So much enthusiasm

Aug 26, 2010, 12.00am IST
Swami Sukhabodhananda.

Live your life with passion. Edmund Hillary, the first to climb Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay, had faced failure thrice, earlier.

Later at a party hosted in his honour in New Zealand, he looked at the portrait of Mount Everest and remarked: "Mt Everest has a problem...it cannot grow more than 29,000 feet, but I can grow in my ability to climb farther than that." That's passion.

Our lower self is jeevatma and the higher self is Paramatma. One can operate from either level. Operating from the higher self consistently generates enthusiasm.

Any situation viewed as threat is an example of one involving the lower self that operates as an obstructing thought. The higher self operates as a supporting thought.


If our immune system is weak, the body is prone to disease. So too, we have a psychological immune system. If our psychological immune system is weak...we are upset, hurt, frustrated. Like our genes, our minds are also products of evolution of many years. When our psychological immune system is weak, we are prone to perceive external situations as dangerous or as obstruction. It only calls for strengthening the psychological immune system so as to be powerful individuals.

How do you make it powerful? Just like how we make the physical body powerful by right exercise and diet, so too, the psychological immune system can be made powerful by not allowing the lower self in us to operate...instead we should encourage the higher centre to operate in our daily lives.

We tend to operate from acquired knowledge, rather than the cosmic intelligence of the cell. Where do we draw our identity from? Most of us draw our identity from acquired knowledge. Don't we? Why is it so? Because through acquired knowledge, our ego is established, our identity is established, and our address is established. In cell intelligence - that we have not created, but are gifted with - our uniqueness is not established. Ego is established in the 'i'. Acquired knowledge is the lower self. The knowledge from which we are born - the cell evolution, is the 'higher self'.

Let us draw our identity from this growing cell that is the higher self. But alas, we don't trust this. Instead we trust our acquired knowledge. In life we should eliminate our lower self and operate from cosmic intelligence. The acquired knowledge will be supportive in our growth and not obstructive. Understand this distinction.

Acquired knowledge should support the higher self, not obstruct it. For example, in a game of tennis, when you see a ball coming from an opponent, your thought should not interfere with it and obstruct your spontaneous effort to hit a ball. But if you think, 'Oh, i am going to miss it because my history of missed stroke last time'; then acquired knowledge is an obstruction. As a player, you cannot succeed.

Suppose, the higher self looks at the ball differently - "With a focused awareness i allow my being that has evolved to guide me in hitting a ball. In case i miss it, the higher self being a learning and evolving being, makes required corrections the next time i face a ball...but whereas acquired self or the 'lower self' creates an image that i am not good and i am not lucky. This image makes me look at a ball next time as a threat and acts as an obstruction. The lower self is rigid, while the higher self is flexible in learning and growing. I will not allow my static conclusions to decide my action instead allow my flow to decide a response."