Guiding Thought

Trusting life allows the flow of Divine energy to come in and through you to bless All. Step gracefully into expansive, unlimited, harmonious, Divine being. Praise and thank Life for supporting you, and relax in its process.

Reflection

Why dost thou, my mind, wander about in vain? Rest (thyself) somewhere! Whatever happens in a particular way happens so by itself, and not otherwise. So not thinking over the past, nor resolving about the future, I realize enjoyments that come without engaging my thoughts.

Bartri Hari, verse 62 of the 100 Verses of Renunciation

One of the things I look for is what shows up in my life, and what kind of connections I make between those things and the Guiding Thoughts, or the Journey more generally.

Today is the second day that Bartri Hari’s 100 Verses of Renunciation, written about two thousand years ago, has spoken to me on this Journey.

What if I am already free, but my mind is too preoccupied with the past or the future to see it?

There is a story–I don’t know if it’s true–about how elephants are trained to be chained to a stake. When they are young, they are bound with the heaviest of chains to the strongest of poles (or trees). They strain and strain against the chain, never able to break the hold. Then one day they just give up. From that day on, they can be tied with the smallest chain to the smallest pole (or tree), and they will never even try to break free. Their minds have associated the feeling of a bond with defeat.

What if this is what my mind has done to me? The elephant’s mind associates the present with a feeling from the past; when my mind preoccupies me with the past, is it not doing the same thing?

What if my mental habits prevent me from experiencing the flow of Divine energy coming in and through me? What if that energy is here, now–all the time? And I just can’t feel it because my mind is somewhere else?

I think today’s Guiding Thought is less about silencing the mind than about giving it a direction to go (stepping gracefully into Divine Being). The benefit of this is to give it a new experience, something new to think about. I believe, that when the mind steps into Divine Being, it realizes that it’s really nice to be in that space of Divine Being. Then, because the mind enjoys it, it will give up old habits that are not as pleasurable as Divine Being.