time, he may have 70% ego and 30% conscience twenty years later as he may have grown more conscience during these years; and he may have 75% ego and 25% conscience as another twenty years pass, because he may have grown more ego during these twenty years. This equation keeps changing until you reach a point where 100% conscience is achieved.

Let’s try to understand it through the example of sunlight. If 50% of your body is under shade and the remaining 50% is under sunlight; you can change this equation to any possible combination you want. It means you can adjust your body in different ways in order to change the percentage of light as well as that of the shade. However, the sum total of the percentage of your body which is under shade and the percentage of your body which is under light is always 100 in all the situations. It means if are absolutely under shade, the percentage of your body under the sunlight becomes 0 and that under the shade becomes 100; which gives a total of 100 again. Similarly; if you’re absolutely under sunlight; the percentage of your body under shade is 0 and that under light is 100; which too gives a total of 100.

Coming back to the personality; when you reach the point of 100% conscience, you can’t go back even if you want to; or to be precise, you’ll never want to have even 1% of ego and hence you stay away from it. This is the final stage which is called liberation because as soon as your ego leaves you, the whole universe becomes you and you become the whole universe as the boundaries that separate the two of you dissolve. It should be noted that in order for such things to exist which are not yours, it is essential that those things should exist first, which are yours or which you think are yours.

It means as soon as the words like ‘I, me, my and mine are lost’; the other words like ‘his, her, theirs and yours’ are also lost. This is because in order for there to be someone called ‘You’, there must first be someone called ‘Me’. When two people are talking and they use words like ‘You and me’, these words are used to define boundaries between them. Since most boundaries are defined by the ego, they dissolve as soon the ego leaves you.

When that happens, the words like ‘I, me, my and mine’ get lost and when they get lost, all other such words defining other people also get lost. This is because you now don’t have ‘Me’ and hence you can’t define other words. For instance, while talking to someone, when you use the word ‘your’ for a cup of coffee, it means this cup of coffee belongs to him and it also means that it doesn’t belong to you. Hence you use this word to draw a comparison and the possession of this other person is relative to your possessions.

Now imagine the words ‘me, my and mine’ are lost. How will you define his cup of coffee now? Physically, there are only two of you present; you’ve already lost sense of the words like ‘me, my and mine’, so what is there to compare with? It means if you now say, ‘this is your cup of coffee’; this sentence also includes the hidden meaning, ‘this is not my cup of coffee’. In fact, you use the first sentence, only in order to make the second sentence clear as otherwise; you don’t need to use the first sentence at all. Hence in reality, you’re telling him that this is not my cup of coffee.

When all the pronouns representing you are lost, how can you use this sentence now? As you go beyond the domain of personal pronouns, you can’t engage in relative comparisons because you need at least two people or things to compare. However, as your ego leaves you, the concept of two is lost and accordingly, all comparisons are lost. Therefore, you won’t say, ‘this is your cup of coffee’ because there is no ‘me’ and hence there is no ‘you’. As the comparison goes away, you use a sentence like, ‘a cup of coffee’ and you eliminate all personal pronouns.

This happens because this cup of coffee now belongs to everyone in this universe and it is related to no one in particular. It happens in case of your house, your car as well as in case of your other belongings; and you start seeing them simply as things and not as your things. It means that instead of thinking, ‘this is my house’; you start thinking, ‘this is a house’. It may sound strange to you and some of you may even think that this type of mindset may not be correct, but it is absolutely correct. As this mindset comes; your house or your car may be lost but then the entire universe is available for you because all the boundaries have been dissolved now and everything belongs to everyone.

When you say ‘my house’, it means you possess this house. Since you’re a soul and not a body in reality, if you actually possess this house, you should be able to take it anywhere your soul goes or let’s say, this house should be yours in every life, the moment you start possessing it for the first time. This doesn’t happen and this house stops being yours as soon as you leave this body or even before that. So how can you call this house as your house? It is there with you today and it may not be there with you tomorrow. Hence there is no wisdom in calling it your house.

This topic needs great details in order to be understood well and hence we’ll discuss it in one of the coming parts of this book. Back to the topic, if you achieve 100% conscience, there is no turning back and you get rid of ego forever. However, if on the opposite end of this spectrum, you achieve 100% ego and 0% conscience at a point in time, the same rule doesn’t apply. It means you’re not eternally doomed to have 100% ego till the end of time and you’re fully capable of growing conscience once again.

This is because every game has a starting point as well as an ending point. When you start playing it, you can keep playing it as long as you don’t reach the finishing point. Consider you’re playing the game of snakes and ladders and you’re playing it alone. There’s a snake at 99 and it sends you back to 1 or 2. If you’re bitten by this snake and you go back to 1, it doesn’t mean you can’t rise again. You can play and rise as many times as it takes to reach 100.

Hence the snake at 99 as well as other snakes in this game may send you back in your journey; they can’t stop you from moving ahead once again. However, as your reach 100, you reach the finishing point, the journey ends and no snake can bite you now. It’s just like this in case of journey of your soul. You may keep playing this game of ego versus conscience as long as you don’t reach 100% conscience and in order to do so, you are allowed to rise again and again, even if you touch 100% ego or 0% conscience again and again.

In reality, the game of the journey of our soul only means growing conscience. Hence ego is introduced as a hurdle and not as an objective. Conscience is what you wish to achieve and ego is what stops you along the way. Hence this journey doesn’t end as long as you don’t achieve complete conscience, which means you become completely free of ego.

It should be noted that apart from the percentage of conscience, the amount of conscience also matters a lot. This means that having a higher percentage of conscience is not sufficient on its own and you must possess high amount of conscience at the same time. For instance, a person may not have high ego but at the same time, he may not have high conscience also. Technically speaking, this person may have 80% conscience and 20% ego but the amount or net quantity of both these entities may not be sufficient to call him a spiritually grown man. In fact, he may lie on the opposite spectrum, which means he may be at the beginning of his spiritual journey.

Let’s make it easier to understand by taking an example. Suppose a native has savings of Rs. 10,000 and he owes debts of Rs. 2000. When we calculate the net savings of this native, we find that he has Rs. 8000 as savings, after deducting the amount of debt from it, as his net savings are equal to his apparent savings minus his liabilities. Hence this native has an overall amount of Rs. 10,000 and his actual savings are Rs. 8000, which means 80% of his overall savings or let’s say his overall assets. Though this native has 80% assets and 20% liabilities and it looks like a healthy ratio, this native can’t be called rich, according to the established standards of richness, as of today.

Now consider another native who has Rs. 100 million as assets and Rs. 20 million as debts. After doing the calculations, it can be found that the percentage assets of this native are also 80% and his percentage debts are also 20%, as in case of the first native. However, there is a big difference between the quantum of assets possessed by these two natives as there is a significant difference between net worth of Rs. 8000 and net worth of Rs. 80 million. Though both of them have the same percentage of assets, the first one is poor and the second one is rich, according to the prevailing standards of today.

Now imagine yet another native who has Rs. 100 billion in assets and Rs. 20 billion in debts. This native also has the same percentage of assets but he’s far ahead of the first two natives in reality. This way, though all three natives have the same percentage of net assets, the first one is poor, the second one is rich and the third one is super rich. This is what happens in case of conscience also and the quantum of conscience is a very important factor, along with the percentage of conscience.

Hence a native may have 90% conscience but he may still have nothing much to offer whereas another native with 90% conscience may shine like the Sun and he may enlighten a large number of people with the amount of conscience he has. The quantum of conscience possessed by different souls can be compared to the quantum of light generated by different stars like our Sun. There are stars which don’t produce so much light as our Sun and there are stars which produce much more light than our Sun.

Once you grow higher amounts of conscience, it starts controlling your body, intellect and heart; instead of your ego doing so. This is when you may witness that you’re reaching the balancing point where you become aware about how to use all these entities at their proper places. Hence you start using your body, intellect and heart in harmony with each other as well as in order to maintain collective harmony. As you move closer to this balancing point which means as you grow more conscience, all these entities stop interfering with each other’s job.

For instance, when you engage in a business deal, your conscience may keep your heart out of it. This is because the primary objective of this deal is to make profits, which may be earned better by using your intellect. Likewise, when you engage in acts of love, your conscience may keep your intellect out of it because the last thing you want in the domain of love is to let your intellect interfere. The matters of love are best dealt with by heart and hence they should be left to it.

This way, you learn to use all these entities in the best possible ways and this is when you have reached the point of high spiritual growth. In its deepest sense, spiritual growth means learning the theme of universe, playing your role in it and acting in a balanced way, according to the demand of the situation. At this stage, your conscience is in charge of all other entities and they can’t mislead you; as and when they may want to do so. We’ll discuss more about this topic in the next parts of this book.

An interesting point to note here is that though your ego may cause so many problems, it can prove helpful; as long as you don’t grow high amount of conscience. This is because majority of the greatest achievements can only be reached either with the help of conscience or with the help of ego, and the latter may even surpass the former in some cases, especially when it comes to materialistic achievements. Your body, intellect and emotions on their own are not able to work as a team due to diversity in interests; and this job is done by your conscience or by your ego.

For instance, your intellect and heart don’t like each other and hence they don’t go well with each other. The only two entities which can make them reach a state of compromise are your conscience and ego. It means a person with high conscience can use both of them to his advantage and a person with high ego can also do the same, though their goals may be different. In the absence of both these entities, there may be no common platform between your intellect, heart and even your physical body. In fact, you may end up having a physical body and some emotions; and having minimum amount of intellect, just like the animals.

This is because your intellect grows when it is asked to do something that it is incapable of doing at that stage. In order to meet this demand, it expands and hence it grows and this process continues. However, this demand for something extra can only be given; either by your conscience or by your ego and by no other entity. This is because these are the only two entities which want to achieve things which are much bigger than your basic requirements at a time. This is why you may find that animals still have the same level of intellect as they used to have in the beginning.

Animals neither have much conscience, nor do they have much ego. Hence the desire to achieve much more than the basic needs doesn’t rise in them due to the absence of both these entities. This is why animals have not made any contribution towards materialistic achievements or advancements since the beginning of the time and only humans have done so. The reason humans have done so lies in the fact that they have ego as well as conscience and hence they have the desires to achieve things bigger than their basic needs at any point in time or to be precise, they have the desire to evolve.

As conscience lies at the third level and as it is the most difficult thing to grow, ego comes handy till the time you develop high conscience. In simple words, a big part of the job that your conscience should do is done by your ego in the absence of the former, though the latter may have a different style of working. For example, a scientist driven by his conscience may work on a project with the intention that the entire mankind should benefit whereas a scientist driven by his ego may do the same, primarily in order to satisfy his ego by receiving recognition; and the benefits of the mankind may become secondary.

However, whether the benefits of mankind becomes primary or secondary; such benefits may be witnessed almost equally well in both these cases. Hence the primary objectives of these two scientists may be different but the world may benefit the same; though the results witnessed by these scientists will be different depending on whether the ego or the conscience has put them to this work.

Therefore, ego can be used as a tool to achieve things in the absence of conscience as ego grows almost without any effort. This is why it may be useful though it may come at a high price at times. We’ll discuss this topic in details in one of the next parts of this book. To summarize, ego can be used as a high cost substitute for conscience, until the latter becomes available. Imagine you’re temporarily crippled in an accident and you need someone’s support, even in order to do your day to day activities. There is only one person who offers this support but he comes with high cost which means he charges significant amount of money for this help.  

It is wise for you to bear the costs of this person until you become healthy once again and at the same time, you should try hard to become healthy as soon as you can. When that happens, you become capable of doing things on your own as you’ve achieved your natural state of being healthy and hence you don’t need to pay high costs any longer. The other person in this example is your ego and your natural state of health is your conscience. As long as you don’t grow conscience, let your ego do certain things at high cost. It’s like you choose to pay high cost for this person’s help as you understand that you may have to suffer a lot if he doesn’t help or you may not even survive as you may not be able to feed yourself.

However, keep working hard to develop conscience so that you may get rid of your ego at the earliest and the operations may be taken over by your conscience, which is your natural way of doing things. Acting upon the advice of your conscience is the natural way for you and using ego in the absence of conscience is the unnatural way of doing things and this way comes at high cost. The reason your conscience is the natural way is that the natural tendency of each soul is to be joyful and peaceful; and this state can be achieved through conscience only; as only a person with high conscience can achieve a natural state of joy and peace.

The natural state here means that such person with high conscience continues to be in a state of joy and peace forever, like the ocean continues to have water in it. On the other hand, the peace and joy achieved through ego are illusionary as well as temporary and they may go away any time, being substituted by sorrows and disturbances which are the costs you pay for such illusionary and momentary peace and joy. Hence you should keep working towards achieving this natural state of joy and peace, which means you should keep working to grow more and more conscience. Until you accomplish this very difficult but certainly doable job, you can enjoy such joy and peace on temporary basis through your ego; of course by paying high costs for them.

After looking at the complex pattern of human behavior, let’s go back to the cup of coffee that you and your lover have together. When your girlfriend asks for your opinion about extra sugar in coffee and she at once adds that some people don’t like this habit of hers but she doesn’t care; this is what is happening in reality. Her liking for you has reached a point where she may have started considering her future with you. This is why she’s opening up and she’s trying to tell you about some of her habits which she thinks may cause small or big differences of opinion between the two of you, depending on the habits in question.

When you really like someone and you want to spend the rest of your life with him or many years of your life with him, you want him to like you too. Hence she may now start opening up and she may start discussing those aspects of her personality with you one by one and at different times, which have generally not been liked by majority of people. This is because she may have a personality type which encourages her to make sure that you’re fine with such habits of her so that problems may not rise later on.

However, the number of such habits shared by her with you versus the actual number of such habits may vary depending on her overall personality. In general, you tend to discuss small negative habits in the beginning phase of a relationship, you tend to discuss relatively bigger ones as the relationship progresses and you may not discuss the biggest ones even when the relationship reaches its peak. These biggest negative habits may be found by the other party and you may not speak about them at all. This is because deep down, you also realize that they’re big negative habits and hence you may not want to share them at all as you may be afraid that doing so may seriously affect your relationship in a negative way.

Hence this girl likes you, she’s opening up and at the same time, she wants you to either like some of her habits or at least not to dislike them. This is due to the reason that as soon as you say extra sugar is not good, you may hurt her ego and hence the problem may start. As you hurt her ego and ego is much more valuable for her than you are at this time, she may start developing dislike for you, as she developed for other people. However, as she knows that if you speak against extra sugar, it may go against her perception of you that she has and at the same time, she doesn’t want to add negative points to this perception because she’s planning a future with you, she gives you a strong hint.

Kindly pay attention that when she says some people don’t like this habit of hers and she doesn’t care about them, she gives you two hints. The first hint is that if you also speak against this habit, she may stop caring for you also and the second hint is that she really doesn’t want you to dislike this habit as she wants to care for you and in fact, she’s already started caring for you. It should be noted that if you really don’t care for someone in a special way, you don’t try to impress him and hence you don’t add such extra lines.

For instance, you may simply tell one such person that you like extra sugar in your coffee and you may not add the second line. This is because you don’t care for him and hence you don’t bother about his opinion about this habit of yours. Whether he likes this habit or he dislikes it, doesn’t matter much to you. On the other hand, when you really care for someone, your behavior changes and hence you may add these extra lines so that the other person may take a hint and speak in favor of your habit as you don’t want him to hurt your ego because that may cause you to add a negative point to his overall assessment done by you.

You see, how much thinking is happening even behind simple lines like these. This is what makes human behavior so complex as even a simple looking sentence may carry a hidden history of a number of experiences and it may try to convey much more than appears on the surface. Hence this girl wants you to know that she likes extra sugar in her coffee and she wants you to be fine with it. Accordingly, you should ideally tell her that you’re cool with it and it is not a bad habit. As you do so, she adds a plus point to your overall assessment, she may start liking you even more and she may start telling you about some of her even bigger negative habits, which she may be aware of.

Hence you should speak in favor of this habit if this girl is important for you and you’re considering a future with her. However, as you do that, you may go against your intellect which may keep repeating that this habit is negative for sure and you must tell her this. Since your heart may have deeply attached to this girl by this time, you may ignore the advice of your intellect and you may instead listen to your heart. During the course of this relationship, you may come across thousands of incidents when you ignore your intellect and all these acts send specific types of signals to your subconscious mind. These signals ask your subconscious mind to stop your intellect from growing beyond a point.

Applying this theory to all spheres of your life, the more you choose not to pay attention to what your intellect says, the less you start caring for it and accordingly, it may stop growing. In fact, your subconscious mind may even start reducing its already achieved size because even in order to maintain that size, energy is required. When you don’t use your intellect beyond a point for a long period of time, your subconscious mind starts reducing the size of your intellect to that point. For instance, if you reach an intellect score of 300 over the course of a number of lives due to your desire to have more and more intellect, where the maximum score is 10,000; this is what may happen in case of present example.

As you start using more heart and less intellect in a particular life, your subconscious mind may start reducing the size of your intellect from 300 to a level which best fits your needs, by sending less amount of energy to your mental plane so that it may send more energy to your emotional plane; as you’re putting demand for it. Accordingly, your intellect may start reducing and it may follow a pattern like this. Over the next ten years, it may drop to 280, it may then drop to 250 over the next ten years and this process may go on. By the time you reach the end of this life, it may have dropped to 220 or any other level, depending on how much reduction you have indicated through your acts of using less and less intellect.

This process goes on and hence your intellect may keep rising and falling throughout the journey of your soul. This way, you may grow your mental plane more and more for a number of lives say ten lives, you may then start paying less attention to it and you may start paying more attention to another plane like emotional plane for the next seven lives. Accordingly, your intellect may start reducing for these seven lives. You may once again start putting demand for more intellect in the eighth life and your intellect may start rising once again. This happens in case of all the entities that you have and hence their sizes may keep growing or reducing, depending on the desire element controlled by you.

We’ll discuss the detailed working of heart and emotions in the next part of this book. For the time being, we’ll take a break in this journey of knowing and understanding ourselves, but I’ll be back soon and we’ll resume this journey. Till then, try to understand and absorb the concepts explained in this book.

 

Lord Shiva Bless You

Himanshu Shangari

 

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Suppose the second native doesn’t care about any specific mango and all he cares for is to collect whatever comes his way, while making sure that he doesn’t lose the already collected mangos. Hence he looks for the mangos which are relatively easier to collect and he doesn’t fix himself on any particular mangos. As the time reaches its limit, suppose this native is able to collect 15 mangos from the tree and he drops none of the already collected mangos. Hence he finishes at a score of 35.

Though the first native has collected that specific mango, he’s missed out on a number of other mangos, he’s also dropped 15 mangoes from his basket and hence he’s lost the competition. The second native understood well from the start that the objective of the competition was to score more points and this is all that mattered. Hence he kept achieving all around success, which means he kept availing the opportunities to collect all the mangos which came his way and he also made sure that he didn’t lose the mangos he already had. Hence he scored almost the double than the first native.

The approach of the first native can be compared to your ego and the approach of the second native can be compared to your conscience. The ego ignores all other mangos in order to achieve one specific mango, which means it ignores all other things in order to achieve a specific thing. Hence it may finally succeed in getting that thing but it may end up even behind the starting line. It means your ego may take you backwards in spiritual evolution and you may end up facing more jobs to do, by the time it has achieved its target.

As you can see, the first native has ended up with 18 points whereas he started with 20. This is what your ego can do to you. Though you may actually lose, it may keep telling you that getting a particular mango is more important; and even if you lose some of the already collected mangos in order to get that particular mango, it is fine. You may get that mango in the end, but at the cost of many other mangos and at the cost of finishing behind the starting line.

Looking at your conscience, it may tell you that the first thing you need to ensure is that you don’t lose the already collected mangos in order to collect new ones. This is because your conscience understands that it is equally or even more important, not to lose things you’ve already gained, while trying to gain new things. Hence your conscience helps you balance your focus in a way that you pay due attention to collecting new mangos as well as to preserving the already collected mangos. Therefore, it helps you collect 15 new mangos and at the same time, it helps you avoid losing any mangos that you already have.

Though the ego of the first native may certainly convince him that he’s collected the one special mango and that is what matters the most; and it can make him feel like a winner even when he’s actually lost, he’s only fooling himself. Kindly understand that the mangos that you already have are also equally important or even more important than the mangos you’re trying to have. Hence your goals should be set and pursued in a way that you don’t have to lose what you’ve already achieved, in order to gain new things.

It means there is no sense in finishing your scientific project if you end up hurting as well as losing majority of important people in your life and you also face other losses. You may think you’ve achieved success; your ego has pushed you behind the starting line in reality. As a result, you’ll be born again to settle the karmic accounts with your wife, your kids and other people as you’ve broken the promises made to them and you have to pay for these karmas. You may have finished this project but in order to finish it, you have left a number of other projects unfinished, when you could easily have finished them.

Finishing a project at the cost of spoiling a number of other equally or even more important projects is something that only a person with high ego may do and a person with high conscience may never fall for it. This is because your conscience helps you evaluate things and people as they are whereas your ego can highly inflate the value of a particular person or thing it gets attached to. Hence in this case, you ego may tell you that all other commitments taken together are much smaller than the commitment made to this project and hence you must fulfill this commitment, even if all other commitments are broken.

Your conscience on the other hand, helps you see this picture as it is and hence you do your best for the project and leave the rest, as getting involved in it beyond a point can disturb the harmony in your life, thereby restricting your spiritual growth. Accordingly, you choose to focus on the effort, instead of focusing on the result, which is another prominent difference between ego and conscience. The ego will always attach to the result whereas the conscience will always encourage you to focus on the effort and remain unattached from the result.

Hence a person driven by ego may see no fun in the effort and he may be interested in results only. The results as you can understand are never guaranteed in most cases as there are a number of variables beyond our control, which affect such results. Hence this person is only inviting troubles in the long run and nothing else. For example, if you’re an actor and you’re acting in a movie, your job is to do your best and leave the rest.

If you’re an actor driven by ego, you may get attached to the success of this movie or even to an award which your acting performance may bring. This is where you’ve started inviting problems. This is because the success of this movie depends on a number of factors and your performance is not the only criterion affecting its success. Hence it may or may not succeed. As your ego is attached to this movie, you may feel happy only if this movie is successful. It means if this movie fails, you may feel let down or sad and you may not enjoy anything for a while.

However, if you’re an actor driven by conscience, your approach may be quite different. From the beginning, you may pay close attention to your acting details, you may deliver your best and you may also enjoy a number of special moments during the making of this movie. For instance, you may have an out of country schedule and you may have a lot of fun there. By the time this movie is released, you may not be worried much about its commercial success though some expectations may still be there.

Even if this movie fails, you may feel content that you gave it your best and hence your job is done. Accordingly, the failure of this movie may not disturb you as your conscience helped you get attached to the karma and not to the result. Hence you draw your pleasure from the karma of acting and you don’t wait for results, in order to feel happy. An interesting thing is that when you remember this movie after many years, you may feel happy as you may remember the fun you had while shooting for this movie.

For instance, whenever anything reminds you of the foreign country where you shot this movie, you may fill with sweet memories as you had so much fun. The same incident may still try to fill you with joy, even if you’re the actor with high ego, but this joy may be short lasted. This is because as soon as you remember the fun you had in this foreign country, you also remember that the shooting resulted in a failed movie. Hence the bitter memories of failure of this movie may stop you from feeling good and in fact, you may start feeling bad. You see, how differently your ego and your conscience work.

Another interesting thing is that the actor with high conscience may deliver much better acting performance than the actor with high ego. Though the former is not much interested in the commercial success of this movie whereas the latter is, the performance of the former may still be better than the latter. If you look from the surface, the actor with high ego should deliver better performance as he’s more attached to this movie than the actor with high conscience. However, the opposite may happen and this is why.

All of us have certain specific amount of energy available with us, though this amount may vary in case of different individuals. For each and everything we do, we need energy. Hence more is the number of things you’re doing at a time; less may be the amount of energy available to all of them or to some of them, depending on your focus. The concept of how your subconscious mind sends energy to your fields of interest has been already explained earlier in this book and hence I’ll move ahead.

When you engage in a specific karma, you have two ways of doing it. You can either focus on the fruits or you can focus on the karma. If you choose to focus on the fruits, your subconscious mind attaches a significant part of the available energy to the fruits and accordingly, not all the energy is focused on the karma. It should be noted that the fruit can only be reached through karma and there is no other way out. Hence the more you focus on karma, the better are the chances of getting the fruit at the earliest, because most of your energy is going to your karma, which certainly improves the quality of your karma.

As the quality of your karma improves, the quality of the fruit also increases as the quality of your karma is the primary factor when it comes to decide the quality of fruit. However, if you get attached to the fruits more than the karma, you may not be able to produce high quality karmas and hence the quality of the fruit may also drop. Therefore, the people who focus on their karmas more than the results are likely to get better results than the ones who focus more on the results. Isn’t it interesting how you may get better results if you don’t care about them much? This is due to the reason that the amount of energy you need to focus on results reduces the amount of energy available for focusing on karma and so the quality of karma drops.

Taking a practical example, if you’re a person driven by ego and you engage in acts of kindness with the ambition of becoming a billionaire when you may already be a millionaire, this is what may happen. You’re doing charities and with each act of charity, your hope for breaking the barrier of billions at the earliest may become stronger and your patience may become weaker. This is because you may think that you’ve done another good karma and hence your objective should be even closer. Though you may be right in thinking so, it can make you anxious.

As your primary focus is on becoming a billionaire and the acts of kindness for you are only the media through which you may achieve your objective, you may not be able to draw much pleasure from such acts. While engaging in all these acts, you’re focused on results and not on these acts. Hence your happiness depends on result and if this result is delayed which may often happen due to a number of reasons, you may start feeling anxious, restless, impatient and even unhappy with the passage of time. It is possible that after some time or after a long period of time, you may even stop engaging in acts of kindness.

This is because you may think that such acts may not be capable of bringing the result desired by you as a lot of time has already passed without the result coming to you. Hence you may lose faith in acts of kindness and you may quit doing them altogether. If that happens, you may also start having regrets and negative feelings as you may think that you’ve lost a big amount of money towards the acts of kindness and you start considering such money as lost money. Hence you end up being sad instead of being happy. You see, how your own mindset can bring you sadness even from the best types of acts?

On the other hand, if you’re a person with high conscience and your primary objective behind all such acts of kindness is to help the needy ones and feel happy in the process, you’re blessed right from the first moment. This is because you start helping the needy ones, your help brings smiles on their faces and that smile fills your face as well as your heart with smile too. Hence you start getting your happiness right from the first moment and you don’t have to wait at all. This is because your happiness is dependent on your karmas and not on their results. Since you can almost always control your karmas and you can almost never control their results, you’ve learnt the art of being happy.

Consciously or subconsciously, you’ve developed a tendency of drawing happiness from the karma itself, instead of waiting for such happiness to come through results. Hence no one can stop you from being happy as you’ve now discovered the biggest secret of happiness. Another good thing is that since you’re drawing happiness from your karmas, you don’t focus much on their results. As that happens, you’re not anxious about the quantum of rewards or their timing and hence you don’t feel impatient. This way, you keep engaging in more and more acts of kindness and you don’t expect results. This is what is called Nishkaam Karma; a good karma without the desire for result and this is what you’ve achieved now.

In deepest sense, Nishkaam karma means learning the art of drawing all the pleasure from the karma itself, rather than depending on its result for such pleasure. When you learn and master this art, you know the secret to everlasting happiness and joy; as all you have to do is to start doing what you enjoy doing, provided it’s not destructive. For example, if you’re a very good dancer, there’re two ways you may try to get pleasure through the art of dancing.

In the first case, you dance and you expect praise from other people who may be watching you perform. It should be noted that your happiness is now dependent on the reactions of other people and hence it becomes dependent on the fruit of your karma of dancing. If majority of people praise you, you may feel happy and if not, you may feel sad though you may have given your best to this piece of dance. Hence you depend on the result of your karma to feel happy and this is what can bring problems. If you don’t receive praise for a long period of time, you may even disengage from dancing as you lose patience and you see no benefit in it.

In the second case, you like dancing and you dance only in order to feel happy. Your happiness comes from the dance itself and it is not dependent on the results. It means you get all absorbed while dancing and the more you dance, the more you enjoy. By the time you’re finished with a piece of dance, you’re filled with pleasure and you don’t want anything else now, like the reactions of people who may be watching you. Your happiness in this case is dependent on your act instead of being dependent on the result. Hence you can almost always control your happiness in this case as you can start dancing whenever you feel like.

It should be noted that in case of people of second type, since the focus is on the acts and not on the results; the results are better or much better than those witnessed by the people of the first type. This is because these natives don’t get impatient or restless to get happiness as they’re getting it right from the start. Hence they keep getting more and more happiness from their acts and as they do so, their acts start getting better and better. It’s a simple fact that the more you enjoy doing a thing, the more you keep doing it and the better you become at it.

Hence these natives keep enjoying their acts, they keep engaging in them in order to enjoy even more and they also keep improving as all their focus is targeted at their acts, which brings improvements. If one such native is a dancer who enjoys dancing, his dance may keep becoming better and better; attracting more appreciation from people who watch his performances. As a result, rewards are earned earlier and at the same time, in higher quanta. Isn’t it interesting that the more you run after results, the more distant they become; and the more you focus on the path to results than the results themselves, the closer they get?

This is why while setting on a journey; you should develop affinity with the path and not with the destination. By doing so, you start loving the journey itself; more than the destination. Hence you start enjoying your journey instead of looking at it like a boring medium which leads to your destination. Accordingly, your journey becomes a happy one and your destination reaches earlier because the more you’re focused on your journey, the faster it is covered. Kindly understand that all your energy is undivided and focused on the journey; and so it is covered at the earliest. As soon as your focus shifts to destination, you start facing problems in your journey as you’re not giving it your undivided attention which is now divided between journey and destination.

For example, if you wish to help a group of hungry kids, you may do so in many ways. Let’s take a look at a couple of them. You may have a mindset that helping people will bring you happiness and hence you’re willing to donate. You see these hungry kids; you give them some money which may be sufficient to buy food and you walk away. You may not enjoy this act much because your focus is on the reward for this act and not on the act itself. Hence you may not get the most out of this act.

Let’s consider the same act when you’re a person who draws pleasure from such acts of kindness, instead of waiting for results. In this case, you may take these kids with you to a nearby place which offers good food or you may bring such food to them, you may accompany them and you may all enjoy this food together. All your focus in this case is on doing your best for these kids. Hence you enjoy this food with them or you simply accompany them while they eat food, you see them become happy and you get an instant reward in the form of satisfaction and happiness.

As your happiness is now dependant on the act itself, you may do it in the best possible way as you know that the better this act is performed, the happier you’ll feel. Hence you may try to create the best possible atmosphere for this entire act so that the kids may become very happy and their true happiness may pass on to you also. This way, you end up feeling happy in the act itself and you don’t depend on the reward. But this is not all you get and there’s more. Kindly note that in order to obtain maximum happiness from this act, you’ve done a lot more than you did in the first case where you merely donated money to hungry kids.

In this case, you may have spent the same amount of money, but you’ve offered yourself also at the disposal of these kids. You’ve spared your time, you’ve offered your services in a sincere way and you’ve tried to ensure that the kids are benefitted in the best possible way. Hence your rewards are likely to be faster and bigger than those in the first case. It’s interesting that though you don’t expect rewards in this case and you enjoy the act itself, the rewards become bigger and faster. This is what Nishkaam karma can do for you; as it teaches you do draw all the pleasure from the karma itself, rather than depending on the result.

Likewise, an actor with high conscience may focus on his acting only and as he may put all his energy in his acts, his performances may be very good. On the other hand, the actor with high ego may get attached to results and hence his energy may get divided. It means he may not be able to devote all his available energy to his acts as a significant part of this energy is already engaged somewhere else. Therefore, he may not deliver as good a performance, as the actor with high conscience may.

Coming back to the primary example, the ego of this scientist may get attached to the project and it can trouble him a lot. In this case, his ego is feeding on the intellect as it is his intellect which can finish this project and bring him recognition, which in fact is the recognition for his ego. Similar to this scientist, most other intellectual people may also develop egos with the development of intellects as their egos may feed on their intellects.

In the same way, ego can feed on emotions also. Many people think that since emotions come from heart and heart is generally related to beautiful feelings, emotions may not be as destructive as intellect. However, it may not be true in many cases and emotions can also do equal amount of damage, when they’re being fed on by the ego. We’ll discuss this topic in the next part of this book.

Such is the power of your ego which can feed on most other entities living inside you and this is what makes it the most difficult to win enemy. If you grow intellect to win over it, it may also grow by feeding on your intellect and it may start using your intellect against the real ‘You’, which is your soul.

If you grow heart to win over your ego, it may also grow by feeding on your heart and it may start using your heart against the real you. As far as physical body is concerned, it can almost never be used to win over your ego and it may almost always become a tool in the hands of your ego.

The only entity in your existence, which can control your ego and even kill it, is your conscience. When it comes to your soul, it may not be willing to interfere with the working of any one of these entities and hence the job of keeping all these entities under control is handed over to your conscience. Your conscience may be considered as the first and the purest product of your soul and hence it can be considered just like your soul, though it is not your soul.

Let’s try to understand this fact with the help of an example. Sun is considered as the source of all types of life forms on earth and rightly so. However, if we get into the bottom of this fact, we may be able to see that in reality; it is not the Sun but it is the sunlight generated by the Sun; which is responsible for creating so many types of life forms on earth and then maintaining them. Though sunlight is the purest product made by the Sun; sunlight is sunlight and it is not the Sun.

The job of the Sun is to keep burning and producing light and it doesn’t care about anything else. Whether an astral body like earth receives this light or not; whether such astral body benefits from it or not and all other questions of this type are the ones which the Sun doesn’t care for and all it cares for is to create light. Any planet that comes in alignment with its light receives its light and the quantum of this light may depend on the distance as well as the angle of Sun with respect to this planet at any point in time.

The quantum of sunlight received by a planet as well as the time period for which it receives such light decides the kind of benefits such planet may receive. If you look at the bottom; the sun doesn’t invite the planets to receive its light and it also doesn’t stop them from receiving it. The sun doesn’t prohibit the clouds from getting in the way and it also doesn’t invite them. The sun doesn’t care whether its light is creating life on a planet or not. All it cares for is that its job is to create this light and that’s it. Hence all the good things attributed to the sun are caused by its light and as the Sun is the source of this light; it duly deserves this credit.

In the same way; the domain of god is like the universe, your soul is like the sun and it generates conscience; just like the sunlight. Just as the sun is directly not interested in changing anything and all it cares for is to create light; the soul too is directly not interested in dealing with your body, intellect, heart; and even with your ego. The sun generates sunlight to deal with things and the soul generates conscience to deal with things. Hence the Sun as well as the Soul is more like a witness; which watches everything from a distance and which is not attached to anything. We’ll talk more about this, later on.

Since your conscience lives on a higher plane, it is difficult to grow as compared to your physical form, intellect, emotions and ego which lie on lower planes. As most people start their journey of evolution, they start from physical plane and then they move ahead. In order to reach the level where the conscience lives, they have to cross the level where ego lives and this is where the problems starts. Your ego may capture you, it may capture you completely and it may not allow you to cross this level at all. Hence you may get stuck on this level and you may not step into the domain of conscience.

As a result, you may have a beautiful body, a well developed intellect and even a beautiful heart but you may not have a well developed conscience. This is because with the growth of all these entities, your ego also grows and it starts controlling and using all these entities to its advantage. The only way to control your ego first and then get rid of it altogether is to try and grow more and more conscience. This task is much more difficult than it may appear to be because there’s a direct clash between your ego and conscience.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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Another interesting angle is that lord Krishna’s primarily declared objective for fighting this war was to help Pandvas as Arjuna chose him for help, instead of choosing his army. Accordingly; when Arjuna refused to kill Bheeshma; lord Krishna faced two options. The first option said he should keep his word though the Pandvas would lose the war in this case. The second option said he should help Pandvas win this war as this was what he was there for, though doing so would lead him to break his promise of not using any weapons.

If he chose the first option, it meant he attached more value to his word than to his primary objective as he’d keep his word and let Pandvas lose this war even though he was capable of winning it for them. On the other hand, if he chose the second option of helping Pandvas win this war by using a weapon; he’d help them in the deepest sense but then; he’d lose his promise. Hence the real decision to be made by lord Krishna was to choose between his image and the benefit of his dearest friend Arjuna as well as that of his side.

I guess now it should be easy to understand that lord Krishna put more importance to his friend than to himself and that is why he chose to break his promise even if that resulted in disgrace; instead of choosing to keep his promise and let his friend’s side lose. Can you assess the greatness of this act as well as that of this character; who was willing to bear any loss in order to benefit his friend? This is what can happen when there is no ego as it is your ego alone which stops you from facing more than calculated losses, even when your loved ones are at stake.

Only a person with no ego at all, can even think of bringing disgrace to his image in order to serve a higher purpose; when he’s the most graceful person of his time. Even if you have a small percentage of ego, you may not be able to do so because the stakes are very high as you’re the most respected person of your time and you’re going to engage in something which may cause serious damage to your image. Lord Krishna did many other such acts throughout his life; which suggest the absence of ego. For instance, despite being a powerful king, he served as Arjuna’s charioteer in this war; when Arjuna was his friend as well as devotee; and not someone superior to him.

Hence a person with high ego may believe in the rule of ‘if you start something, you must finish it’ whereas a man with high conscience may translate this rule as ‘if you start something, give it your best. It should be noted that giving it your best doesn’t mean sacrificing other important people or duties in order to blindly pursue a particular person or mission. Giving it your best means trying your best while fulfilling all other duties undertaken by you before this mission or person; and not running away from them. This is because your commitment to those duties or people came prior to your commitment to the present mission or person. Hence you should duly consider this fact that those duties must also be fulfilled.

Therefore, even this reason doesn’t justify your high cost engagement in the mission to complete your discovery. Likewise, your intellect may give you a number of other reasons but they may all fail and hence let’s come to the real reason now. Well, the real reason is that you’ve worked hard for this discovery and you want to be the one to claim all the credit for this discovery. If it is not finished in your lifetime and a scientist from a later generation finishes this project, he’ll claim major credit for this discovery and this is what your ego may not be willing to accept.

Since you’ve spent a long period of time on this project, your ego may be strongly attached to this project. Hence it encourages you to pay whatever cost is needed in order to ensure that you and only you finish this project. Provoked by your ego, you may decide to pay such cost which may come in form of family life and many other things. If you’re lucky, which means if you have sufficient positive energy in your aura, you may one day finish this project, though you may have lost your family by then or you may have paid other prices which may be even higher than the rewards given by this discovery.

So why may you be doing all this? Ego is the answer and you’re doing it to satisfy your ego. The name and fame that this discovery may bring can take your ego to seventh heaven and this is why it keeps encouraging you to finish this project at any cost. There are no doubts that when you finish this project, the world may benefit and you may receive positive energy in the form of thanks. However, your motive behind this discovery was not purely intended to benefit the world and your benefit was also involved, and in fact, your benefit became primary as this project progressed.

This is how your ego can feed on your intellect and this is how it can use it. Your ego can feed on the accomplishments made by your intellect and it can feel proud when someone says that you’ve won a noble prize by virtue of your discovery. A noble prize is very good but why are you so proud of it? Going even deeper, why was this prize initiated to start with? I guess it was done so that the egos of people with special abilities may fix on these prizes and they may do something good or very good for the mankind, in order to reach these prizes.

I know it may sound strange but why do you need a prize otherwise? Yes, you’ve accomplished a great discovery and the whole world is benefitting from it. This is perfect till this point. But why do you want the whole world to know and remember that it is you who made this discovery? What is important, the benefits given by this discovery or the fact that you were the one who made this discovery? I guess the benefits are important for people and the fact that you made this discovery is important for you. You see, how your ego can feed on you, even when you may be doing some very good things for other people.

What happens in case you complete this discovery and you decide not to put your name on it? It means people benefit from this discovery but they don’t know the name of the discoverer. You don’t need any rewards and you don’t need any recognition for it. Does it mean this discovery won’t work for people, if such is the case? No, people will still benefit the same through this discovery. So what changes then and why do you have the need to attach your name to this discovery? I guess, you know by now that it is your ego which wants to feed on the name and fame generated by this discovery, and there is no other reason.

Let’s now suppose you’re a scientist with high conscience and not the one with high ego. You work on this project and you realize at a time that you may or may not be able to finish it in your lifetime, if you keep working on it in routine. You may also be sure of the fact that even if some work is left incomplete, the next scientist after you may very likely finish this project. You see two options from here.

The first option is to give as much extra time to this project as you can so that you may be able to finish this project in your lifetime. In order to do so, you may need to reduce the amount of time you may be giving to some of your other important commitments like to your family or even to your health and hence you may have to break those promises. Even if you choose to do so, there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to finish this project. On the other hand, the chances are high that you may suffer from problems on the fronts where you choose to break promises.

The second option is that you give this project your best and leave the rest for outside variables or so to say, for luck or nature to decide. Hence you work with maximum devotion and concentration on this project, but only for the time that you assign to your profession or may be for some extra time that you are able to manage without breaking other commitments. If you choose this option, you may or may not finish this project in your lifetime but the chances are high that it’ll be finished by someone after you and you’ll be able to fulfill other commitments of yours.

It should once again be understood that giving your best to something doesn’t mean giving it even those things which you’ve already given to someone or something else. Suppose you work for a salary of Rs. 100,000 per month. Your compulsory monthly expenses are Rs. 50,000 and hence you’re able to save Rs. 50,000 per month. You purchase a house on loan and the monthly installment works out at Rs. 30,000 per month, for the next 20 years. Then you avail loan for a car and the monthly installment works out at Rs. 15,000 per month for the next 5 years.

At this stage, you still have Rs. 5000 to spare after fulfilling all your commitments. Suppose you now decide to engage in a noble cause and you decide to financially help an orphanage on monthly basis; and you decide that you’ll do your best for this orphanage. It should be easy to understand that your best in this case means Rs. 5000 which are spared after fulfilling your already made commitments and hence you can do your best by donating this amount to the orphanage, every month. Stretching it a little further, let’s suppose you manage to spare Rs. 5000 more per month, by squeezing some of your domestic expenses and you start donating Rs. 10,000 per month to this orphanage.

Even this much may be healthy and you’re certainly doing a good job. At this stage, you come across a piece of information that the orphanage is expanding its building and they need extra funds for a period of the coming year or two, in order to do so. You choose to donate more money to this orphanage so that the building may be completed at the earliest. Hence you cut down some of your compulsory expenses and you even skip some of the installments in order to donate more money to the orphanage.

Do you think by doing so, you’re doing your best? The answer is an obvious no. This is because in order to honor a new commitment, you can’t break a number of already made commitments. If you’re a wise man, you should assess the maximum you can do for someone or something before making any commitments and this maximum should be decided by looking at what is left after fulfilling your already made commitments. Hence Rs. 5000 or Rs. 10,000 is your best in this case and doing anything more than that may bring imbalance in your as well as in other people’s life.

For instance, if you reduce the already committed as well as fair monthly allowance of your wife as well as that of your son against their wishes, you’ve created a problem. This is because in order to benefit someone, you’re intentionally troubling other people and hence this act can’t be called a balanced act. It should be noted that donating the fair amount of monthly allowance that your wife and son receive as a part of commitment made by you to them is none of your business.

Accordingly, such amount may be reduced only if they give their consent for it and reducing it without their wish is breaking your commitment, unless the situation becomes such that you’re not able to fulfill this commitment, despite your best effort. It means if you lose your job for a few months and you have to significantly cut down on your expenses in order to assure the survival of your family for this period of time, you have the due right to cut down their monthly allowances. This is because the commitment of monthly allowances came with a spoken or unspoken condition, ‘if the circumstances allow’. You see, outside variables may always influence your promises and this is why a person with high conscience may always say, ‘I’ll try my best’ and not ‘I’ll certainly do it’.

Then there may be a couple of other options. For example, your wife or your kids or all of them may agree to donate a part of their monthly allowance to this orphanage when they hear about this noble deed you’re engaging in. If it happens, you’ve not broken any promise though the amount of donation has still increased and hence you’re doing your best once again. Another option is that if you choose to purchase yet another car and the monthly installment works out at Rs. 10,000 per month when you can spare Rs. 5000 only, supposing the orphanage donation is not in the picture, this is what may happen.

Your wife and even your kids may agree to have their monthly expenses reduced for the next few years so that this car may be purchased as they may see benefit in it. Even in this condition, you’re not breaking your promise. However, if you reduce their monthly allowances against their wishes, except for some situations beyond your control like the one already mentioned, you’re creating problems.

Kindly understand that free will of every soul is of utmost importance and no one has the right to mess with it. Accordingly, you don’t have the right to force other people to do something, even if that thing is the noblest thing to do in the world. Hence you should only try to convince your family members to donate a part of their monthly allowances to the orphanage and you should not reduce their allowances against their wishes. If you choose to do so and they resent, your intellect may keep telling you that they’re ignorant people and they don’t know how noble this job is. Hence you may think you’re doing them a big favor by donating a part of their monthly allowances, even if that is against their wishes.

However, it is not true and your intellect is only playing in the hands of your ego or so to say, your ego is speaking in the guise of your intellect. Kindly understand that whenever you force your desire on someone, even if it is the noblest desire in the world, you’re essentially engaging in a negative karma; except in some circumstance beyond your control, where you have to do such things and you have no control over them. For example, if you force your son to pray for two hours before sleeping, in a way which reduces the time he has for sleeping; and he doesn’t want to do it; you’re not engaging in a good karma and you’re engaging in a bad karma.

This is because his prayers are his personal matter and it is none of your business; and so you can’t force such prayers on him. The balanced way to do it is to keep telling him or convincing him that he should do so. A day may come when he may willingly start doing so and this whole practice is positive. On the other hand, if your son is temporarily suffering from a health problem, like from a snake bite, the doctor has given him the antidote and at the same time, he’s warned you that he should not fall asleep for the next four hours at the least, the situation has changed.

Even if your son tends to sleep as the effect of poison may be more than the effect of antidote at this time, you are free to do anything in your power to stop him from sleeping. This act may once again look against the wish of your son as he may want to sleep and you’re stopping him, it is not so in reality. The desire to live is strong in your son, he doesn’t want to die and this is what gives you the right to interfere. The tendency to sleep is being forced on him due to the effect of the poison and it is not his independent wish.

Deep down, he also doesn’t want to sleep but he has no control over it and that is why it looks like he wants to sleep. The poison has stopped his conscious mind from working and hence he’s not able to control his actions. However, his subconscious mind is still working and this part of his mind is expressing a strong desire to live. Since his conscious mind has been taken over by something else, which means by the poison, any wish expressed by his conscious mind is not his wish in this case. Hence it is not his wish to sleep; it is the wish of the poison which has controlled his conscious mind; that he should sleep.

The wish of your son is expressed by his subconscious mind in this case; and hence you should respect that wish. When you see the fear of death on your son’s face or you even hear such words, ‘I don’t want to die, Dad’; these words or expressions are his clear consent which gives you the authority to do anything you can in order to save him, even if you have to go against his conscious wish. Hence you have the right to forcibly stop your son from sleeping for four hours in this case and you may do whatever you have to do, to accomplish this task.

To make these two karmas even clearer, let’s look at their long term results. In the first case, your son or wife may keep cursing you for reducing their monthly allowances though such curses may be as fine as subconscious resentments shown by them. In the second case, the first thing your son may do after getting out of the effect of poison is to thank you for keeping him awake, even against his wish. He may even keep telling other people about this incident, throughout his life that he was once bitten by a snake and his father saved his life by forcibly stopping him from sleeping.

It is easy to understand that the first act is generating more and more negative energy through conscious or subconscious resentments of your family members whereas the second act may generate more and more positive energy through the conscious or subconscious thanksgiving by your son. You’re using force in both these cases, but the circumstances are different. The circumstances in the first case don’t allow you to use such force whereas they do allow you to use force if needed, in the second case. Hence you can force required things on your son in the second case, but you have no right to do so in the first case.

Therefore, doing your best for the orphanage means donating Rs. 5000 or Rs. 10,000 to it on monthly basis and it doesn’t mean violating your previously made commitments in order to give your best to the commitment in hand. If you’re hurting one person without valid reasons, in order to facilitate another person, you may end up gaining more negative energy than you gain positive energy. Hence the balanced way is to do your best to fulfill a commitment and to honor your already made commitments at the same time.

Going back to the two options, if you’re a scientist with high conscience, you may very likely choose the second option. Hence you may give your best to this project while fulfilling all other commitments made by you and you may not care for the timing of results. Kindly understand that you only have the right to engage in karma and you don’t have the right to control its fruit. Hence you should give your best to your karma and you should forget the rest. A person with high conscience may feel very happy, merely by the thought that he did his best to create something meaningful and this is all that may matter to him.

Imagine this scientist is not able to complete this project but he dies satisfied and happy as he’s a man of high conscience. The next scientist completes this discovery and he even claims majority of the credit for this discovery. What is it in this case that this scientist may have lost? Let’s try to find out.

He’s lived a happy life, he’s given his best to this project while keeping all other commitments like family commitments and he’s done justice to most things and most people during his lifetime. It means he’s marked positive and meaningful Samskaras on his subconscious mind. The only thing he may seem to have lost is due credit for this project. But what is due credit and how will you define it?

There are two criteria for assessing due credit. The first one is the system of nature which never makes mistakes and hence due karmic credit will be assigned to this scientist for the amount of effort done by him towards this project. Therefore, the karmic equation as well as the equation of energy will be duly taken care of. The second criterion is the recognition given by other people to you, for the constructive and meaningful work done by you. What is the value of this recognition and what do you gain if you get this recognition?

This recognition or credit is valued by your ego alone and neither the system of nature nor the fruits of your karmas depend on this recognition; in order to work out in the best possible ways. It means you’ll still receive all the karmic credit for your constructive work towards this project and nothing will be held back. Kindly understand that this recognition is not essential for your karmas to bear fruit and it is essential for your ego to feed on and grow.

Accordingly, you may miss on a chance to feed your ego, if you don’t receive recognition for this project, in your lifetime. Hence the only thing you may lose is the chance to expand your ego. As you can understand, a person with high conscience may not care much to feed his ego and hence he may do his best for anything, where this best complies with the already mentioned guidelines. On the other hand, a person with high ego may almost never be able to miss a chance to feed his ego and hence, he may do whatever it takes to receive this recognition, even if he has to break a number of his already made commitments.

You see, how different may things look when you assess them from the surface, compared to when you assess them from the bottom. On the surface or so to say, at the first sight, it may appear that the scientist who’s mad after his project and who sacrifices his family is better than the scientist who is not able to finish his project, things are almost the opposite at the bottom. The scientist with high ego may be paying much higher price than his success is worthy of whereas the scientist with high conscience may achieve this success in the best possible way, without suffering losses on other fronts.

It should be noted that real success doesn’t lie in achieving your objective and it lies in your best effort for this objective. For example, if an athlete has the ability to finish 100 meters in 10 seconds at his best, let’s try three options here. The first option is that he’s given the goal of running 100 meters in 15 seconds and the number of seconds less than 15 doesn’t matter. It means whether he finishes in 10 seconds, 13 seconds or in 15 seconds is considered equally well. Suppose he runs and finishes this task in 12 seconds.

In the second option, he’s to run 100 meters in 10 seconds with the same condition that anything less than 10 second wont’ give him extra credit. Suppose he tries and he finishes this task in exactly 10 seconds. In the third option, he’s to run 100 meters in 9 seconds. Suppose he tries and he finishes this task in 9.9 seconds. Let’s now look into these options and see what is happening.

In the first case, the athlete may seem to have succeeded but he’s not. This is because he had the ability to finish this task in 10 seconds and hence 10 seconds is his best in this case. Therefore, finishing the task in 12 seconds means he may have met the challenge given to him but he’s not given his best. In the second case, the athlete has given his best and at the same time, he’s succeeded also. In the third case, he’s given his best but he’s not been able to meet the challenge given to him.

If you look at these results from the surface, the first two results look like successes and the third one looks like a failure. However at the bottom, the first attempt is a failure whereas the second and third attempts are successful. Even between them, the third one is even more successful. This is because in the first attempt, he was not able to deliver his best, in the second attempt he delivered his best and in the third attempt, he was even able to improve his best by a small margin. Hence the third attempt is the most successful attempt in reality, as it brought improvement in his performance. The second attempt is also good as it helped him bring out his already accomplished best performance.

Let’s take a different challenge now. Each one of two natives has a big basket tied on his back and they’re given the challenge to collect as many mangos from a tree, as they can and store them in their baskets. Each mango carries one point and the native having more points at the end of this competition will win. In addition to this, there is a mango on this tree at a difficult location and hence it carries ten points. Each basket already has 20 mangos in it, which also carry one point each. The competition starts and both the natives start climbing this mango tree, with baskets on their backs.

Suppose the first native is lured by the extra points given by the specific mango and he decides to get it. Since the time is limited, he aims for that mango first. He faces difficulties and he even fails a number of times, but he finally succeeds and he collects this mango as well as three other mangos before the time is finished. However, in order to achieve this difficult task, he forgets to take care of the mangos in his basket as all his focus is fixed on the difficult to get mango; and he drops 15 out of the already given 20 mangos. Hence he finishes at 18 points, 13 points for the mangos collected by him and 5 points for the 5 mangos which are left out of the 20 mangos he had at the beginning of this task.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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Another person may depend on the opinions of other people for certain things and he may not want their opinions for some other things or he may partly depend on other people for his happiness or confidence and he may partly rely on himself also. This person is a mixture of true confidence and illusionary confidence and he may be somewhere around the middle of his journey. Yes, people can be mixtures of true and illusionary confidence or even happiness and this is what majority of us are.

It should be noted that only a rare few people lie at the extreme ends of this journey, which means only a few people may be found absolutely dependant or absolutely free. It is the people in between, who are found in majority. For instance, if the state of absolute dependence is zero and the state of absolute freedom is hundred on a scale, the people having zero or hundred are rare to find. Most people will have scores between 1 and 99 as they’re on their journey from zero to hundred.

If a person is at 50, it means half of his confidence or happiness may depend on other people and half of it may come from inside. In practical terms, the criticism of other people can damage the confidence of this person up to a point and not beyond that. The 50% of his illusionary confidence may be destroyed whereas the remaining 50% which is his true confidence can’t be altered. For instance, if most people around him tell him that on a scale of 1 to 10 for physical beauty, he’s a 3, this is what may happen.

His true confidence may tell him that he’s certainly a 5 at the least and his illusionary confidence may keep adding or not adding a score of 1 to 5. It means when appreciated the most by other people, his illusionary confidence or his ego may add a score of 5 to the score assigned by his true confidence. Hence he may think that he’s 10 out of 10, at such a time. When this appreciation becomes less but it is still there, his ego may add a score of 2 and he may think that he’s 7 at this time. Likewise, if all people around him don’t appreciate his physical beauty, the score added by the ego may drop to zero and he may start feeling like being a 5.

Moving ahead, if a number of people around him start telling him that he’s a 2 or 3, he may not believe it. This is because a score of 5 is coming from his true confidence and hence it can’t be altered by other people’s opinions. Therefore, if the people around him keep telling him that he’s a 5 or anything above a 5, he may believe them because the score above five is dealt with by his ego and hence it is variable.

However, when these people try to make him believe that he’s a 2 or a 3, this may not happen. This is because these people can only control his illusionary confidence and not his true confidence. Accordingly; they can alter the score above 5 but they can’t alter the score up to 5. Hence when these people tell him that he’s a 2, he won’t bother much and he may think these people don’t know how to assign scores. He’s confident that he’s at least a 5 and no one can convince him against it. This is how we work, as most of us are mixtures of different percentages of dependence and freedom.

The more this percentage shifts towards dependence, the more we’re affected by other people whereas the more this percentage moves towards freedom, the freer we are from other people’s opinions. This is why you may see different people having different levels of confidence or happiness and you may also see the same person possessing different levels of confidence at different times. If that happens, it means this person is a mixture of true and illusionary confidence. Hence his confidence is varying between the point of true confidence and the scores added by the illusionary confidence, based on the positive or negative feedback of people.

Going back to the example where you’re a scientist, even this logic given by your intellect doesn’t justify your blind desire to finish this project; that you must finish what you start. Looking at this rule in its deepest sense, it should be rather understood as ‘if you start something, give it your best’. This line may look similar to the first one, it is a lot different and in fact this is the line which holds the true essence of this rule.

The first and the most important thing to understand is that no matter how strong your ego may be and how much push it may give to you, it is a fact that all of us as humans only have control over our effort and we have no control over the results. Even the smallest or the simplest looking things may become impossible to do for you and this fact certifies this rule. For instance, if you make as simple a promise to your wife as ‘I’ll make coffee for you tomorrow morning’; are you absolutely sure you’ll do it?

I mean can you be 100% sure that you’ll not fall so ill by tomorrow morning that you may not even rise from your bed or you may even live till tomorrow morning? We all know the answer and hence a promise even as simple as this is beyond your control because a number of outside variables are also involved. For instance, if an earthquake hits your city in the night and there’s no kitchen and no coffee left to start with, which means this earthquake may be destructive, how can you make this coffee? In this case, you may not even remember that you’d promised your wife a cup of coffee, as you may be so busy with other important things.

Therefore, when you make this promise, in sense it means that you’ll put in your best effort to make this cup of coffee for your wife and if the variables beyond your control don’t play against you, you’ll very likely be able to do so. It means nothing more than this and in fact, this is all it can mean at the most. Hence a person with grown conscience won’t attach too much to his promise beyond a certain point. I know it may sound strange to many people as keeping your promise is considered as the mark of a great man.

It certainly is the mark of a great man but kindly understand that keeping your promise only means doing your best and nothing else. Make a promise, do your best to fulfill it and whether it is fulfilled or not should be none of your business. This is because if it does become your business, your ego may be much more in percentage than your conscience. Kindly understand that it is your ego which attaches to such things like your image and it is not your conscience that does so.

One of the basic differences between your conscience and ego is that the former encourages you to work for the universal wellbeing even if you have to face individual losses for that, such as the loss of image or reputation. Hence a person with highly developed conscience may not be afraid of even breaking a promise, if doing so is in tune with universal will, in a particular situation.

However, if such promise rises from your ego, you may not care for universal wellbeing or anything else for that matter and all you may care for is your promise. This is because your ego cares for you only and it doesn’t bother about anyone or anything else. Therefore, if universal will is against your promise, you may not quit this promise and you may instead go against the universal will. Similarly, if variables beyond control don’t allow you to fulfill your promise, you may feel ashamed if you’re a man of high ego.

On the other hand, you may still be peaceful if you’re a man of high conscience because even while making such promise, you knew very well that making this promise only means that you’ll do your best to fulfill it and it may or may not be fulfilled, depending on the variables beyond your control. Some of you may think at this point that people with highly developed conscience may then keep breaking their promises as they may not attach much value to them?

It may look so but it is not. In fact, people with high conscience attach even more value to their words, in the deepest sense and this is why they operate in a different manner, like a person with grown conscience should operate. Hence when you ask for a promise from a man with high ego, he may give a straight promise if he’s willing to do so. It means he may tell you something like, ‘I’ll do it’.

However, when you ask for the same promise from a man with high conscience; he may instead tell you something like, ‘I’ll try my best to do it or if all goes well, it’ll be done’. You see, there’s an obvious difference between their answers as the former attaches all his ego to his promise and the latter only attaches all his effort to his promise, which is the best thing to do. It may look like you can trust the first person better than the second one, it may be quite the opposite in a number of cases. The promise made by a man with high ego can often land him as well as you in trouble, if you’re a part of such promise.

For instance, if you go to a person who has some type of authority and high ego also; and you ask him to help you out, this is what may happen. You may tell him that your son-in-law has beaten your daughter a lot, he’s thrown her out of his house after that and she wants justice but the police are biased as he has a politician to support him. Hence the police are not taking any action against him. You tell him that your daughter wants divorce and you want a criminal case to be registered against your son-in-law, for the wrong doings done by him to your daughter.

He may ask you some questions related to this matter and motivated by his ego, he may give his word that a criminal case will be registered against your son-in-law. It is natural for you to feel very happy as you know he’s a resourceful person and he attaches value to his word. The process starts and both parties are called to the police station for initial investigation into the matter. This person goes with you and your son in law is accompanied by the politician who’s supporting him.

During the course of arguments, suppose your son in law or the politician with him tells this person that there’s nothing he can do and the matter will decide in their favor. This is when his ego may get hurt and he may also make counter claims like they’ll face serious damages in this case. This matter goes on for some days and your side becomes sure of winning. It means the police tell you that they’re soon going to register a criminal case against your son-in-law and they’re going to put him behind bars.

Everything looks perfect till here and this is where the twist may come. Your son-in-law may come to you begging for another chance, he may ask forgiveness for his mistakes and he may even offer guarantees in written as well as some assurances that he’ll respect his wife in future and nothing of this sort will happen. His conduct so far may not make him worthy of being trusted and you may not have done so either, if it was a business deal. It means you may never work with someone who’s hurt you or cheated you.

However, relationships don’t work that way and they’re all about giving more and more chances to one another, so that a balance may finally be reached. Hence when your son-in-law says so, you may duly consider his offer and on top of that, your daughter may express her opinion very clearly that she wants to give second chance to her husband. This is because she may have seen some very good times with him and there may be a number of good things about him which may convince her to give it one more try. She may also tell you at this time only; that she was also partly at fault for the situation which went beyond control. Hence you all may decide to withdraw the police complaint and reunite this couple.

This is where your problems may start. When you go to this person and tell him that you want to settle, he may not like it at all and here is why. Kindly understand that he may have started helping you under any pretext but during the process, his ego has got attached to this case. It means that for you, it may be about the welfare of your daughter whereas for him, it may primarily be about winning one more case and proving his authority over the others, in order to satisfy his ego.

Such attachment may have intensified when they had an argument and the other party hurt his ego by saying that he wouldn’t be able to do them any harm. This may have provoked his ego to make sure that the other party faces serious losses so that they may come to know who they’re messing with. Hence this person may now be much more interested in causing harm to your son-in-law than in benefitting you in some way.

Therefore, he may not like the statement given by you that your daughter has reconciled with her husband and hence you wish to withdraw the police case. It may actually turn out to be a good decision for your daughter as the couple may gradually sort their differences out, after this reconciliation. However, it may certainly not be a good thing for this person as the other party had insulted him and all he wants is to put your son-in-law behind bars.

As your daughter has the right to withdraw her complaint at anytime and as he also knows it, he may not directly do much in this matter and hence may take an indirect approach. It means he may tell you that your son-in-law is a crooked person, he’ll trouble your daughter even more in future and hence you should not withdraw this case; and you should instead put him behind bars for the wrong doings done by him to your daughter.

If you still express your wish to reconcile, he may give you another reason and it may go on until he’s run out of the imaginary reasons and the real reason may come out of him. This is the time he may tell you that if all you wanted was a reconciliation; you should have told this to him when you first came for help. You said you wanted to put your son-in-law behind bars and you should stick to your word now. He may then say that in order to help you, he’s done so much effort and he’s even born insult. If you settle like this now, how will his insult be compensated?

This is what he may truly want. His ego may have got attached to this case and it may settle for nothing less than prison for your son-in-law or at least a due apology from him that he’s truly sorry for challenging his authority. You see, you’ve got yourself in trouble now. In the beginning, you valued him high for making a clear promise to you but now the same promise has become the cause of trouble for you. This person may not be willing to let go of his promise now and instead he may convince you to keep your word also, that you want to put your son-in-law behind bars.

The person who looked so good to you may suddenly start looking like a difficult to handle person and you may find yourself in trouble. There may only be two ways out of this problem now. The first way is for you to convince your son-in-law that he should come to this person and duly apologize for the challenges he made. Your son-in-law may not be willing to do so and even if he does so under pressure, this may lay the foundation of future problems between the couple. This is because your son-in-law may take it as an insult and as you may understand, the only person he’s capable of settling this score with is your daughter.

The other way out is that you don’t do anything he wishes you to do and you leave him dissatisfied. If you choose this option, kindly understand that you’ve lost his support for future and the chances are high that he may indirectly trouble you in future; and especially your son-in-law. This is how people with high egos operate and this is why you should be careful while dealing with them. Many of them may genuinely offer you help to start with, but before you know and even before they know, such acts of help may become the acts to satisfy their egos and this is when it may become difficult to disengage them from such acts, if the circumstances so demand.

Imagine another scenario and consider that this person is resourceful and he has high conscience instead of having high ego. In this case, when you go to him, he may not give you a promise of putting your son-in-law behind bars. He may instead say that he’ll do the best he can and he’ll try to ensure your purpose is served. It may not look as good a line in the beginning as it did in the first case; it may turn out much better than that, later on.

When he says that he’ll try to ensure your purpose is served, he may already have this option in mind that though you want to see your son-in-law behind bars, the matter may ultimately end up in a settlement and even he may be in favor of such settlement. It should be noted that for a person with high ego, everything is all about winning or losing whereas for a person with high conscious, everything is all about universal well being. Hence he may have already thought that if the situation turned out to be so that reconciliation became the best option, they’d take it.

Accordingly, he may help you in a way that your daughter may finally benefit in the end and not in a way that he should have one more victory in the end. Hence he may welcome your decision of reconciliation when you deliver it to him and in fact, he may himself start putting it into your mind from the beginning; that at a later stage, if you’re offered a chance to reconcile and you find it good, you should do so. Hence the approach of this man may be to keep war as the last option and peace as the first option. This is how the unclear promise of a man with high conscious can prove better than the so called clear promise of a man with high ego, in many cases.

Let’s now go back in time and look at one of my favorite examples from Hindu mythology, in order to understand the true value of a promise from lord Krishna himself. Before the war of Mahabharata began, representatives from both sides went to lord Krishna for his support. Duryodhana went from the side of Kauravas and Arjuna went from the side of Pandvas, in order to ask for support. Lord Krishna offered Arjuna to choose one option between him with the condition that he wouldn’t use any weapons which meant he wouldn’t directly fight this war but he’d do his best to help his side win this war; and between his army which was one of the largest armies of that time.

Lord Krishna told Arjuna that whichever option he chose, the other option would be given to Duryodhana. Having heard this, Arjuna chose weaponless lord Krishna and hence the army was ordered to fight in favor of Duryodhana. The war started and a moment came when Arjuna refused to kill Bheeshma who was his grandfather and who was fighting from the opposite side. Bheeshma was a great warrior and except Arjuna, no warrior could match him. The war started to turn in favor of Kauravas but Arjuna refused to kill Bheeshma, despite lord Krishna motivating him again and again. For readers who don’t know this story; Lord Krishna took the job of being Arjuna’s charioteer in this war.

Seeing this, lord Krishna called for Sudarshna which was one of the deadliest weapons of that time and which never failed. As lord Krishna was about to launch Sudarshna in order to kill Bheeshma; the latter bowed to the lord and said it would be his greatest fortune to be killed by the lord himself. He then reminded the lord that he had promised not to use any weapon and if he killed him with Sudarshna, the lord would become guilty of breaking his promise.

Hearing this, lord Krishna said that in the present situation, only two options were available. If he kept his promise, his side would lose this war as Bheeshma alone was capable of winning it for his side, if Arjuna didn’t stop him. The second option was to break his promise and kill Bheeshma. This way, he would break his promise but at the same time, his side would win. The lord then said that since his side is the side representing the truth, it must win in order for justice to prevail.

Hence he said that under the present situation, the victory of truth and the prevalence of justice were much more important than his promise. Therefore, if it came to choose between his promise and victory of truth, he would choose the latter. Accordingly, he would kill Bheeshma with Sudarshna and he would not care if the world called him a promise breaker. The promise of an individual could not be more valuable than truth and justice. Hearing this, Arjuna got enlightened, he asked lord Krishna for forgiveness and he engaged in war against Bheeshma. This war was ultimately won by Pandvas.

There are two ways of looking at this incident. The way a person with high ego may look at it is that no matter what, if lord Krishna made a promise, he was bound to keep it, even if the war was lost. The second way is the way of a person with high conscience who finds this incident beautiful and inspiring. This is because lord Krishna is willing to sacrifice his promise and he’s even willing to face disgrace, in order to ensure universal well being. Kindly understand that when you’re the most respected person of your time, like lord Krishna, it becomes supremely important to keep your words.

However, lord Krishna chose to break his promise in favor of universal will, though doing so might have given some people a reason to talk ill about him. Lord Krishna didn’t care about this and for him, universal well being was much more important than his promise. Breaking a promise can certainly hurt your ego but only if you have one. Lord Krishna was all conscience and no ego. Hence he always did what he felt was the right thing to do according to a given situation and he didn’t care whether it brought him good name or bad name.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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On the other hand, if a religious head asks you to be polite and to keep your ego under check, he’s also bound by the same rule. If you find him taking pride and pleasure in controlling the people under his command as he may have a number of people under his command; he’s certainly a hypocrite. This is because he’s telling you to be polite and he’s himself being harsh to his subordinates, especially when there is no valid reason for this act of harshness and it is only being practiced in order to satisfy ego. Hence he’s expecting the others to do one thing and he’s himself doing the opposite thing.  This is what makes this religious head a hypocrite.

As you may have understood by now, the word hypocrisy rules a big empire in today’s world and there’s almost no field where hypocrisy is not being practiced in one form or the other. Taking a brief look at some other common examples of hypocrisy; not doing your job properly and expecting an early promotion is hypocrisy, making excuses instead of offering help when your friends are in need and expecting them to help you at the earliest when you need such help is hypocrisy.

Similarly, getting offended when someone parks his car in your parking space and missing no opportunity to park your car into other people’s parking lot is hypocrisy; listening to relatively loud music till midnight when you feel like doing so and prohibiting the other members of your family to do so when they feel the same need but you don’t like it is hypocrisy; expecting people to love you truly when all you do is pretend to love them is a common form of hypocrisy; expecting to be respected on account your age like being a 70 year old person while behaving like a complete idiot or nonsense is once again hypocrisy.

Likewise, not giving equal rights to women is hypocrisy; talking ill about most people when you want them to talk only good about you is hypocrisy; buying an expensive house in order to compete with a relative when you really can’t afford it at all is hypocrisy and then there are millions of such examples from each sphere of life. In the last example, if you choose to buy a house even when you know you won’t be able to pay the installments on time, you’re a hypocrite. This is because you are aware of your incomes and accordingly you know how much extra money you can afford to pay the installments.

Your financial status doesn’t allow you to engage in this purchase but you still trouble yourself in order to appear richer than you are. Since you’re taking all this trouble to look what you are not and you duly know this fact, this is what makes you a hypocrite. If you’re an honest person, you’ll purchase a house which you can comfortable afford and you won’t land yourself as well as your family members in financial problems, only in order to look richer than you are. I guess the world hypocrisy has been understood in its deeper sense and hence we will move ahead.

Going back to the scientist, he’s obeying a rule to finish his project and he’s breaking the same rule in many other spheres of his life. This is what makes him a hypocrite because if he believes in the rule of finish what you start, he should properly finish all other duties started by him. Hence the excuse given by his ego through his intellect is once again not a valid one. Though there may be a number of other such excuses, we’ll skip them and we’ll now discuss the real reason.

The true reason behind this act is that with the development of his intellect, his ego has also developed. Ego also lies on the same level which is the second level and it has a strong ability to feed on all the entities lying on all the levels. It means your ego can feed on your physical form, it can feed on your intellect, it can feed on your emotions and surprisingly, it can even feed on your conscience at times or so it may seem to do. This is why ego is considered as the most difficult hurdle on your path to liberation because it keeps bothering you even till the very end.

If the journey of spiritual growth starts from 0 and libration lies at 100; your ego accompanies you till 99.9999999999~. It means your ego accompanies you almost till the end. In fact, as soon as your ego leaves you or you are able to leave it, you see the end of your journey at the very same moment. It is only because of your ego that you’re not able to reach the end of your journey of liberation.

This is because one of the most important conditions to achieve liberation is that you can go there alone and no one can accompany you, which means nothing should be attached to your soul. Hence as long as your ego is attached to your soul, you’re not free and you simply can’t reach the destination called liberation. As soon as your soul detaches itself from your ego, the journey ends and your get a pass to the land of the liberal or so to say, the land of the free souls.

As I mentioned, your ego feeds on all other entities in your body and hence you don’t need hard effort to grow it as it keeps increasing its size by feeding on these entities. On the other hand, hard and dedicated effort is needed when you want to stop your ego from feeding on the other important entities. Starting from your body, if there’s anything worthy of attention in your body, your ego may feed on it. This means if your face is beautiful and other people keep telling you this, your ego may attach to your facial beauty and it may start feeding on it.

As a result, you may be able to notice that out of all your body parts, you tend to pay special attention to your face. I know everyone in general may pay more attention to his face as the attachment of ego in general is the maximum with face, when it comes to body parts. This is because among all the body parts, majority of people consider facial beauty as the most important type of physical beauty and hence everyone may feel cautious about how his or her face looks because he or she knows that most people may be judging his or her beauty from his or her face.

When it comes to ego, it gets satisfied the most when it gets to know that it has something which others don’t have or it is far ahead of other people in a race or it has some other unique advantage over the others. Hence it always encourages you to be someone special, do something special or have something special. The best way your ego may become certain that you have that extra edge in any field is through the recognition of other people.

This is the primary reason for most people to run in one type of race or the other and almost all these races end at the points where other people acknowledge that you have something special in you, whether that something special is your face, your house, your car, your job, your money, your achievements, rewards, prizes, your father, your wife, your husband or anything else for that matter. All your ego wants in order to feel satisfied as well as to grow is for other people to recognize that you have something special.

This is why when a number of other people tell you that you’re beautiful and they mean facial beauty, you become more aware about your face. This is because as more and more people tell you that your face is special, your ego attaches to it and it feels satisfied each time one such complement is given to you. As it wants to feel satisfied every now and then; it tends to pay extra attention to anything which brings it such satisfaction.

In the present case, your ego attaches to your face as it knows your face is one of those possessions of yours, which can bring complements and satisfy it through those complements. Hence it attaches to your face and as a result, it starts controlling the degree of attention you pay to your face, through your subconscious mind. It means that even if you don’t notice it consciously, you start paying more attention to your face and you start taking much more care of your face, compared to your other body parts.

This is why you may find that people who have more facial beauty than average people tend to be more cautious about their faces compared to other people. On the other hand, the people who may have ugly faces according to the standards of beauty set by society (though I don’t believe anyone or anything is ugly in reality) may be less or much less cautious about their faces. The former type of people know that their faces may bring them something to feel good whereas the latter type of people know that their faces are not going to bring them anything to feel good.

Therefore the faces of the former type are the winning horses and hence they take care of their faces, a lot more than average people do. The latter type of people know that their faces are the losing horses and hence they may not want to pay much attention to them. Since a person of the latter type may also have reasonably developed ego, his ego may find something else which is special about him, it may attach to such things and it may make him pay more attention to those things or aspects of personality.

Similar to the face, your ego attaches to anyone of your body parts which may bring attention as well as appreciation and accordingly; which may satisfy it as well as give it the chances to grow bigger. This is why people with fit and curvy bodies may tend to wear tight fits so that they may flaunt their curves, people may notice those curves and they may appreciate them. Through such appreciation whether it comes through words or looks, your ego gets its diet and it feels satisfied.

Have you ever noticed that a number of men with well built arms tend to wear dresses which put their arms on display? Have you noted that a number of females who have well shaped bottoms tend to wear dresses which project their bottoms in such a way that they draw your attention more than any other body part of theirs? Have you ever noticed that a number of people having athletic bodies keep flexing their bodies in public places in a way that lets other people know and appreciate the fact that they have flexible and athletic bodies?

There are many other such acts of physical display that all of us may engage in, from time to time. The primary reason behind all these acts is the feel good factor that comes through the appreciation of other people. Some of you may even feel that the appreciation of other people increases your confidence and you tend to do better in your life. Well, it is the time to know that this feel good factor generated due to the attention and appreciation of other people is nothing but a shade of your ego. It means the entity in your body, which feels good through all such appreciation; is your ego and no other entity.

The confidence that you gain when other people appreciate you is not the true type of confidence which is an attribute of your soul and it is instead an illusionary confidence which is the ornament of your ego. You may wonder how confidence can be true or false and you may think that confidence is confidence. However, it is not so and even your confidence can be illusionary like many other qualities of yours, though you may not realize this fact. Let’s now look at this concept in details.

The word confidence in its deeper sense means your ability to be aware that you can do a particular thing or you’re good enough to handle particular situations. Kindly note that it is your ability to be aware about a quality of yours or even about your overall positive or negative personality and it has got nothing to do with other people. In order to develop any ability in its truest sense, you and only you are involved and no one else is there in the picture.

If you’re a good actor, you can be confident about your acting abilities in two ways. The first ways is that you let other people decide whether your acting is good or not and based on their feedback, your confidence in your acting abilities may rise and fall. It means when a number of people tell you that a piece of acting or your acting performance in a particular movie which may have just released is good or very good; you may start feeling more confident about your acting and hence you may deliver an even better performance in your next movie.

However, if a majority of people tell you that your acting performance in this movie is very bad or they don’t appreciate your acting performance and your confidence starts going down, even when there may be no good reason for it, this confidence is illusionary and it is not the real thing. This is because appreciation from other people may build it and criticism from other people may destroy it. Hence this confidence is not coming from inside you and it is rather coming from the people around you. In reality, other people can make you feel confident at any time and they can also make you lose this confidence any time, through the type of feedback they give you.

Hence if people appreciate your performance in a particular movie, your confidence rises. If your performance is criticized in the next movie, your confidence falls. The performance in the movie after that is once again appreciated and your confidence rises once again. You face criticism for the very next movie and your confidence is lost once again. After looking at all these incidents, do you really think you have confidence in your acting abilities?

The answer as we all may know by now is no. There is no contribution from your part as long as building confidence is concerned and it is only the people around you who are making and destroying your confidence at their discretion. Since the amount of confidence you have at any time is being controlled by other people, you actually don’t have true confidence to start with and you’re only living in the illusion of rising and falling confidence.

Let’s look at another possibility in the same case. You deliver an acting performance in a movie and people appreciate it a lot. However, you already know the quality of your performance in advance as you are very much aware of the quality of acting produced by you. Hence you don’t feel your confidence is boosted a lot by their appreciation as all these people are only telling you something that you already know. Though you may still humbly acknowledge their appreciations, it may not make much difference inside you.

Now suppose your next movie fails and most people criticize your performance. If your confidence is true, you have two options from here. If the criticism generated by these people is valid, which means you also know that this acting performance was below your standard, you may acknowledge it but you don’t witness even the smallest decline in your confidence. In fact, you may already know before the release of this movie that your performance may be criticized as you feel that it is not up to the mark, due to various reasons.

Hence all these people may not be telling you anything new and they may only be telling you something that you already know. Accordingly, this criticism doesn’t do much to damage your confidence as you already know the reasons for your not so good performance in this movie and you may even have starting working on them, by the time this movie is released. In this case, the chances are high that you may come back with a very good performance in your next movie, even if no one tells you how good or bad your performance in this movie is.

The second option is that though the movie has failed, you are duly aware that you’ve done justice to your performance and there’s nothing wrong with your performance. You also understand that when a movie fails, different people blame different team members of such movie for being a not so good movie. Accordingly, some of them are blaming you for the failure of this movie as you may be the lead star of this movie. In this case, you’re once again not bothered by this criticism because you know the people criticizing you are mistaken and you know for sure that your performance is good.

Hence your confidence is once again not altered by their opinions. It can be seen that if you’re truly confident, your confidence is neither built by the people around you nor it is destroyed by them. Your confidence is coming from your faith in your acting abilities as well as from your awareness about how good or bad you perform in a particular movie. If you feel your performance has dropped in any particular movie or in any particular scene of a movie, you may notice it before other people do, you may find out the reason for this and you may hit back after taking care of that reason.

As long as the reactions of the people around you control a quality of yours, you don’t have it in true sense as these people can build or destroy this quality any time. Kindly understand that if a quality truly belongs to you, you and only you can control it and no one else can. Hence if you’re truly confident about a thing, you’ll remain confident even if the entire world stands in opposition. If the opinion of the entire world against you can destroy your confidence in a thing, such confidence is illusionary and it is not true confidence.

Imagine what may happen if all seven hundred billion people on this earth start telling the Sun that they don’t like it for being a burning sphere and they want it to look cool? Do you think influenced by their opinions, the Sun will stop burning and it will start being cool like the Moon? You already know the answer and hence I won’t mention it. The Sun has true confidence that being a burning sphere is the best thing it does and hence it keeps doing so, whether people appreciate it or criticize it for doing that. This is what true confidence means. If you have it, only you can control it and no one else.

Similarly, if all people on earth start appreciating the Sun for being a burning sphere, the Sun won’t start burning more fuel and being hotter. This is because neither the appreciation nor the criticism of the others affects its confidence and hence it keeps doing what it believes in. This is what true confidence means, it rises from inside you and it remains unaffected by the others. I mean how can you call it your confidence if people outside or the circumstance outside can control it?

Suppose you’re a billionaire at a time when even being a millionaire is considered rich. Do you need to ask other people in this case whether or not you’re financially rich? No, you don’t need to ask anyone as you already know very well that you’re a very rich person according to the prevailing standards of measuring financial richness. This richness is true as it comes because of enough money and wealth possessed by you and not because of other people’s certificates. Taking a look at another possibility in the same case, do you think if a number of people start telling you that you’re a financially poor person; you’ll forget that you have billions and you’ll start feeling that you’re poor?

You know that it may not make much difference to you whether these people consider you rich or not; as you already know you’re rich. Hence you don’t need to learn this fact from other people and the money as well as wealth you have is sufficient to let you know that you’re rich. The same holds for a poor person also. It means if you have no job, not much money and no assets at all, you know that you’re financially poor according to the prevailing measures. Hence even if everyone keeps telling you that you’re a financially rich person when you don’t even have enough to eat; you won’t believe them and you’ll know for sure that you’re financially poor.

In the first case, the presence of money tells you that you’re rich and in the second case, the absence of money tells you that you’re poor. It means the presence of a quality within you should tell you that it is there and not the people outside. Just as the opinions of people can’t control the amount of money you have, their opinions should not control the amount of a quality that you have. You’re the best judge when it comes to assess how much money or wealth you have at a time since the other people may not know the exact equation of money in your case. Likewise, you’re the best judge of all other things you have like a quality; and not the other people.

As these people are judging this quality from outside which means through your expressions; they can’t assess it properly because this quality actually lies inside and not outside. Since you alone have the access to look inside where this quality actually lies; only you can judge it in the best possible way. If you have diamonds worth billions inside a locker that you only can open; no one but you knows how many diamonds are there at any point in time.

Accordingly; when someone tells you that you have 100 diamonds at this time inside your locker; you may not bother much as you know that he’s making a random guess and the number of diamonds you have is 500. Hence his opinion doesn’t matter and only your awareness about the number of diamonds you have; is the true measure of knowledge in this case. Similarly, if this person tells you that you have 700 diamonds inside your locker; even that may not make much difference to you as you know that the actual number of diamonds is 500.

Taking one more example, a baby remains truly confident of whatever he does, as long as he doesn’t develop or become aware of its intellectual abilities. For instance, a baby knows that he has the right to jump onto his mother as and when he feels in need of milk. He has this confidence and hence he doesn’t ask anyone whether this act is good or bad. All he cares for is he wants milk and he knows how he can get it.

Now try doing a thing. Don’t try to physically force this baby away from his mother but whenever he tries to feed on his mother, start criticizing him for this act and start telling him that he should not do it. Also start telling him that he should instead feed on bottled milk and feeding on his mother is essentially a bad thing. You’ll find that as long as this baby doesn’t develop intellect, all your criticism won’t affect him even in the least and this baby will keep feeding on his mother with the same confidence. Even if the whole world tells this baby that feeding on his mother is bad, he won’t stop. This is what true confidence is, unaffected by the people or circumstances outside.

However, as and when this baby develops significant amount of intellect, try doing the same thing to him and you’ll feel that it starts affecting him. If more and more people start criticizing this baby for feeding on his mother and they start telling him that he should feed on bottled milk, the baby may start losing confidence and he may start hesitating to approach his mother, whenever he feels like having milk. Through a series of criticism, you can actually convince this baby to feed on bottled milk instead of feeding on his mother’s milk.

On the other hand, if you start appreciating this baby a lot, for feeding on his mother’s milk and you keep telling him that it is the best thing to do in the world, the results may change. This baby may keep feeding on his mother’s milk much longer than he may have, if outside intervention was not there to affect him. Another interesting thing is that even if this baby starts feeding on bottled milk, affected by your criticism, your appreciation or criticism for this act can once again increase or decrease his level of confidence. It means your continuous criticism can make him quit the bottle also and use something else that you may suggest.

Looking at this experiment, you’ll find that as long as the baby doesn’t develop or become aware of intellect, he remains truly confident about whatever he wants to do and feeding on mother’s milk is just one of those acts. However, as this baby develops intellect and as he starts discriminating between good and bad, his confidence may start getting affected by the circumstances or people outside. It should be noted that in most cases, the criteria for discrimination between right and wrong is supplied by you and it may not come from inside the baby.

For example, if you keep telling this baby that it is bad for a kid above one year to feed on his mother’s milk and he should start feeding on bottled milk instead, this is what the definition of right and wrong about milk feed may become, for him. It means this baby may not only stop feeding on his mother’s milk but he may also register this statement in his mind as a rule that a baby older than one year should not feed on his mother’s milk. Hence he may reflect the same opinion when he gets old and he has his own babies.

You see, you’ve conditioned this baby and you have even controlled the roots of his intellect. It should be noted that your intellect works on the basis of calculation and analysis of facts and logics gathered by it over time and hence its correct or incorrect working depends on whether such facts and logics are correct or not. Therefore, if you can control the basic facts and logics which are supplied to a kid during early ages, you can control the type of intellect he may develop.

Coming back to the example, as long as your opinions don’t affect the actions of this baby, he remains truly confident about almost whatever it does. This is why you may find that until the kids start developing intellect, they’re the happiest. This is because their confidence remains unadulterated as other people can’t affect it positively or negatively. However, as soon as they start developing intellect, the appreciation or criticism of other people may start controlling the kind of confidence they have in an activity or in their overall personality.

Though there are many other examples, but the point is that true confidence rises from inside you and it remains unaffected by the appreciation as well as criticism offered by other people. Therefore, true confidence is the ornament of your soul whereas the illusionary confidence is the ornament of your ego. Since the attributes of the soul rise from it, they remain unaffected by the opinions of other people. On the contrary, the one and only diet of your ego is the attention and appreciation of other people.

This is why it feels happy when other people appreciate you or they pay attention to you and this is why your ego feels bad when other people criticize or ignore you. Hence if other people can control your confidence, it is a sign that such confidence is coming from your ego and not from your soul. As and when you feel that your confidence in something remains unaffected by the opinions of other people, you’ve become truly confident.

This is one aspect of liberation, having true confidence which rises from within you instead of depending on other people. Liberation means freedom and accordingly, a liberated soul is free and it doesn’t depend on outside people or circumstances for anything it wants to practice or feel. If you’re dependant on other people to feel confident, you’re not liberated as you’re not free and you’re bound to these people. This is because the happiness of a liberated soul depends only on itself and on nothing else. It means whenever a liberated soul wants to feel happy, it can feel happy no matter what is going outside.

On the other hand, a non-liberated soul may not feel happy even if it wants to, if the outside circumstances want to make it sad. It should be noted that liberation is complete freedom from each and every condition; and on the opposite end of this spectrum; lies the state called complete dependence which means that other people and outside circumstances control almost each and everything that a person in such state may want to do or feel.

The ultimate journey of each soul is to start from the point of absolute dependence and reach the point of absolute freedom. On the way to this journey, there are many milestones as well as points and this is why different people on this journey may be at different points or milestones. It means a person may entirely depend on the feedback of the others in order to feel confident or happy. This person is at the beginning of this journey as the dependence factor is high.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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Doesn’t it sound strange that even those positive and constructive looking goals are set by your ego and they are even achieved with a big part of the help coming from your ego? However, it is true and let’s now consider an example in order to understand it. Suppose you’re a pure scientist, which means you’re an isolate intellectual type. You desire to accomplish a particular invention or discovery and you start working to achieve this goal.

Over the next few years, you make significant progress towards your goal though you feel that much is still needed to be done in order to witness the final result. Hence you start working more and you even start working from home, whenever you’re free. You’re so dedicated and focused in your approach that you may not even attend properly to your family or even to your daily needs.

You spend many more years, you work even harder and in a more dedicated way and finally, you achieve your target. You’ve reached the invention or discovery you wanted and it is a positive as well as constructive thing for society as your invention may help mankind advance or it may facilitate the world in a different way. You set a positive target, you worked hard, you were driven by your intellect, you even dragged your body to over perform during this conquest and you finally achieved a heroic victory.

It all looks so positive and many of us may want to do things like that. However, there may be factors which are hidden and which may skip your attention. Let’s now look at these factors and see if this whole story is actually this positive or not? You set a goal to discover something so that the entire mankind may be facilitated. It is good and positive till here and it may change from here onwards.

Over the next few years, you realize that through your natural style of working, you may or may not achieve this goal in your lifetime. It means if you work hard for ten hours a day and you use the rest of the time to fulfill your other duties as well as to meet your daily requirements, you may or may not accomplish this task in your lifetime. Let me ask you this question here that what is wrong if you don’t achieve this goal in your lifetime?

You’re recording as well as saving all your research and it will remain available for the scientists of the coming generations. If you maintain your natural as well as balanced lifestyle, you may or may not see this discovery happening in your lifetime. If it happens in your lifetime, it is good. However, if it doesn’t happen in your lifetime, the coming scientists will resume your research from the point you left and they’ll complete this job. You see, in this case also, the discovery will finally be reached. So what is it which makes you think that you alone should finish this project in your lifetime, even if you have to make so many changes to your lifestyle?

The answer as you may know by now is the attachment of your ego to this project. Your ego is now attached to this project it wants to see the completion of this project by you, so that the credit may be assigned to your name and that too in your presence which means in your lifetime. Since you’re an intellectual type of person, your ego may use your intellect to convince you and hence your intellect may give you a number of reasons to complete this project by yourself. Here are some of these reasons for better understanding.

Your intellect may tell you that if you die without finishing this project, the scientists of the later generations may not be able to finish it and hence you have to take it to completion by yourself. This reason may look like a very good reason but only to you or so to say, to your ego as it is only interested in a reason to justify its actions and it is not interested in the fact whether such reason is valid or not. If the reason is actually not a valid reason, your ego may convince you to believe it is. As you’re convinced, this is all your ego cares for.

Looking at this reason, throughout the history of mankind, intellect has only been rising and it has not fallen. It means that on average, each generation is smarter than the previous generation and that is why we’ve been able to witness so much growth all around us. Hence the chances are fairly high that if you’re not able to complete this project in your lifetime, a scientist from the very next generation may complete it. Therefore, this reason doesn’t hold good though it may look good to you, as your ego may have blurred your vision.

Then there may be another reason given by your ego that since you’ve started this project, you must see it through. This is the probably the best reason that your ego may give you. It may also tell you that all great men were great because they finished what they started and they did whatever it took to finish their tasks. It may remind you of many such great men from history who went above and beyond to finish what they started. Though it looks like a very solid reason and you may not even find any logic against this reason, it is not so perfect in reality.

If it is the mark of a great man to finish what he started, then this rule should be applied to all the tasks or affairs undertaken by you and it should not apply to this task alone. For instance, you married your wife long back with a spoken or unspoken promise that you’ll give her due time and attention that a wife deserves. Due time and attention means fair amount of them and it doesn’t mean anything unfair.

Similarly, when you brought a son to this world, it was once again your unspoken promise that you’d do the best in your power to raise him in the best possible way. Doing so once again demands proper time and attention from your side. Though there may be many other such tasks which you may have undertaken, we’ll consider these two tasks for the time being.

When you start working day and night in order to finish this project in time as you want to obey the rule of ‘great men finish what they start’; do you apply this rule to these two spheres? The answer is no and this is what makes you a hypocrite. You start spending more and more time on your project and you start ignoring your wife, even against her wishes. Whenever she demands your attention which she duly deserves; you may silence her by giving her a number of reasons generated by your ego.

She may have a number of grudges against you and many of them may be valid ones. You made promises to her and then you broke them, you undertook the job of being a husband and you failed at it or in other words, you left the mission of being a husband unfinished. You do the same to your son and you fail to complete the job of being a father in proper manner. Likewise, you may leave many such important jobs incomplete, in order to complete just one job.

The most interesting thing is that your ego motivates you that you must finish what you start, when it comes to finish this project. However, the same ego keeps silence when your wife or son tells you that you must properly finish what you started with them. It should be noted that your ego is a perfect mutant and it can assume the form of your body, intellect, your heart and even that of your conscience at times. When that happens, you may think a decision is coming from your intellect or from your heart depending on the situation; it may be coming from your ego in reality as your ego is completely in charge of your intellect or heart at that time.

It means when needed, your ego may become your physical body, it may become your intellect, it may become your heart and it may even pretend to become your conscience. Going even one step further, your ego tells you that their complaints are baseless and they’ll benefit the most when your project is finished. This approach is what makes you a hypocrite. You’re applying a particular rule to succeed at a particular thing in your life and you’re going against the same rule when it comes to most other things in your life; the perfect mark of a true hypocrite.

The word hypocrisy rules over a large empire in today’s world and it is not as small as you may think. It may look like a simple word which may rule some people or some spheres of their lives, it is not so. In reality, hypocrisy is ruling the maximum number of spheres of a majority of people living in this day and age. In order to look at some of these examples, let’s first get to know the deeper meaning of this word called hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy in its deeper sense means saying one thing and doing another in order to benefit in all situations. It also means making different rules for different people under similar situations, in order to benefit in all situations. Hypocrisy also means strongly advocating a rule at a time and going against it at another time, in order to benefit in both situations. Likewise, all the practices which lead you to engage in opposite types of actions at different times, when they should ideally have been the same, are called hypocrisy. After knowing this much, let’s take a look at some examples of hypocrisy.

My son should respect me though I don’t respect my father; this type of approach makes you a hypocrite. Going deeper into this case, there may broadly be two rules for this situation and following anyone of them in sense makes you a non-hypocrite. The first rule says that a son should respect his father. If you choose to stand by this rule, you should have respected your father. As you haven’t obeyed this rule, you’re not entitled to expect the others to obey it. Therefore, if you don’t respect your father but you expect your son to respect you, you’re a hypocrite as you’re not following the rule in its true sense.

Another rule may be made for this situation and this rule says that a son doesn’t need to respect his father. I know it doesn’t look like a good rule but let’s discuss it for the sake of even more clarity. If you choose to stick by this rule and this is why you don’t respect your father, there is no point in expecting respect from your son as that goes against this rule.

Hence if you don’t respect your father and you don’t expect your son to respect you either, you’re not a hypocrite. Yes it is true, you may not be a very good person for not respecting your father but at least you’re honest and not a hypocrite. You understand that you don’t respect your father and accordingly you should not expect respect from your son. This is what makes you an honest person and not a hypocrite as you’re following the rule in both the cases. However, if you obey this rule when it comes to not respect your father and you expect your son to break this rule and respect you, you’re a hypocrite.

You see, whether you believe in the first rule or in the second one which is the exact opposite of the first one, you’re hypocrite in both the cases. An honest person is the one who follows a rule in its true sense and in all situations whereas a hypocrite follows a rule when doing so benefits him; and he chooses not to follow it when he sees loss in following it.

Taking a look at another example, you expect your wife to be loyal to you and at the same time, you think you may afford the luxury of being disloyal to her. If such is the case, you’re once again a hypocrite. An honest person follows one of these two rules. The first one says that husband and wife should be loyal to each other whereas the second one says husband and wife need not be loyal to each other. If you go by the first rule, you can’t afford the luxury of being disloyal to your wife.

If you follow the second rule and you are disloyal to your wife, you can’t expect her to be loyal to you, according to the same rule. Hence if you’re following anyone of these rules in true sense, you’re not a hypocrite and you’re an honest person though choosing to follow the second rule may question your character in different ways. However, when you follow one rule and you make another rule for your wife in a way that both these rules end up facilitating you; you’re certainly a hypocrite.

Taking a different example, you go to a religious place and you ask god for his grace. You do so because you believe in the rule that god is far more resourceful than you and hence he helps the less resourceful ones. This is a good rule and there’s nothing wrong with it. However, as you step out of this religious place and a bagger asks you for any kind of help at all, you may try to avoid him or you may even treat him bad.

This happens in case of many people and they don’t even realize that they may become hypocrites by engaging in this practice. This is because if the rule says that the more resourceful one should help the less resourceful one when the latter asks for such help, you should also help this bagger when he prays for help. However, you may not do so and to justify this situation, your ego may give you a number of reasons including the overall negative character of the bagger asking for such help.

Have you ever realized that you too may be nothing more than this bagger when you pray to god for help? You may have even more flaws in your character than this bagger may have. Since you expect god to help you despite all your flaws, isn’t it fair to obey the same rule and help this bagger despite his flaws, even if such help is a really small one? However, you may not do so and you break this rule when it comes to help this bagger while expecting god to follow the same rule when it comes to help you. This is what makes you a hypocrite.

In this case also, there are two rules and following anyone of them in proper sense makes you honest. The first rule says that the more resourceful one should help the less resourceful one when the latter needs such help or prays for such help. If you go by this rule, you have the right to go to god and ask for his help through your prayers. However, by choosing to go by this rule, you also become liable to help this bagger as well as all other people who ask for your help from time to time. It doesn’t matter how much help you may actually be able to offer, and what matters is that you present yourself for such help.

For instance, when a bagger asks you for money and your financial status allows you to donate one Rupee without much trouble, even this much help is sufficient. Similarly, when you see an old man standing at the side of a road and looking for someone to help him cross this road, you are required to help this old man, according to the same rule that you believe in. It should be noted that this old man may not have asked you in particular for this help and he may be looking here and there in general for anyone to come and help him out of his situation.

This general prayer of this old man for help makes it compulsory for everyone following this rule to help him. The equation is simple, you believe in this rule and you want to benefit through this rule. This is why it becomes your duty to obey this rule at the other end also. People who pray to god for his grace or help will agree that it is not only when they consciously pray to him that they expect him to help them; but they expect god to help them even when they may suddenly fall into trouble and they don’t even have the time or sanity to pray to him for help.

The word sanity in this context means that while driving, if you’re about to hit another vehicle head on head, you may completely lose your sanity for the time being due to a panic attack and hence you may not be able to pray to god at this time. All your senses may get lost or distorted for the time being as you see a disaster so close to you. Hence you may not be able to pray to god in this situation but you still expect him to help you, according to the same rule. If you’re able to avoid this accident by virtue of something uncalculated and miraculous, the first thing you may do after that is to thank god. This is because you may feel that though you were not able to ask for his help at this time, he still came to help you, bound by this rule.

The situation is the same when this old man is looking for help in general. Hence if you believe in this rule and you ask for god’s help through this rule, you can’t afford the luxury to ignore this old man in need, under the pretext that he’s not directly asking you to help. Even if this old man or anyone else for that matter looks out for help in general, which means anyone who may help should help, the rule you believe in binds you to help. There are many other such examples in day to day life but I guess the point I want to make is made.

If you help people in need as and when you can and as much as you can, you have due right to bind god to help you according to the same rule and believe me, he’ll always come to help you in this case. If you obey this rule in its true sense, you may find that whenever a problem falls on you and you feel incapable of dealing with it on your own, help comes in any shape or form and you get out of this problem. The most amazing thing is that most of the time, such help may come even before you pray to god for such help.

You may call him very kind and caring, but in reality, all this is happening because you’ve bound god with this rule by obeying it from your end, in its true sense. It means god also has to obey it and as you can understand, he is perfectly capable of obeying any rule to its deepest sense. Hence if you become a person like this, he may not need a call for help and he may come to help you as soon as he feels that you’re in trouble and you may not be able to get out of it on your own. As soon as that happens, he sends help in different forms and shapes.

So if you believe in this rule; you help the needy ones and you expect god to help you when you pray to him, your demand is fair enough and you’re an honest person. This is because you’re only expecting the same thing in return, that you’re delivering and hence it’s fair enough. The equation looks perfectly balanced and this makes you a good, kind as well as an honest person.

However, if you keep praying to god for his help and at the same time, you don’t help the needy ones in most cases even when such acts of help may be small ones and you can easily afford them, you are certainly a hypocrite. This is because you want god to follow this rule when you don’t follow it yourself. This is what makes you a hypocrite as you’re once again dealing in double standards.

The second and the opposite rule in this case is that no one should help anyone and everyone should manage his affairs on his own. I know it sounds like a strange rule which it may be, but even this one is fine as long as you obey it in its proper sense. If you choose to go by this rule, you don’t have the need to help anyone at all and hence you’re free from this so called burden. However, the same rule prohibits you from asking help from god or from anyone, in time of need. Hence if you follow this rule, you should not ask anyone for help and you should face all your problems alone.

If you can do that, you’re certainly not a hypocrite and you’re an honest person, though you may not be a kind person as you don’t believe in helping anyone. However, being a kind person and being an honest person are different things. Even an unkind person can be honest and even a partly kind person can be dishonest. I’ve used the phrase partly kind in this context because as soon as kindness reaches its peak in your personality, dishonesty vanishes. Hence an absolutely kind person can’t afford the luxury of being dishonest though a partly kind person may afford this luxury.

Moving on, the problem occurs when even with this rule, you choose one end and you ignore the other end. It means you don’t help anyone as you believe in this rule but at the same time, you ask god or other people for help or you expect them to help you in time of your need. If such is the case, you’re once again a hypocrite as you want to do one type of thing to the others and you want the opposite type of thing to be done to you.

The word honesty includes this clause that you should expect same or similar things to be done to you, which you do to other people or universe in general. Hence even a criminal who confesses his crime and who’s willing to serve the sentence may be honest and he may not be a hypocrite. This is because he realizes that if he does bad to the others, he should only expect bad to happen to him. Since he’s following the rule of ‘do bad and bad will come to you’ in its true sense, he’s honest, though he may be a criminal.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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However in reality, the habits marked negative by you may not be negative when seen neutrally or they may not be as negative as marked by you. For instance, you strongly disliked how this person embarrassed you in front of many people when he mentioned how helpless you felt while tracking a mountain and how he helped you out of this situation, making him a hero and making you look like a poor person in need of help. But this is only your point of view and it may not be completely correct.

Let’s now look into his act of show off from a neutral point of view and see how bad it is. The first question to ask is whether one such incident happened at all or not? The answer is yes. The second question is whether you felt helpless or not and the answer is again yes. The third question is whether he helped you out or not and the answer is again yes. The fourth and the final question is whether the entire incident has been honestly described by him or he has exaggerated his heroic deeds as well as your state of being a helpless person at a time. Let’s suppose the answer to this question is also yes, more or less. It means this person may have added 5 to 10% exaggeration but he’s been honest on the whole.

It is the time to analyze all these facts and reach a conclusion. When you analyze all these facts in a neutral way, you’ll find that this person has only spoken truth and nothing else. You felt helpless, he helped you and you were able to make it with his help. This is all this person is saying and this is all that has happened. So what is wrong in it? How can you call it a negative habit? Do you think that even speaking the truth qualifies for a negative habit?

In reality, there may be nothing wrong with this person’s approach though he may have slightly overdone certain things while describing this whole incident. Hence he may deserve a tiny little negative rating for this incident but not the kind of big negative rating that you assigned to him. The reason you give him such rating is that by describing this incident in front of other people, he’s made you feel small as you’re portrayed as a poor and helpless person in this story and your ego doesn’t like it.

The million dollar question to ask yourself before giving this rating is that whether you were actually a poor and helpless person back then or not? If the answer is yes, then there may be no valid justification for this negative rating and it is simply your ego in play. It may be a small incident but it can give you a perfect window to look into the domain of your ego. So let’s use this window and see what is there on the other side of this window, the side called the domain of your ego.

At a time when tracking a mountain, you felt helpless and this person helped you out of your problems. Then after some time, he described this incident in front of other people and you didn’t like this fact. Hence you give him a big negative for this act. It means your ego pays less attention to the fact that someone actually helped you in time of need and it pays more attention to the fact that he told other people about such help. By doing so, he embarrassed you and your ego got hurt. Hence the act of help almost vanishes in the shade of the act of your embarrassment.

Some questions arise here. Is help more important or the privacy of such help more important? When this person described this incident, why were you embarrassed in the first place as he was telling the truth only? Instead of feeling very bad and disliking this person at that moment, why didn’t you like him and join him? Why didn’t you say in front of all those people that whatever he’s saying is absolutely true and you’re grateful for all the help offered by him at that time? There are many other questions like these ones but considering these questions will serve our purpose.

Looking at the first question, the fact that more than help, the privacy of help is important to you asserts that you have a well developed ego which wants to project you only as a hero or a capable person and it hates when people see you as a helpless or needy person. Hence whosoever is responsible for projecting this helpless image of yours is your enemy, according to your ego. Accordingly, you want help but you don’t want other people to know that you need help as that goes against your ego.

In the second question, the other person was telling the truth only and you should not have any reason to feel embarrassed or bad. Being humans, we’re all vulnerable at times and all of us may need help at times. If none of us needed help and each one of us was complete, what was the need to build a society to start with? The concept of society was established only because long back, some wise people realized that as humans, we’re not complete and each one of us needs help at one time or the other.

Yes, some of us may need help more often and some of us may need help less often. However, that is a quantitative change and not a qualitative change. It means even the people who need help less often are basically the same as the people who need help more often. The quality of needing help remains common among both these types of people and only the quantity of such help may change. Therefore, there is no qualitative difference and there is only a quantitative difference between these two types of people.

For example, sugarcane needs much more water to grow than certain beans or other crops need. However, one common factor between them is that they all need water to grow and they can’t grow without it. Hence their quality of needing water to grow remains the same and only the quantities of water they require are different. When two or more things or people have the same basic quality but the measure of that quality is different, they’re called qualitatively the same but quantitatively different.

This is because they have the same basic quality and only the intensity of this quality is different in different cases. The measure of intensity of a quality is called quantitative measure and hence it deals with the percentage or score of a quality possessed by a thing or a person, compared to percentage or score of the same quality, possessed by other thing or person. Since both sugarcane and beans need water to grow, they’re qualitatively the same in this aspect though they are quantitatively different as they need different amounts of water to grow.

Now consider the comparison of taste between sugarcane, banana, bitter gourd and chilly. For this comparison, sugarcane and banana taste sweet though sugarcane is generally sweeter than banana. Bitter gourd tastes bitter as its name suggests and chilly tastes chilly according to its name. Hence when compared for taste, sugarcane and banana are qualitatively the same but they have different quantities of sweetness.

However, sugarcane and banana have qualitative difference of taste with bitter gourd and chilly since none of them tastes sweet and they have different tastes. This is what is called a qualitative difference which means that two or more things or people being compared for a certain aspect have qualities different than each other. Hence qualitative difference means having different qualities whereas quantitative difference means having different quantities of the same quality.

Coming back to the example, if all of us need help at one time or the other though some of us may need it more often, why do you need to deny this fact that you need or needed help? This is because your ego feels you’ll fall into the category of people who often need help and it instead likes to belong to the category of people who don’t need help much often. You see, on a subconscious level, your ego has assigned rating to each and every aspect of your life and it wants you to belong to the top rated categories in most of them.

This tendency in itself is not a very positive tendency as all you need is to be your natural self and if needed, try and improve yourself. However, it may still not be the biggest problem if you want to belong to top rated categories in most spheres of life and the way you try to achieve this target may be the biggest problem. There are primarily two ways of accomplishing this task and we’ll now look at these ways.

If you’re a fairly positive person, this is what your way is likely to be. You scrutinize most of your weaknesses, you resolve to overcome them and you start working towards improving yourself or towards making yourself a stronger and better person. Since you’re a positive person, you don’t hesitate in accepting your weaknesses as long as they’re there and in fact you welcome everyone who tells you about any one of your weaknesses.

This is because your primary goal is to overcome your weaknesses and this mission is accomplished step by step. In the first step, you have to learn that a particular quality in question is a negative quality and it is not a positive quality. In the second step, you have to realize that you also have this quality and you have to develop a desire to get rid of this quality or habit. In the third step, you have to start making efforts to get rid of this quality and in the fourth step, your mission is accomplished.

If you work on these lines, people who tell you about your weaknesses or negative habits complete the first two steps on your behalf. They tell you that a particular habit is a negative habit and they also tell you that you have it. If you’re a truly positive person, you should thank these people as they’ve made your job easier. After this, you only need to engage in the effort required to get rid of such weakness or negative habit. However, throughout this process, you have to consciously be aware that you have this habit and if anyone tells you that you have it, you should acknowledge that he’s telling the truth.

Doing so helps you stay aware about this habit and that further helps you engage in more and more effort to get rid of it. If you’re a truly positive person, you’ll follow this procedure as this is the correct procedure if you want to overcome your negative habits. Since this process is in tune with universal will, which means you don’t become jealous of anyone or you don’t think ill about anyone during this process, you’re essentially doing a good thing. Removing each one of your weaknesses in this way, you take one more step towards your higher spiritual growth or evolution of your personality.

However, if you’re not an overall positive person, this is the way you may follow. If you’re not an overall positive person, the chances are high that you have well developed ego as it is primarily your ego which tries to make you a negative person. As a general rule, the bigger is the size of your ego, the more negative you may become.

Since you’re a negative person and your ego controls most things you do, this is what may happen to you. The first thing you need to accept is that you have a weakness or a bad habit and this is where majority of negative people fail. The ego simply refuses to accept this fact and it may do this job in two ways. In the first option, your ego may tell you that though a particular habit is surely negative, you don’t have it and the people who think you have it are mistaken.

In the second case, you challenge the very fact that the habit in question is a bad habit to start with and the people who call it a negative habit are mistaken. Though both these approaches look different, they lead you to the same result which is to deny the fact that you have a particular negative habit. Since you have to realize that you have a negative habit in order to develop dislike for it and in order to develop a desire to get rid of it, failing at this step will restrict you from moving to the next step.

It means when you think you don’t have a particular negative habit to start with, you don’t feel the need to develop a desire to get rid of it and hence the process stops here. In the second case, you think that this habit is not negative at all and hence you may once again not develop a desire to get rid of it. It should be noted that you can only get rid of the things that you have and you can’t get rid of the things that you don’t have. Can you imagine a bagger getting rid of billions of Rupees? It is out of question and only a billionaire can do so.

Hence you have to have something in order to get rid of it. At the same time, you have to be aware that you have such thing in question. Now imagine a person whose grandfather left billions of Rupees for him and he doesn’t know this fact. This person can once again not get rid of these billions as he doesn’t know he has them to start with, though he certainly has them. Hence you have to have a negative habit and you have to be aware about it, in order to initiate the process of getting rid of it.

Though both these ways lead you to stay away from getting rid of your negative habit, their impacts may be different in quantum. If you’re the first type of negative person who thinks a particular habit is certainly negative but you don’t have it, your problems is relatively smaller and the chances of recovery are better. On the other hand, if you’re the second type of negative person who thinks that a particular negative habit is not negative and on the contrary, it is a positive habit, your problem is the biggest type of problem and recovery may become very difficult in this case.

This is because if you’re the first type of person, you still manage to complete the first step of getting rid of a negative habit. The first step is to learn that a particular habit is negative. Since you agree that a habit in question is certainly negative, the first step is finished. In this case, you’re stuck on the second step which says you have to realize that you also have this negative habit. The chances are there that over a period of time, you may be able to realize that you do have this habit. When that happens, you may wish to get rid of it and hence the process of effort may start.

This way, you may take more time in order to get rid of this negative habit compared to the time taken by a positive person for the same job, but you may still be able to do this job. If you’re a negative person of this type, it is also an indicator of the fact that though you certainly have a developed ego which fools you and tells you that you don’t have this negative habit, the size of your ego is not very big. This is because when the size of your ego crosses a point, you become the second type of negative person.

It means instead of thinking that you don’t have a particular negative habit, you start thinking that the habit in question is not negative at all. In fact, you may consider it as a positive habit. As you like this habit; the question to get rid of it doesn’t rise to start with. Hence you may not wish to get rid of it until you realize it is a negative habit.

When you have a relatively small ego, you tend to use your conscience also at times. It should be noted that conscience and ego are sworn enemies of each other as the former tells you to do the right thing whereas the latter tells you that whatever you do is right even if it is the worst thing to do.

As your conscience grows, your ego starts reducing and hence you start becoming more and more positive. On the other hand, as your ego grows, your conscience starts reducing and hence you become more and more negative. If you’re a negative person of the first type, you are a likely to be a mixture of conscience and ego where you may have a developed ego but it may not be big enough to kill your conscience. Hence they both affect you in their own ways.

The job of your conscience is to separate right from wrong and hence it tells you that a particular habit in question is certainly a negative habit and so you admit it. However, when it comes to admit that you also have this habit, your ego comes to play and a clash happens between your conscience and ego. Since your ego finds it very hard to accept that you have any negative habits at all, it strongly votes against the suggestion that you have this negative habit. Hence you end up deciding that this habit is negative but you don’t have it.

If the size of your ego is even smaller, you may even accept that you have it but you may convince yourself that you have just a little of it. This means if your conscience is stronger than your ego but your ego is also significantly strong, your conscience may convince you that a habit is negative and you have it. However, your ego may also want to get something to satisfy itself and hence it may convince you that though you have this negative habit, it is not very intense in your case and it is mild.

For example, your conscience may convince you that arrogance is bad and you’re arrogant but your ego may convince you that you’re just a little arrogant. You see, there’s a constant conflict between your conscience and your ego where the former is supported by the positive energies and the latter is supported by the negative energies in your aura. Hence the more positive is your aura, more developed is likely to be your conscience whereas the more negative is your aura, the more developed is likely to be your ego.

Your conscience and ego engage in such conflicts for almost each and every decision you make and for each and every situation you face. Even if you have a mixture of 90% conscience and 10% ego, the latter won’t hesitate from misleading you as much as it can. It means that in this case, though your conscience is likely to win most of the arguments, your ego may still reduce the degree of correctness of certain facts related to you, in order to feel satisfied.

For example, if on a scale of 100, your arrogance now ranks at 20 and your conscience tries to convince you about this remaining amount of arrogance, your ego may still play a trick. It may convince you that your arrogance is only about 10 on this scale and hence you don’t need to worry as much as if it was 20. If you’re a person with arrogance score less than 10, your ego may try its best to convince you that now you don’t have any arrogance at all.

It happens in case of all other habits and situations and this is why there is a constant need to be aware as nothing less than that may deal with your ego. It is the job of your ego to blur your vision as much as it can and it is the job of your conscience to clear your vision as much as it can. Accordingly, the people with very high egos are almost blind in their vision whereas the people with high conscience seem to possess super vision. Since all this happens on microscopic level inside your subconscious mind, you don’t get even a remote idea about all this.

Coming back to the point, if you’re a negative person of the first type, you may admit that a habit is negative but your ego may convince you that you don’t have it. However, if you’re a negative person of the second type, the problem becomes much bigger as you think it is positive habit instead of being a negative habit and so the question of getting rid of this habit doesn’t rise in the first place. In this case, the size of your ego is very high and hence it may try to control each and everything you do. It is the time to know that your intellect can be used as a tool by your ego in most cases though it may offer its services to your conscience also.

Many of you may think that intellect is the best thing when it comes to tell right from wrong or when it comes to make decisions, it is not true. Your conscience is far more superior to your intellect and it can accomplish tasks which can’t be accomplished by your intellect. Another surprise is that your conscience doesn’t believe in doing so many calculations as your intellect does and instead, your conscience can reach a better decision with minimum number of calculations.

The reason your conscience is superior to your intellect is that your conscience lies at a level which is higher than the level at which your intellect lies. Your physical body lies at the fist level, your intellect as well as your emotions lies at the second level and your conscience lies at the third level. Your ego also lies at the second level and hence the second level becomes the most important level as a number of important entities are playing at this level.

Physical level is given to all species whereas the entities in the upper levels need effort to grow. Hence you need effort to grow your intellect, your emotional strength and even some effort in order to grow your ego. It is through the journey of a number of lives that you’re able to grow these entities in a gradual way. Since your conscience lies at an even higher level, it is even more difficult to grow and hence you may need even more time and effort to grow it.

Another problem on the way is that the entities lying on each level try to bind you to them, thereby making it difficult for you to leave them and pay more attention to the entities on the next level. It means your body makes it difficult for you to grow intellect, emotions or even ego at times; and all these make it difficult for you to grow conscience.

Hence all the people who spend most of their time for physical pleasures may have been tightly gripped by the entity on the first level and so they waste their chances of growing the entities on the second as well as on the third level. A significant number of people belong to this category and that is why you may witness many people living, primarily in order to fulfill their physical desires which may be of many types.

Then are the people in the second category. These are the people who are able to rise above the first level and hence they are able to develop entities lying on the second level. Some of them grow more intellect compared to emotions and hence they may use their intellect to achieve things which may be more significant and valuable than the things targeted by the people dealing on the first level.

It means some of these people may become officers in governments, some of them may become politicians, some of them may become scientists and some others may achieve success through other fields which require the application of intellect in order to give results. Since these people have become able to rise above the first level which is the level of physical body, they may now be able to practice control over this level, which means they may be able to control their physical urges.

This is because intellect is an entity higher than the physical form and if it grows beyond a point, it starts controlling your body as well as its physical needs. Hence it can control you in way that you may choose not to consume alcohol or drugs though your body or heart may lure you into them. However, your intellect warns you against these habits and as you value your intellect, you listen to it and you stay away from such things or you keep them under control in a way that they don’t do damage to you.

Then there are people who rise to the second level and who develop more emotions than intellect. These are the people who use their emotional strength to achieve bigger things in life and these people are also able to control their physical urges. Taking a look at some examples, the poets, the singers, the actors, the painters and all other such creative people primarily belong to this category, though some of them may grow some intellect also. It should be noted that it may be relatively difficult for this type of people to control their physical urges as their emotions may get attached to some of those urges at times and hence they may not be able to get rid of them.

Talking about the third entity existing on the second level, as any one of the first two entities grows, the third one called ego essentially grows in most cases and this is where the problems starts. It should be noted that as your intellect grows, so may your ego and as your emotional strength grows, so may your ego. Another interesting fact is that your ego can use both your intellect as well as your emotions in order to get what it wants. We’ll discuss the exact working of ego, later on.

Some people may think that emotionally dominant people are not egoistic or they have far less grown egos than the intellectual types. However, it may not be true in many cases and both your heart and intellect can give rise to ego as well as to the problems generated by that ego. We’ll discuss this aspect in details, later on.

Moving on, as your intellect or emotions grow or so to say as your mental or emotional plane grows, so does your ego and this is where the problems starts. It is the time to understand that this entity called ego can give you surprisingly good material results as the attachment of ego to your material goals can speed up your chances of achieving success, many times. It is your ego which focuses on the targets and which motivates you to achieve them so that it may feel satisfied and it may grow even more. It is your ego which may tell you to stay away from alcohol and other such vices as they may weaken you and hence you may not achieve the goals set by it.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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When that happens, two opposite types of energies may initiate a complex reaction inside you. Your intellect may strongly advise you that this is all rubbish as there is no logic for this nonsense talk. Hence your intellect may tell you to convince your lover that she’s wrong and she shouldn’t think or talk like this. However, at the same time, your heart starts telling you that if you do so, she may get offended and you should not do anything to hurt her.

Since your heart is deeply and purely attached to this girl at this stage and you don’t want to offend her at any cost, you’re stuck in an inner conflict. Your intellect strongly suggests you to overrule this nonsense whereas your heart tells you to agree to what she says. All this may happen very fast and in a matter of a couple of seconds, your heart and intellect may have suggested you tens of things in support of their demands. As your heart is likely to win this case, you may eventually agree with her, against the advice of your intellect.

Hence you agree with her and you may even tell her that you also believe that morning dreams come true. Though your lover as well as your heart may welcome this answer, your intellect may strongly oppose it. Let’s now look at the process which is taking place inside you, shortly after you agree to your lover’s point of view.

By choosing to go against the advice of your intellect, you’ve given a signal to your subconscious mind that whenever there’s a conflict between your heart and intellect, you want to go with your heart and not with your intellect. At the same time, you’ve refused to listen to your intellect and you’ve chosen not to pay attention to the logics and facts given by it in support of its actions. By doing so, you’ve shown disinterest in your intellect and that also sends a negative signal as far as your mental plane is concerned.

However, this may not be much trouble as this is only one event. But as it starts happening every now and then, which may certainly be so because in order to maintain a love relationship on a healthy level, you may have to ignore your intellect and listen to your heart only, in most cases. With these repeated actions, you keep sending messages to your subconscious mind that you need more heart and less intellect.

This is because whenever you tend to use intellect while interacting with this girl, you may offend her or she may disagree with you during most of these incidences. For example, while chatting over coffee, your lover may tell you that she likes extra sugar in her coffee though some people advise her not to do so as it is unhealthy. She may also say that she doesn’t care about those people and she does what she likes as it is her life. She may then suddenly involve you in this equation and she may ask for your opinion on this matter. It means she may ask you whether she’s doing the right thing by having extra sugar in her coffee or not?

As you can understand, it is a tricky question. It is obvious that if you depend on your intellect alone in this case, you may end up offending your lover. This is because she’s already told you that she likes extra sugar in her coffee, some people advise her against this habit and she doesn’t care what they say. Kindly understand that this girl has already made it clear through these lines that she expects you to like her habit of having extra sugar in her coffee, though she’s done it in a subconscious way.

Kindly pay attention to the extra lines added by her, which say some people don’t like this habit of hers and she doesn’t care what they say. She may simply have said that she likes extra sugar in her coffee and she may then have asked for your opinion on this matter. If she only wanted to know your neutral opinion, this was a better way to do it. Then why did she use those extra lines? You’ll be surprised to know that she may not have used these extra lines consciously and they may just have slipped out of her mouth.

The reason why she used these extra lines is that deep inside, she’s afraid that you may also vote against extra sugar in coffee and if you do so, there’s another vote which tries to prove her wrong and ask her to quit this habit. As she enjoys this habit a lot and she may have a reasonably developed ego also, like all of us do, she may not want to hear anything against this habit. This is because the more is the number of people telling her that it is a bad habit, the more she may have to believe that it is a bad habit and she must quit it.

When this happens, there are many things going inside her. Since she likes extra sugar in her coffee, it means her heart supports it as most of the likings come from the heart. If she has a reasonably developed ego, that ego may also be attached to this habit as this is the job of ego. This means that almost all of us get attached to what we like and what we do on regular basis. When you get attached to a habit or anything you do on regular basis, your ego also gets attached to it and it doesn’t want to hear opinions against this thing.

This is because if you pay attention to such opinions and you start believing that what you’re doing is not right, this may hurt your ego. Kindly understand that it is not a simple admission of something wrong or something not so right being done by you, it is much more than that. For instance, when a number of people tell your lover that she’s wrong in having extra sugar in her coffee as that may expose her to health problems in the long run, it is not just one thing and there are many things happening inside her.

The first thing is her liking for extra sugar which goes against such advices. It means her heart may keep telling her not to pay attention to these people as otherwise, she may have to quit having extra sugar in her coffee. Hence there is already one vote against such advices. The second factor is that if she’s doing it for a long period of time and her ego has attached to this habit, the ego may also vote against such advice.

This happens because when a person tells you that having extra sugar in your coffee is bad for your health and hence you should stop having it, this simple statement tells you much more than you think it does. This statement tells you that extra sugar in your coffee is bad, this also tells you that you didn’t know or didn’t agree to this fact till now and that in itself tells you that you’re not a smart person. This is because you don’t know or realize simple facts that most people know and hence you’re not a smart person or maybe you’re a dumb person.

When it comes to being a less smart person than the average, your ego gets involved and it may take this statement as an insult. Kindly note that the focus has now shifted from extra sugar and it has been shifted to what type of a person you are. If you admit that having extra sugar in your coffee is wrong and you didn’t know it, you also admit that you know less than many people and the other person knows more than you; or probably much more than you.

This may instantly give you a feeling of inferiority. There are many ways you may react to this situation and we’ll discuss some of them. If you don’t have a well developed ego and you’re willing to learn and improve anytime, you may admit to this fact and you may say that you’ll try to quit this habit. However, when it comes to ego, most of us have it much bigger than even we know it and this is what the root cause of most problems related to relationships in this world is.

In case you have a reasonably sized ego, the chances of which are high, here is how you may respond. You may tell this person that extra sugar may be bad for some people but it is not essentially bad for everyone. Some people do well with extra sugar and you’re one of them. This may start an argument though it may be a controlled and decent type of argument. This is because if the other person also has a reasonably sized ego, the chances of which are once again high, the same process may start inside him also.

It means he knows something, he’s sure of it and he’s trying to convince you about this thing with the help of his knowledge. However, as you choose to contradict his opinion and you even start supplying facts in favor of your statements, his ego also gets involved. This is because if you prove that he’s wrong or he’s not completely right, it is once again not as simple as it looks and it goes as deep as his ego, though on a subconscious level.

It is interesting to see that this chain of statements starts from a simple line which says having extra sugar in your coffee is bad as it may expose you to health risks and hence you should not have it. However, sooner than you know, it may turn into an argument, primarily because of the involvement of egos from both sides. You may challenge this statement partly or fully and you may supply facts and logics in support of your replies. You do this because you don’t want to lose this argument and you don’t want to lose this argument because that hurts your ego by telling you that you’re a loser. Your admission may also tell you that so far, you’ve been doing this thing wrong which means you’re not as smart as you think you are.

All this is happening on subconscious level and at a fast pace. Hence you may not have conscious knowledge of all this happening inside you and you may simply feel like acting naturally according to the situation. You may tell this person that extra sugar is not bad for everyone and this is true in your case in particular. You may then also tell him that you’ve been having extra sugar in your coffee since childhood and you’ve not experienced any health issue due to this habit, so far. It means your ego may have come to the scene in order to protect itself and it may have decided to fight till the end.

As your words go to the other person, he may either agree to them or he may oppose them. In case he chooses to agree with you, he may have to accept that he was wrong in what he was saying or he was not completely right. When that happens, his ego may also get involved and he may choose to disagree with you. This is because this simple admission of being wrong may tell him that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is and he’s filled with incomplete or untrue knowledge.

If this person has acquired this knowledge recently, he may not have attached much ego to it and hence it may become easy for him to agree with you. However, if he has this knowledge for many years and he’s proven himself right many times during these years, there’s almost no chance that he may agree to your statement. In order to understand this concept, let’s try to look into the working of your ego.

Among many traits your ego has, it has a strong tendency to assign value to things or people; based on how much it has invested in them. It means if you’ve invested only a few days in something, your ego may not be much attached to it as it has not invested much time till this point. Another fact that should be understood at this point is that your ego always wants something in return for its investments and that is why it gets attached in the first place. As a general rule, the more is any type of investment made by it in anything or anyone, the more is the expectation for results or returns and accordingly, the more is the attachment.

The word attachment in its deep sense means that you’ve done something for someone or something and you’re now waiting for the returns. If the results don’t come or they are not as good as you expect, your ego gets hurt and you may react in a not so good manner. Another catch with your ego is that no matter how good the results may be, it may almost always tell you that your effort was more in comparison to the results delivered to you. This is one of the ways through which your ego feels satisfied.

For example, if you help a friend in time of need and you expect him to do something for you in return at a proper time, your ego gets attached to it. When the time comes and your friend helps you as you thought, even that help may disturb you, depending on the size of your ego. It may happen that your friend may offer you help which may be bigger or much bigger than your help. When that happens, there are many ways you may subconsciously respond to this act of help.

If you don’t have a big ego, you may feel grateful for this friend and you may at the same time pat yourself on your back as it was you who knew many years back that this friend will help you in times of need. It means you did the right thing by helping this friend long back and that help has paid in full now. This validates the ability of your intellect to judge people and through that, it satisfies your ego. You see, how your ego may find ways to interfere with most things and attach itself to them. However, this is only the case if you don’t have a big ego and it may get worse if you have one.

In case the size of your ego is big, the thought of being grateful to your friend may not come to your mind and a different type of thought pattern may initiate inside your subconscious mind. This thought pattern starts comparing the size of help offered by your friend with the size of help offered by you, as it wants to find out who offered more help. It should be noted that people with big egos may simply not be able to accept more from other people than they’ve given them. This happens because their egos feel satisfied only when they’ve given more and not when they’ve taken more.

In fact, their egos may start hurting them from inside if that happens. As a result, these people may start finding ways to balance out such situations. Coming to the present example, if you have a big ego, it may start comparing your help with your friend’s help. If a part of your intellect tells you that the help offered by your friend is bigger or much bigger than that offered by you but your ego is not able to digest this fact, you may respond in different ways to balance out this situation, depending on your personality type.

One of these ways is that you may resolve in your mind that as soon as you can, you’ll do something for this friend and that something may be of the quantum which may settle this equation in your favor. It means that such act should rearrange this equation in a way that the favor done to your friend by you in the past plus the favor to be done by you to him in future becomes more than the quantum of favor done by him to you. As you reach this decision, your ego feels partly satisfied and it waits for you to engage in such favor so that it may feel fully satisfied.

If you’re a different type of personality, you may start finding ways to assure yourself that the quantum of help offered by you was in fact greater than the quantum of help offered by your friend. For example, if you gave Rupees ten thousand to your friend about five years ago and he gave you Rupees twenty thousand recently, this is what your ego may do to feel satisfied. Your ego may use your intellect to its advantage and through your intellect; it may find facts and logics to assure you that the help offered by you is more in quantum.

For instance, your intellect may tell you that over these five years, the factor of inflation has played in a way that the value held by an amount of Rupees ten thousand five years back; now corresponds to the amount of Rupees twenty five thousand. This way, when the factor of inflation is taken into consideration, you gave your friend Rupees twenty five thousand and he gave you Rupees twenty thousand. Your ego reaches this conclusion that the help offered by you was bigger and hence it feels satisfied.

However, if through the calculations of inflation, your intellect finds that the amount of Rupees ten thousand about five years back now corresponds to the amount of Rupees fifteen thousand, your problem may still persist. This is because after adjusting the inflation factor, you gave your friend Rupees fifteen thousand and he gave you Rupees twenty thousand. There is a gap of Rupees five thousand, this gap is hurting your ego and it has to be balanced out in some way, so that your ego may feel satisfied.

Your ego looks towards your intellect for help and sooner than you may realize, your intellect may offer such help with yet another fact. Your intellect tells you that when you gave Rupees ten thousand to your friend, you earned Rupees twenty thousand per month, which means you gave half your salary to your friend. Now your friend has given your Rupees twenty thousand and he earns Rupees sixty thousand per month.

Hence your intellect does all the calculations and it tells you that five years back, you offered half of your salary to your friend and five years later, he’s offered one third of his salary to you. Since one half is more than one third, your help was indeed greater in quantum. The conclusion is once again reached that your help was greater in quantum than the help offered by your friend and your ego feels satisfied once again.

Even if this factor doesn’t work out in your favor, your ego may ask for more help and your intellect may come up with more facts and calculations to change this equation in favor of your ego. This may keep happening until your intellect has supplied facts which are sufficient to prove that the help offered by you was more in quantum than the help offered by your friend. You see, how complicated things may get even when a friend offers you help in time of need. All this happens because of your ego and this is why it is said that ego is the biggest hurdle on the path to spiritual growth and liberation.

Coming back to attachment of ego to things and people, the more you invest in something or someone, the more your ego gets attached to this thing or person and the more difficult it is get rid of this thing or person. Hence if you’ve acquired a piece of information recently and you haven’t used it much, your ego may not have strongly attached to it. It means you may find it relatively easier to let go of this piece of information or correct it if needed.

However, if you’ve acquired this piece of information many years back like ten years back, you’ve used it a lot and with the help of this information, you’ve convinced a number of people, it may become very difficult for you to let go of it as your ego may now have strongly attached to it. This is because if at this time, you come to know that this piece of information is incorrect, this fact leads to many conclusions.

The first conclusion is that you wasted ten years of your life believing in something which was not correct. This further tells you that you’re not a smart person as even an incorrect piece of information can fool you for ten years. Another thought that may cross your mind is that over these ten years, you’ve convinced dozens of people that this information is correct. If you now admit that it is wrong, it means you misguided all those people, which gives you one more reason to feel ashamed.

Going even further, the ideal thing to do in case of your admission that this piece of information is incorrect is that you should contact all those people or as many of them as you can; and you should tell them that the information given by you to them was incorrect. You should also apologize to them that due to ignorance, you supplied them with incorrect information. This is where the biggest problem happens.

It is not as simple as accepting something on merit and it goes far deeper. It’s not about whether what you believe in is true or not and it is rather about your entire identity, at least according to your ego. I mean, you have to believe that you were wrong about something for ten years, you misguided people and the hardest part; you should apologize to all of them. This is the time to understand that apology is one of the biggest enemies of ego. Hence it can do anything but apologize. This is what complicates this equation.

Since all these things look difficult to do, your ego encourages you to find another way. Your intellect comes to help and this other way is found. This ways says that if you prove that your piece of information is correct, you won’t have to face all these problems. Encouraged by your ego, you start arguing in favor of the information given by you and as the other person is also doing the same thing, the situation gets complicated.

You see, on the surface, it all looks like the mentioning of a simple piece of information that extra sugar is bad for health. However, deep down, it may soon become a question of existence as the result of this argument may decide whose existence is more valid or more valuable. This is why you find even simple discussions turning into serious arguments or even into disputes as no one wants to take a hit on his ego. It should be noted that most of this happens inside your subconscious mind and you may not have any idea about this. Hence you may engage in one such argument as you may consciously feel that you’re representing the truth whereas the real reason for this argument may not be known to you even.

Coming back to your lover, as she feels relaxed while sitting with you, she mentions this fact that she likes extra sugar in her coffee. However, as soon as she says it, her subconscious mind reminds her of all those incidents when other people told her to quit this habit as it is unhealthy. A chain of thoughts starts within her subconscious mind and it processes at lightening pace.

The first thought is followed by the subconscious thoughts that she argued with most of those people in support of her habit and the arguments didn’t go anywhere as she stood in favor of her statement whereas those people stood firm in support of their statements. As a result, a draw was reached in most of these cases, which means the matter heated up and then the argument reached a point where both parties didn’t have anything to say. This was the time when a dirty silence prevailed for some time and then both parties moved on to a different topic.

The fact that no conclusion was reached and both parties decided to stick to their point of views indicates that both of them had reasonably developed egos which didn’t want to lose the argument. As this series of thoughts crosses her subconscious mind, another very important thought comes to her subconscious mind. It is the thought that deep down, she disliked all those people for trying to make her believe that she has a bad habit. She may not have said it to their faces but she subconsciously developed partial disliking for those people.

The phrase partial disliking in this context means that when you interact with someone, both of you engage in a series of things affecting each other. Hence the other person does certain things which you like whereas he may do certain things you don’t like. All these findings are recorded on your subconscious mind and at any point in time, it has all this data as well as the conclusion of the analysis of this data for this person. It means there may be 40% likes for this person and 60% dislikes for this person, which further means that you like 40% habits of this person or things done by this person whereas you dislike 60% of his habits or actions.

Whenever you think about this person, your subconscious mind analyzes all this data and it gives you a conclusion based on calculations of your experiences with this person so far. This conclusion may be called your internal rating for this person. In the present case, this rating may be ‘not a very good person but may be tried in some situations’. The phrase some situations in this context means that he does certain things which you like and which constitute the 40% positive rating for him.

For example, he may be a very good mountain tracker and you may also like mountain tracking though you may not be as good as he is. Your subconscious mind registers this fact in favor of this person and it may encourage you to avail his company whenever you wish to go for mountain tracking as your previous experiences of mountain tracking with him were good.

Looking at a negative point, this person may love to show off his possessions or his qualities and you may strongly dislike it. It may have happened that while being at get-togethers with him, he may have showed off a lot and he may have even embarrassed you in front of other people. For instance, he may have said that once you two went for mountain tracking, you felt completely helpless at a point in time and you were able to complete the mission with his help only. Hence your ego dislikes it, your subconscious mind marks this habit of him as negative one and it uses this fact for calculations.

It means when you think of this person, your subconscious mind suggests you to avail his company while going for mountain tracking and at the same time, avoid his company when you plan for a get together as he may embarrass you in front of other people. Hence you may choose to go for mountain tracking with this person but you may avoid partying with him. All this goes inside your subconscious mind, all these calculations are processed very fast and you may not have even the slightest idea about any of these records and calculations.

All you may notice is the conclusion which is delivered in any case related to this person. It means when you think of this person, you may get conclusions like, ‘good for mountain tracking but bad for partying’. Similarly, there may be many other facts related to this person which your subconscious mind may have recorded through your interactions and experiences with this person over a number of years. This is how you generally rate a person and this is how your subconscious mind does all this job of recording the facts, marking them positive or negative, making calculations and then delivering the conclusions.

You see, how much is going inside your subconscious mind and how many calculations it may be doing when you engage in a simple looking conscious thought like who should I go with for mountain tracking or for partying. Since all of this happens at lightening pace as well as in the hidden as your subconscious mind is the hidden part of your mind, you may not have much conscious knowledge of this process.

Taking a look at the rating given by your subconscious mind to this person, this rating says, ‘not a very good person but may be tried in some situations’. It is interesting to see that the rating given for different habits of this person may not be the actual rating and it may only be his rating from your point of view and to be precise, from your ego’s point of view. Moving on, since your point of view is yours, which means your ego is attached to your point of view, it may not be neutral in most cases. Hence you mark a habit of this person as positive when your ego sees profit in that habit whereas you mark such habit as negative when your ego sees loss in it.

Himanshu Shangari

 

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Now suppose you want to increase this capacity to two kg of food at a time. If such is the case, this is what you require and this is how this entire process takes place. The first thing you need is the desire to increase your eating capacity and when you develop that desire, the second thing is to engage in conscious effort. It means you should try to eat more and more food in one meal and even if your capacity is reached, you should try.

This doesn’t mean you should forcibly eat even if you don’t have any space left in your stomach or so it tells you. It means when your capacity is reached, you should focus on your desire to eat more food and you should focus hard. At the same time, you should try to eat more food in small quantities even if it is ten grams. Ten grams of food may not look like making a difference but it does; as it creates demand for more space or more capacity.

This way, you’ll send signals to your subconscious mind that though the capacity is reached, you want to eat more. When that happens, your subconscious mind registers these signals and if they’re repeated again and again, your subconscious mind starts acting on them. As a result, it starts sending more energy towards your stomach and this energy is primarily supposed to complete two tasks.

The first task is to redesign your internal system in a way that it may handle more food at a time, thus giving you the option to eat more. The second task is to boost your digestive system in a way that by the time you eat the last ten percent of your food, ten or twenty percent of the already eaten food is channelized and hence it moves out of stomach, giving you more available space to pack in more food.

Through these two processes, your subconscious mind tries to expand your capacity to eat more food and this increased capacity can help you eat more and more. The limit of this capacity may reach when one of the two conditions is met. The first condition is that you stop putting demand for more capacity as you may have reached the capacity you wanted and you may not wish for more capacity. When that happens, the desire element gets out of the picture as the task to achieve your desired capacity has been accomplished and hence you may not want more capacity.

Therefore, your conscious mind starts sending signals to your subconscious mind once again that this much capacity is fine and you don’t want more capacity. Your conscious way of doing it is that while eating food, whenever you reach closer to this enhanced capacity, you start feeling satisfied and you don’t have the desire to eat more food. This feeling of satisfaction as well as this unwillingness to eat more food sends signals to your subconscious mind that you don’t need capacity more than this and hence you’re fine with it.

When these requests are sent again and again, your subconscious mind starts acting on them and it stops sending more targeted energy to your digestive system. The reason your subconscious mind does that is the fact that you have a specific amount of net energy and this energy is required to take care of all your day to day life functions. It is the job of your subconscious mind to strike a balance between how much energy is sent to which plane or to which part of your body and this job is done well by it, in most cases.

In cases when you don’t forward specific demands to expand any particular plane or ability in particular, you’re out of the picture and the operation is completely taken over by your subconscious mind. It means your system goes to autopilot mode and your subconscious mind makes all the decisions related to the distribution of energy to different planes. However, when you consciously want to change certain things about you, like you want to increase your eating capacity, you also become a part of this equation and hence the system goes to semi-autopilot mode.

This means though the distribution of energy is still carried out by your subconscious mind, your specific instructions are also included while making such distribution. In case of your conscious desire to eat more food, your subconscious mind starts sending more and more energy to your digestive system in order to expand or enhance it so that your wish may be fulfilled. As a result, your capacity to eat food is increased.

As long as you desire for more and more capacity, the distribution of energy is altered by this desire of yours and hence your subconscious mind keeps sending more and more energy to expand or enhance your digestive system. Once your desire is fulfilled, you stop sending such requests to your subconscious mind and hence it stops sending more energy to your digestive system. At this point, if you have reached the capacity to eat two kg food at a time and you don’t wish to increase this capacity, the job of your subconscious mind now becomes to maintain this capacity, instead of increasing it. Hence your subconscious mind makes sure that as much energy is supplied to your digestive system as is required to maintain the capacity to eat two kg solid food in a single meal.

The second factor that can stop this growth is the optimum physical limit to eat food in a single meal. It means even if you keep placing demands for more and more capacity and even if your subconscious mind keeps expanding your eating capacity, a stage may come when the optimum limit of your digestive system is reached. This optimum limit means how much food at the most you can handle at a time, being the type of species you are. In simple words, the optimum limit in this case is the maximum capacity of a human being to handle food in a single meal.

Though I have no idea about this capacity in your case as it may vary from person to person; let’s suppose it is ten kg for a single meal. It means if you wish, you can keep expanding your capacity from one kg to ten kg of solid food in a single meal and not beyond that. Hence the expansion of your capacity to eat may stop in two conditions. The first condition is that you stop wishing for more capacity and the second condition is that the optimum capacity is reached. In most cases, the expansion of your digestive system is stopped because of the first condition and not because of the second condition. It means your digestive system virtually keeps expanding as long as you want it to expand.

It should be noted that we’ve discussed only one aspect of this equation and there are other aspects also. For example, even if you increase your eating capacity to eat ten kg of solid food in one meal, you must be able to put the energy provided by this food to proper use. It means your daily calorie consumption or your requirement for physical energy should be such that the energy supplied by this food is utilized. If that doesn’t happen, the excess energy may start converting into fat and as a result, you may start putting on more and more weight.

You may be surprised to know that even when you keep gaining weight, the decision to maintain or even reduce your present eating capacity is still controlled by your own desire. It means as you gain more and more extra weight, though the basic functions of your body may become difficult to manage, your subconscious mind may still not reduce your eating capacity. This is the time to know that though your subconscious mind is a very powerful entity living inside you, it only works to facilitate your wishes in most cases.

It means your subconscious mind doesn’t have an agenda of its own and it operates more on the agendas given by your conscious mind, in most cases. Hence your subconscious mind doesn’t stop you from eating more and there are only two things that can do so. The first thing is that with the passage of time and with extra load, some of your digestive organs may become incapable of processing excessive amount of food for you. When that happens, your optimum limit to eat a specific quantity of food in a single meal is reduced and accordingly, you have to eat less now.

The second factor is once again the desire factor. In this case, you may keep putting more and more extra weight and though your digestive organs may remain intact, you may start disliking your body shape. When that happens, you may consciously start thinking about reducing your body weight and when you engage in this chain of thoughts, your intellect tells you that extra food eaten by you is the root cause of this excessive fat.

As a result, you may start developing dislike for too much food and as this dislike develops, two things happen simultaneously. The first thing is the rise of your desire to get rid of this extra fat at any cost and the second thing is to eat less food. Through repeated signals, your subconscious mind starts acting on both these requests. Acting on your first request, it starts making you interested in techniques and methods which may help you reduce extra fat. Hence you find yourself getting interested in going to a gym, for regular walks or for any other such activities which help reduce extra fat from your body.

Acting on your second request, your subconscious mind starts sending less energy to your digestive system. When that happens, the capacity of your digestive system starts decreasing. This is because in order to maintain any particular capacity, your digestive system needs a specific amount of energy, like all other systems do. For instance, if a car has an optimum speed of hundred miles per hour and in order to do so, it needs ten drops of fuel every second; this is what may happen when you change some variables.

It should be noted that the engines of cars are so designed that as you put demand for more speed and as they try to run faster, they need more fuel in order to do so. There’s a part in the engine which increases or decreases the supply of fuel drops to the engine, depending on how slow or fast it wants to run. It means the engine puts a demand for the amount of fuel to be sent to it based on the speed demanded by the driver; and the other part supplies that amount of fuel to it on regular basis.

Hence if a car needs ten drops of fuel every second in order to run at a speed of hundred miles per hour, this speed can be reduced in many ways. One of these ways is to reduce the capacity of the engine, the second way is to flatten a tyre in order to provide more resistance and similarly, there may be other ways of doing this. Coming to the way relevant to our example, let’s make certain changes to the fuel dispensing part in a way that at the most, it may supply nine drops of fuel per second and not more than that.

When that happens, the capacity of engine as well as all other factors remains the same and only the maximum amount of fuel which may be supplied to engine per second has been changed or so to say, reduced. Comparing it to our body and translating it in terms of energy, we have reduced the amount of energy that may be supplied per second to the engine, in the form of fuel. Whenever the driver puts demand for more speed, the engine tries to extract more fuel per second from this part and hence the speed keeps increasing.

However, as the car reaches a specific speed let’s assume ninety miles per hour, it starts consuming nine drops of fuel per second in order to maintain this speed. If the driver wishes to increase the speed further, he may not be able to do so. This is because the engine now needs more than nine drops of fuel per second in order to carry out the task of achieving a speed more than ninety miles per hour. Since the part is designed to supply nine drops per second at the most, the engine may not find more energy to meet this new demand.

Hence the engine may lack the required amount of energy and it may not be able to run the car at a speed more than ninety miles per hour. The driver may think that this is the optimum capacity of the engine but it is not so in reality. The engine is still capable of running this car at a speed of hundred miles per hour but it is not getting the required amount of energy to accomplish this task. The maximum amount of fuel per second or energy supplied to this engine enables it to reach the speed of ninety miles per hour when all other conditions are ideal and hence it can only reach that speed.

You see, though the engine still has the capacity to perform more, the reduction in the supply of energy has restricted it from doing so. Similarly, the supply of fuel drops per second or so to say, the supply of energy may be reduced further and the maximum speed achieved by this car can be lowered, though the optimum capacity of the engine may still remain the same.

A process which is not exactly the same but which is similar to this happens inside us also. When you develop desires for eating less food, your subconscious mind acts on them and it starts sending less energy to your digestive system. As a result, the capacity of your digestive system starts reducing due to lack of required energy to carry out this operation. Accordingly, you may witness reduction in your eating capacity over a period of time, just like you noticed increase in your eating capacity over a period of time. It should however be noted that this entire process takes place very slowly and it can easily take some weeks or even some months for you to notice significant increase or reduction in your eating capacity.

Now that you’ve understood the working of your eating capacity, it should be easier to understand the mechanism of expansion of your mental plane or intellect. There are primarily two factors required for this task, your desire to send more and more energy to your mental plane and the gradual enhancement of your mental plane to absorb and channelize more and more energy.

Hence if your mental plane has the capacity of 10 units at a time, it means it can absorb and channelize 10 units of energy at this time. Accordingly, it will be able to deliver intellectual performance matching this input of energy. If the maximum possible capacity of your mental plane is ten thousand units of energy and it is operating at 10 units only, at this stage, it is easy to understand that you may not be able to produce much intellectual work and your mental plane has the ability to expand hundred times from this point.

As a result, you may not be able to understand most things as more than ten units of energy may be required by your mental plane to break those things into constituent units and give you proper understanding of their mechanisms. However, if you keep trying hard even after failing again and again, you forward specific request to your subconscious mind, through these conscious acts of your desire to understand. Hence your subconscious mind registers a new task which says that you really need to understand more things related to mental plane and it starts doing this task for you.

Accordingly, your subconscious mind starts sending more and more energy to your mental plane and at the same time, it starts stimulating your mental plane to absorb and channelize more energy. It is a very slow process but it does bring results. Over a period of some years, your mental plane may increase in capacity and it may now start handling twenty or even thirty units of energy. Technically it means that your intellect has grown two or three times.

In practical language, you may now become able to understand the mechanism of all such things related to intellect, which require your mental plane to consume less than thirty units of energy, if your mental plane now has the capacity of thirty units. As there may be hundreds of concept which require your mental plane to have a capacity between ten and thirty units in order to be understood, you may start understanding all these hundreds of concepts. People notice that you’ve become more intellectual and you also witness ease in understanding matters which you found difficult some years ago.

As your mental plane reaches the capacity of thirty units, it may understand a number of new things but it may still not understand concepts which require the capacity of mental plane to be more than thirty units. Hence you understand hundreds of things previously not understood but you still find thousands of new things worthy of being understood. At this stage, two things may happen.

If you’re satisfied with the performance of your mental plane and you don’t want more intellect, the desire element goes away. This is because you don’t wish for more intellect and this message is conveyed to your subconscious mind. If you want to practically notice how you convey this message to your subconscious mind, pay attention to this.

You may have noted that while trying to understand some difficult looking concepts, you keep trying hard even if you don’t succeed. When you get tired trying, you may take a break for a while but this thought may keep crossing your mind every now and then, as to how to break that concept into pieces so that you may understand it. This is how you forward desires or demands to your subconscious mind. While trying hard to understand this concept and while thinking about it even when you’re not working on it, you convey this message to your subconscious mind that it is important for you to understand this concept.

Your subconscious mind registers this request and it starts working to fulfill it as already explained. Now consider another situation. You look at a concept, you try to understand it, you fail to do so and you quit. It means you don’t understand it and you may not even want to understand it. Hence you move away from it and when that happens, you don’t think about it in your free time. The type of message you’re sending to your subconscious mind is different in this case, compared to that in the first case.

In the first case, you consciously worked hard to understand a concept and even when you failed, you kept thinking about it. The message conveyed to your subconscious mind is that this concept is important for you to understand. The word important means a desire as there is nothing more important for you than your desires in most cases. Among all your desires also, your most intense desire or so to say your primary desire is the most important to you and you may be willing to do almost anything to achieve it.

This willingness sends strong messages to your subconscious mind and it starts doing everything in its power to fulfill this desire at the earliest. Looking into the second case, you try to understand a concept, you don’t succeed and you quit. Kindly note you’re not interested to give it more time as you don’t find it important. It means you’re willing to move ahead with your life, without understanding this concept. Hence you move on and you don’t think about it in your free time.

Now look at your thought pattern as well as your approach in this case. While trying to understand this concept, you didn’t try as hard and for as long as you did in the first case. Hence your approach is less intense in this case. Coming to your thought pattern, you don’t think about the need to understand this concept when you’re not working on it and in fact, you’ve quitted this job. Hence your thought pattern doesn’t attach importance to this concept.

Through this less intense approach and through the lack of importance attached to this concept, the message conveyed to your subconscious mind is that you don’t understand this concept and you don’t even want to. Hence there is no demand for the expansion of your mental plane and so your subconscious mind doesn’t try to send more energy to expand your mental plane. If you keep this status, it means your subconscious mind will keep sending as much energy to your mental plane, as much can enable it to keep having a capacity of thirty units and nothing more than that.

However, if you’re not satisfied with this capacity and you want to understand even more, the same process of creating yet another desire for more mental ability is started once again. Your subconscious mind tries to expand your mental plane even more and over a significant period of time, slowly but surely, it may succeed. If this process continues throughout your life, you may end up having the capacity of your mental plane as sixty units.

As your mental plane reaches the capacity of sixty units, you become able to understand many more things and concepts which require the application of intellect, to be decoded. Since the journey of the soul is continuous and intellectual abilities are the attributes of the soul instead of being those of the physical body; you are born again with your mental plane having a capacity of sixty units.

It means you’re an intellectual child and if your desire to achieve even more intellect remains strong in this life also, you may keep expanding your mental plane in this life also. This way, you may keep expanding your mental plane as long as you desire and as long as the maximum allowed limit is not reached. Some of you may think that this way, a person interested in more and more development of intellectual plane should reach the maximum allowed limit in a matter of some lives. It may look this easy but it is not and this is why.

The process which works to increase the capacity of your mental plane works in the backward direction also and this is what may change everything. It means that if you’ve reached an intellectual capacity of three hundred units in a life and you take a diversion in this life, your mental capacity may start decreasing instead of increasing or even instead of sustaining. Yes, that may happen due to a number of reasons and here is one of them.

Suppose in this life, you like a girl lot and you fall in love with her. Your love relationship may continue for many years and during these years, you may develop different types of desires. Since this girl has now become your primary desire, it is natural for you to find more and more ways to make her feel happy and to connect with her on deeper and deeper levels. When you forward these desires to your subconscious mind, a problem starts taking place.

Your intellect and your heart work in opposite directions in most cases and hence they may prove bad for each other in most cases. Since you now desire to get as close to this girl as you can, your subconscious mind starts working to fulfill this desire. As a result, it starts sending more energy to your heart since the matters of love are dealt with by your heart and not by your intellect. In fact, all relationships in their healthiest forms are dealt with by your heart and not by your intellect.

Though increasing number of people have started to control their relationships with their intellects rather than using their hearts for this job, this practice has only resulted in more problems in relationships. Any relationship can be strengthened in its truest sense, only through your heart and not through your intellect. This is because intellect is all about calculations, profits and losses whereas heart is all about feeling and living. Hence your intellect may warn you not to let go of your material possessions even in case of your loved ones whereas your heart may encourage you to let go of everything material if that makes your loved one happy and it gives you a feeling of joy.

As your subconscious mind starts sending more energy to your emotional plane, it starts expanding. As a result, you now have two different types of energies which generally don’t go well with each other and which stand in opposition to each other. Let’s now look at some of the things which may happen during this love relationship and which may demand your intellect to reduce in capacity.

Going to the beginning phase of one such relationship, suppose you like a girl with all your heart, you’re sitting with her over coffee and a conversation is going on. During the course of conversation, she may say a number of things which may not make sense when scrutinized by your intellect. For example, she may tell you that she saw a fancy dream and she believes it’ll come true. She may even tell you that she strongly believes that morning dreams often come true. After telling you all this, she may ask for your opinion on this.

Himanshu Shangari