INTENTION, ATTENTION, & MANIFESTATION

The universe functions with intention, attention, and manifestation. Wherever you put your attention that starts manifesting in your life, if you put too much attention on anger, anger manifests, too much attention on lust, lust manifests, on greed, greed manifests. When the intention is love, even anger is beneficial, that’s what was the case with the rishi, Dhurvasa, every time he was angry some great thing happened on the planet, and it did only good to all mankind. Are you with me, do you hear what I’m saying? So observe the intention, and put your attention where you want to put it, whatever you would like to manifest: focus on imperfection and imperfection will manifest, focus on love in life and love manifests.

Addiction starts with the repeated experience of the same sense object, repeated experience of a particular sense object creates an addiction, or a habit. The repeated association with a particular sense object creates a sense of craving for it. Leaving the habit becomes painful, but having it does not give you any bliss, or ecstasy - this is the definition for a habit.

If you are habituated to eating ice cream almost everyday, you get a craving for it. Nobody is born with a craving, but you have started a habit within you that has created the craving. Drinking coffee every day is not carrying you to heaven, but leaving it gives you a headache. Similarly, all those who are into alcohol and drugs, look at their faces, they are not in an ecstatic state of consciousness filled with joy. In fact it is the other way around, there is no joy on an alcoholics face, even if you squeeze it not a drop of joy will come out, the alcohol has cleanly washed out the joy with which one is born. That joy and innocence has been robbed away, washed out. So alcoholism, sex addiction, any type of drug addiction, all these are the result of repeated experience, or association of a particular sense with the object of sense

Again it is a fine line, when the association happens repeatedly, desire for it arises more, and whether the desire is fulfilled or unfulfilled, anger comes. Whenever there is anger, behind the anger you will see there is a desire, a craving, and the craving brings anger. When you become angry, the next step is you get attached, and whomsoever or whatsoever you are angry with, sooner or later you regret and regret brings more attachment to the person, or situation, or to the sense object. By regretting you don’t move above some thing, you go more into it. When you think of someone whom you hate, your nervous system undergoes such a distortion, there is a distortion happening within your system. This means your nervous system is assuming the form of the person whom you dislike, and when you keep doing it again and again you get all their impressions, and your system becomes like them. So when you become like them you get drawn to them, and this is entanglement.

The importance of spiritual practices, meditation is to put the wheel back, it is to bring back the pleasant memories more and more, and to reduce the unpleasant memories to an almost insignificant amount.

An obsession brings anger, anger brings entanglement, and entanglement clouds the intellect, your intellect blurs, your wisdom is lost, judgment is lost, sharpness of awareness is lost, and your ability to access the situation is lost. The entanglement whether out of love, or out of hate, clouds the intellect. A clouded intellect doesn’t let you be in peace and such a distorted intellect doesn’t even bring up the subtle feelings in you, any feelings you’ll have will be gross feelings, violent feelings, you don’t feel lighter when there is hatred within you.

Your vibration indicates what is inside you, whether you are light like a flower, or you are heavy like a stone, this shows up in your vibrations, in your surroundings. Look at someone who is worried, there is such a sense of heaviness, and heaviness is contrary to joy, contrary to love, and contrary to all that you cherish as human values.

However, those moments have been beneficial when you have expressed your anger without really getting mad, or losing yourself completely. You can show anger, but not that anger in which you are lost, shivering and shaking. In life it is impossible to deal with all situations without at least sometime, somewhere showing some anger. Don’t expect life to be a sort of flat, bland, goody-goody thing. Sometimes you have to show anger, it’s alright, but those moments have you noticed that it’s not really taking away your sense of peace, or sense of centredness. Like the rishi, Dhurvasa, he was a sage, a saint who used anger as an exercise, to see whether in spite of anger he didn’t lose himself, or lose his centredness.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

SRI SRI RAVI SHANKAR The writer is an Indian yoga guru, a spiritual leader, founder of The Art of Living