36. You just Love your Problems🔗

A small story: A guy goes to the psychiatrist and shares that he has a strange problem – he thinks that he is a dog!’ The psychiatrist says, ‘I will surely try to help you. What kind of dog do you think you are?’ The guy says, ‘I think I am a small dog with black and brown patches - don’t you see me?’ The doctor says, ‘Don’t worry, I will try to help you. Can you first lie down on that couch? I will try to find out the root cause of the problem.’ The guy says, ‘Oh no, I cannot do that!’ The doctor asks, ‘Why?’ The guy says, ‘Because I am not allowed up on the furniture.’

Understand, if you are convinced about some problem, it just becomes your reality, and you become completely powerless before it. Instead of going to the root of the problem and solving it, completing it, you go on holding onto the surface.

Sometimes, you are afraid that if you go to the root of the problem, it may disappear! By now, you are so comfortable with problems that you are afraid to come out of your comfort zone and live without any problems! Your problems are your companions. You just love them. If you don’t have anything to worry about, you feel lonely, confused! So you don’t want to look into the root of the problem.

Viparyayo mithyājñānam... in this one sutra, Patanjali very beautifully analyzes and describes ALL our problems.

Please understand, most of the time we suffer only with our conditioning, not with the situation itself! 99.9% of the sufferings we have are not related to the external situation, they are related to our internal conditioning. This is a real incident which happened in our sangha:

One of our brahmacharis, who has been trained in all our traditional puja and other spiritual practices, was invited to conduct a spiritual program in another state of India. When he conducted the program, he was pronouncing the Sanskrit mantras so beautifully that the local temple priests they thought that he is a Brahmin, an upper class boy. They saw the way he sat, and his body language was so graceful when he was chanting the mantras, that they thought he was a Brahmin; they paid their respects and touched his feet and did namaskar.

Later, after he left, they found out that he is not a Brahmin. That's all!

Till the previous evening, the temple priest was honoring the brahmachari, feeling blessed that he is able to receive him and touch his feet. Now, suddenly this priest is in depression! He is in depression; he is continuously taking a bath for three days... three days he is taking a bath! And, for three days he did not enter the temple, for three days he is performing all the rites to clean himself, because he touched the feet of a non-Brahmin!

I was shocked. If any inauspiciousness is supposed to happen by touching that non-Brahmin, it should have happened when you touched him - not when you heard the news! When you touched his feet, you felt blessed, auspicious, blissful; but when you hear the news, suddenly the same blissful experience becomes inauspicious! It is nothing but the past conditioning. Almost all your sufferings are related to your internal conditioning, not to the external situation. Your mind is programmed, your bio-computer is programmed, at a young age. You live based on your programs, you take decisions based on those programs, you walk and talk based on your programming. You do everything based on the programming, yet you don't realize that you are programmed!

This is what Patanjali calls wrong knowledge. It is not just wrong knowledge; the very cognition, the very input, the way in which you receive life, is distorted - because it is based on past conditioning and incompletions. And naturally, when the way in which you input and process the data is wrong, the way in which you make a decision, the way in which you deliver your output, will also be wrong! This is viparyayo mithyājñānam.

Do this as an exercise, as homework. Sit down for an hour and write at least ten incidents where you made the same mistake of interpreting your present moment using the past conditioning. You will see how your mind is behaving, how your life is happening. You don't even have to bother or struggle to correct yourself.

The big problem is, before you even understand the depth of the problem, you start trying to correct it! Then the problem can never end! Just understand the depth of the problem, that's enough. Suddenly you will see the transformation inside you. Just by your understanding the depth of the problem, the transformation starts happening.

Please understand, again and again the Upanishads declare, all the enlightened Masters declare - Whatever IS, is Divine; it IS God. If you see anything other than the Divine, if you have any other experience other than bliss in life, you have this problem; you need this sutra!

Contemplate on this sutra. You don't need to repeat it; just internalize it. Constantly contemplate on this sutra, on this idea: interpreting based on past conditioning leads to misconception or wrong understanding.

ACTIVITY

Write ten incidents where you came to the wrong conclusion because of the past conditioning, and understood the whole incident differently when you looked into the same incident with restful awareness, without carrying your past incompletions into it.

Imagination, as opposed to reality, which is the result of mere words - this is known as vikalpa or fantasy.