An Open Mind – The Gateway To all Possibilities
- Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
There are two kinds of minds- an open mind and a closed mind. A closed mind is that which says, “This is how it is, I know it, that is it.” It gets hardened. An open mind is, “Oh may be! Perhaps! I do not know!” Limited knowledge, and conformity about it, makes a mind very hard. Whenever you seem to understand a situation and label it, “This is how it is’, that is the beginning of your problem. And all problems arise from “knowing”, not from “not knowing”. You do not label something that you do not know. Whenever you think that injustice has been done to you, or you think you are suffering, or think that you are a victim, or something bad has happened to you; all this falls in the category of ‘I know it, this is how things are.’ Suffering is a product of limited knowledge. Whenever we attach a label ‘not good’, it comes from limited knowledge. But when there is amazement, patience, joy, then you are in a state of ‘ I don’t know, may be, something, Oh, what is it.” The whole life is a shift from the limited ‘I know’ to all possibilities’.
You think you know the world and this is the biggest problem. When an event happens, there could be many possibilities for that event to be that way, not just in the gross, but some other reason in the subtle as well. Suppose you walk into your room and you find that your roommate has made a big mess in your room. It has irritated you. You came to do work in silence. And now you are grinding your teeth. You attach that cause for your anger to that person. There is something else happening in the subtle, maybe some angry vibrations wee present then, but you could only see that person creating a mess and you attribute all the anger to that person. This is what limited knowledge does.
There is a proverb in India that says,’ You fell into the pit in the daytime, which you could see in the night’. You saw the pit at night and you were careful, but in the daytime you fell into the same pit.
This means that your eyes are not open; you are not sensitive enough to see and recognize what is going on. And as we attach the events and emotions to individuals, this cycle continues. You will never be free from that. So first detach an event and emotion from that person and from space and time. It is like Astrology, which is the knowledge of oneness of the universe. If a pin is pricked into your hand, your whole body feels it. So every cell is connected with the whole of you.
In the same way everybody is connected to the entire creation, to everybody. This is because as there is only one life at a very subtle level, though it appears to be many in the gross. If you go deeper and deeper, it is one existence, one divine. So the wise never labels individuals, or for a wise person, all individual existence ceases. That is why one should not see intentions behind other’s mistakes or attribute mistakes to somebody and bear grudges, because one knows and understands that it is nobody’s mistake. Then mind drops cravings and aversions and becomes free. The world is of change, the self is of non-change. You have to rely on the non-change and accept the change. Often people think that certainty is freedom. If you feel that freedom when you are not certain then that is ‘real’ freedom.
