62. The Juice of Experience🔗

The next sutra is very powerful sutra. Here Patanjali gives the solution - relaxing from these thought patterns through constant and intensive practice of unclutching.

Sometimes people ask me, 'If we don't remember anything in the inner world, how are we going to maintain our relationships, how are we going to live our life? If we don't remember our past mistakes, how are we going to develop ourselves?' Please understand, if you actually unclutch more and more from the memories inside, the essence or juice of those memories will become part of you. By constantly remembering your past mistakes, you will only create guilt; you will not develop yourself. By unclutching from your past memories, you will assimilate the essence, the experience gained from those mistakes. Experience is not about the number of incidents you go through in your life; it is about the number of lessons you learned from those incidents! That learning, that assimilation, happens only when you unclutch from the emotions connected with that experience. Otherwise you will be only carrying self-doubt from that experience; you are only going to lose trust in yourself because of your past mistakes.

That juice which you need to learn from that incident is digested, it becomes part of your life, by unclutching. You don't have to remember the incident itself, the only thing that needs to happen is updating yourself using those lessons, upgrading yourself using those lessons, and that happens only if you can look into the memory face to face.

A small story: A guy calls the mental hospital and asks, ‘Hello, is this the State Mental Hospital?’ The telephone operator answers, ‘Yes it is.’ The guy asks, ‘Can I speak to Mr. Joseph in Room 727?’ The operator says, ‘One moment, I will connect you.’ There is a pause, and then she says, ‘I am sorry, Mr. Joseph is not answering.’ The guy says, ‘Great! That means I must have really escaped!’

Many a time you don’t want to look into a past incident or mistake because it creates so much of pain. You try to remember the incident so that you will not make the same mistake again, but unconsciously you are trying to forget the same incident, because it is too painful for you. It is a struggle, it is a struggle. A person who is caught in this struggle with his memory is a split personality.

When you remember the incident with joy or pain, you cannot learn from it. You will just be lost in the fantasy or the pain associated with the incident. When you unclutch from the emotional charge associated with each memory, when you relax from it, what needs to happen automatically happens inside you.

Many times, I don’t want to look into a past incident or mistake because it creates so much of pain.