Excel Without Stress
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You are not in tension. You are the tension.
Worry and stress are closely interrelated. They are like parent and child. One cannot exist without the other. What works for one works for the other as well. However, given that stress is considered the biggest destroyer of health in today's world, it is worth going into more depth on this subject.
Four hundred years ago the French philosopher Rene Descartes declared, ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ This has formed the basis of modern thinking. Billions of people in this world have followed Descartes for generations believing that unless each one outthinks the other they cannot succeed in this world.
Descartes was right, and he was wrong. He was right in that that the human system does not know how to live without its mind, without thinking. As a result human beings become slaves to their minds. They live in bondage.
Many centuries before Descartes, a vedic sage declared that man does not begin to exist till he stops thinking. Adi Shankara, at the age of eight, faced his future master across the waters of the holy Tungabhadra river. The master asked him, ‘Who are you?’
In response Shankara said, ‘I am not the mind, I am not the intellect, I am not the ego and I am not the senses. I am beyond all that. I am pure consciousness.’
We are merely a bio-machine as long as we think we are mind and body. We are just a shade better than the animals we ascended from as long as we allow our senses to guide us. But the true potential of human beings is not merely to think and prove that we are superior to animals. The purpose of human life is to machine. That is why constantly we connect all the past happenings of the mind as a chain, and start believing our mind is a solid thing.