Burst Fifty:
Transforming Thought Into Action
First of all, not all people get good ideas and thoughts. Even among those who are inspired by a nice vision, not all are able to fuel that vision and fire it into action. Why?
Nature has its laws for good reasons. If thought were to get converted into action without delay, a lot of our whims and fancies also would become concrete actions in no time, and that is not desirable. It is therefore good in a way that there are some filtering processes before a thought takes the form of its corresponding action.
Great people like Gandhiji were convinced that a truly strong desire, felt from the bottom of our hearts, never goes unfulfilled. Hard to believe, even as it may seem, there is more than a grain of truth to such a conviction as India ’s Father of the Nation had. A strong, earnest desire in the depth of our being is indeed like a banyan seed, which, though very small in its size, grows into the huge tree in due course of time. Calling such a desire the Deep Driving Desire, Sri Eknath Easwaran also highlights its power in his writings. This DDD is often quite different from what we let the public know and is other than what even our own conscious mind recognizes most of the time. It is only with a lot of quiet self-observation and honest introspection that we can take note of our DDD. Then we can see that much of our life so far also was shaped by it and it is at work even now, everyday!
Call it poorva–samskaras (past impressions, from previous lives) or early childhood influences, the cause of the deep driving desire is not as important as is the question of how we may free ourselves from its limited confines. In the case of Mahatma Gandhi and many other saintly persons, the net resultant force of their past seems to be of a noble nature. No wonder their lives became exemplary. In the majority of cases of us, the rest of humanity, alas, our own true calling seems to be ‘not yet ripe or strong enough’ and our energies get dissipated in other ‘not so worthwhile’ areas.
We need to sit, watch and weed out a number of thoughts within us which weaken our noble energies. Clarity about where we want to go should emerge in a natural way, as a result of our coming face to face with the many voices within us. We have always believed in our own original goodness. We therefore have to rest assured that ‘cleaning up the house’ will leave us with good discoveries.
Even on a daily basis, small victories are important as they are sweet in the first place, and they further lead to big victories. “What is it that I really want to achieve?” is a question that we may ask at all the junctures of doubt and despair. By holding this question powerfully, we can separate the grain from the chaff.
Every thought has the potential for turning into action but it is other thoughts that cancel out its potency. Good thoughts making their way through a number of other less important ones is the hallmark of an integrated personality. When this happens without much struggle or conflict and when our bosom is free from negative energies like self-doubt or varieties of fear, there is the fragrance of spontaneous dynamism.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi Monday, April 9,