Monstrous Thoughts

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The other day my neighbour and I were having a little chit chat in which I was mentioning about Oprah Winfrey’s decision to close down her talk show shortly. As I am an avid fan of Oprah Winfrey I was eulogizing her virtues and her courage to call it a day when she is still in the pinnacle of success. I have personally found it most admirable the way Oprah Winfrey has handled the most sensitive issues in her shows with such insight and tenderness. If she has received accolades for her philanthropic work she also has had her quota of trying times when people dragged her to courts. She has come out as a better soul with every test. When I told my young neighbour that it is not an easy decision to make considering the fact that she has been in the limelight for more than two decades and her work has been so dear to her heart, my neighbour told me she failed to understand what was so remarkable about Oprah’s announcement when she had amassed so much wealth. Given the same situation, my neighbour said, she would have done the same thing.

Although I felt she was callous about Oprah I could sense it was more to do with her problems than with anything else. When I gently asked her about it, she said,
“Oh! It is nothing big but to me it is all very important. Every morning I wake up with anxiety thinking whether my maid would come, whether my children would go to school on time, whether I would be able to get my husband’s breakfast ready, whether my boss would be satisfied with my report. By the time I get ready for the office I am already tired and stressed. I wish I too could call it a day but I have to wait till my children finished their studies. It is so very difficult to have a comfortable life style with a single person’s income. When my needs are fulfilled I will definitely chuck my job”. I knew in my heart my neighbour would never be without a job for she would always find a valid excuse to earn that extra money. Moreover, it is considered the order of the day to put your children in a school, you think, is the best, even if you have to pay through your nose to meet out the demands of the so called elite school. If she thinks her desires are just needs it is okay because she does not expect others to fulfill it, not even her husband. I decided the time was not right to lecture her on her desires which are the root of all problems and about the renunciation. Firstly I should be qualified to talk about it, which I am not, and secondly, I should see whether the person is in the right frame of mind to listen.

What my neighbour said set me thinking about the state of the most working women who have to go through the anxieties day after day. Although a major section of the women in rural India work purely for economic reasons it is the other segment of women who work for reasons other than money that is growing in size. Correspondingly the thought pattern of these women is also similar. Most of them work to have those extra fringe benefits and in pursuit of this they are ready to go through the ordeal day after day. They say, they “have to” go to work instead of saying they “want to”. Their sentences are replete with “putting up with the boss”, “managing the situation”, “manipulating the relationships”, “suppressing the anger”. Many of these women consider working place as drudgery; Monday being the monstrous leader of five successive days and their feelings start showing on their countenance.

In the process of getting economic freedom to spend liberally, they depend more and more on external factors which are not under their control. When things do not happen the way they expect, the leakage of energy starts by way of irritation, anxiety and fury. These play havoc externally not only on themselves but also on the people around them. By the time the day starts they are already stressed out. Internally, any such incident triggers a whole lot of negative thoughts in the mind which go spirally out of control. This leads to emotional stress and depletion of energy. In the long run these thoughts manifest themselves in the form of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hyper tension which are found to be psychosomatic in nature.

Now is the time to pay attention to our inner thoughts. From birth to death we are engaged in thoughts and our mind has infinite space to harbour them. If only we care to ‘see’, we have more of negative thoughts than of positive thoughts. These negative thoughts, unless discarded, seep into our systems and decide our destiny. It damages the very fibre of our lives even before we are aware of it. It is imperative we see what type of thoughts we store in our minds. We can easily delete waste thoughts from our mind by telling the mind to reject them as soon as they enter. It is not very hard to instruct our mind to say ‘no entry’ to our waste thoughts and direct them to the garbage bin. It requires some practice, no doubt, but it is not impossible. It is our negative thoughts that play hide and seek with us. We have to show our mind that we are the master and not vice versa. It is important to silence the cacophony of our mind and discard the negative thoughts which need great patience and discipline from our part. Unless we keep a check on these negative thoughts they keep surfacing like the recycle bin. What we feed in our mind is more important than what we feed our stomach. The accumulated thoughts in this birth in the negative form will be a great catastrophe which will hinder our process in gaining spiritual strength. Our mind filled with positive thoughts acts as a conduit for our soul to connect with God.

This inward journey of transformation empowers us while even when we are in the journey and the subtle changes to the better are almost immediate. It is a joyous experience and the truth and beauty of it lies not in accomplishment but in our efforts to accomplish, not in perfection but in our strife to be perfect. This is all we need to know on this mother Earth and let our endeavours be a tribute to God.