Such challenges will make us even stronger.
Imagine everything is going so well and people are listening and tra la la....
then there is no fun.
How will you grow in such an environment?
You need challenge.
Strong opinions need not be wrong
opinions or something which is not coming from the heart.
We give what is authentic, what you feel in your heart that this is right or wrong.
That’s all. In the business world also, there are kinds of people
who often go away or enjoy so much of luxury
with bosses because they do wrong things.
But these are all temporary.
Even if they may survive about two years,
three years, 20 years, but the end will not be good.
People who are looking after the interests of the company
and when you're authentic about it, even the boss will appreciate, “Yes.
Whatever Saravanan is saying is correct.”
So always express your heartfelt opinion.
When the mind wants to take over and you want to impress the boss,
then it is a different story you see.
But then too you realize that “Oh! I am trying to prove a point.
I want to subdue the other person's opinion.”
So spirituality, again, comes to our rescue.
It helps us in realizing that, ”Okay, I should not be so much carried
away because of my egoistic ideas.”
So I have to differentiate whether I am interested in
welfare of the company or whether I am trying to impose my own ideas.
So it's a great, great thing, actually.
Such challenges are good.
Such challenges will make us even stronger.
Imagine everything is going so well and people are listening and tra la la
then there's no fun.
How will you grow in such an environment?
You need challenge.
Challenges are naturally provided by the work environment and, again,
your family environment
also. Not all families have harmony.
They look apparently happy,
apparently luxurious, apparently affluent.
But when you go deep down, see the inner life
of each of these members, you feel sorry, you feel sad.
They all live in their illusions, illusions
that possessions will protect them.
I am not against possessions.
My Master used to say, “if you can make a crore,
go ahead and make 10 crores.
If you have the ability to make 10 crores, make 100 crores.
It is okay to make tons of money.
Use it wisely.” What has helped me
is, again, my trust and faith in myself.
Confidence, when do I lose confidence in myself?
When do I stop loving myself?
The failures after failures, you start blaming yourself, that ”Oh,
I failed and I failed and I failed.”
And you start disliking your thoughts, disliking your actions.
In order to avoid these various failures
one has to become more contemplative before we implement any actions.
I recommend a great book which I read many, many years back
called - As a Man Thinketh.
I will start with the last page of the chapter and come to the first page.
I will put it in a very simple way that, the author,
he says, “Why do you feel sad?
And why do you feel happy?"
When things go
as per your desired trajectory and things happened
because you have wished it like that and it happened like that.
And when things don't happen, according to my action, which I planned for,
I become sad. So the results of my action decide whether I will be happy or unhappy
and the results of my action depends on how well I planned
my action. How well I planned my action depends upon my thoughts,
how I played my game in my mind. And the kinds of thoughts
I regulate in my mind depends upon my attitude.
Now it becomes a vicious cycle.
First, I will speak in Hindi, how this gets related.
In fact, he (James Allen) says thoughts are the main thing.
Thoughts leading to actions, actions leading to results,
results leading to
either or. But he did not
write about what precedes thoughts.
Vrittis (tendencies) we call in Hindi.
Vritti leads us into a particular level of Pravritti.
Attitude defining your actions -
Pravritti.
Pravritti
will lead you to another thing
that makes your nature what we call Prakrithi.
You repeat things again
and again, that becomes your second nature.
What we call “Aapka prakrithi aisa hogaya, (Your nature has become like this)
because Pravritti aisa hai. (because your attitude is like this.)
Aapka pravritti aisa kyu hai? (Why is your attitude like this?)
Because vritti aisa hai. (Because your tendency is like this)
So, vritti leading to pravritti
leading to prakrithi.
And from Prakriti, we create our own Prarabdha, our destiny.
So these are all connected.
How to regulate our tendencies?
That's why Heartfulness comes into picture. The more and more Cleaning we do,
we are able to remove samskaras, impressions.
We are slowly getting deconditioned.
So far, we have been conditioned in a particular way.
Now we want to erase that, we want to decondition ourselves.
So when the emotional baggage that we carry guides us
in a particular direction, when that emotional baggage is removed,
you are able to have, what Zen or Buddhism calls,
a beginner's mind, a fresh mind,
meaning you don't have any biases.
You don't have any preconditioning.
So I have to free myself from all kinds of impressions.
Impressions are of two types again.
You know, many people argue with me that somebody
had cheated me in the business world
or in a relationship.
So this cheating has two aspects to it.
One is that you form emotional baggage.
It also has what we call a cognitive baggage.
You always remember
that so-and-so has done that to me. This memory
part is there, that's what we call cognitive memory of
so-called cheating.
But there is an emotional memory also.
We call it samskaras.
Cognitive memory makes me more careful
not to trust this person in the business world or in a relationship.
So we learn, we do learn something, though
we have forgiven the past.
Cognitive memory is always good that when somebody sneezes
and I also inhale that I get Covid, for example. It is a memory.
Both kinds of memory,
when you suffer at the same time, next time you'll be wearing a mask.
So we learn from all these things. In relationships
also, we may forgive
but the cognitive part of it
will come to our rescue for the rest of our life -
not to repeat the same thing again.