07 December 2013 - QA 1

Dear Gurudev, I’ve always felt that I’m a tool in the hands of someone else, but I want to reach great heights and have a name of my own. Would it still be possible?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:

You want to have a name. Have that Sankalpa and forget about it. If you’re feverish to have a name, I’m sure you’re going to be disappointed.
Let us say you want to go to Chennai from Bangalore. You sit in the car, and it’s a five hour drive. All along the route if you keep on saying, ‘I want to go to Chennai’, you’ll end up, not in Chennai, but in a mental hospital. Or as soon as you reach Chennai, you’ll have to be taken to a mental institution there.

One intention in the mind, and attention on it, and then it manifests (this is called sankalpa). There is nothing wrong in wanting to be good, wanting to be famous, wanting to be enlightened, all these wants are okay, but it should be just an intention, rather than feverishness.
So many times people throw all these tantrums, to draw someone’s attention.

Once, in one of our Rishikesh shivirs (roughly translates to camps), I was taking a walk and nearby a woman fell down. Seeing her, all the nearby people started walking towards her. I just walked by, and people came running to me saying, ‘Gurudev, a woman just fell down!’
I told them that she did that just to draw my attention.
When I came back from the walk, I found her sitting on the same spot. I told her, ‘Don’t try to trick me. You tried to trick me and wasted the time of the ten people sitting around you’. She said, ‘You don’t even look in my direction, that is why I did that’.
Children do this all the time. They will be silently playing and doing their own stuff, but as soon as a guest comes and you’re having an important discussion with them, they will come to you and show you something they’ve made – a painting, or some paper craft. So children do this to gain your attention.

We are attention hungry. This is a habit which we need to change.
Why are we like this? It is because we don’t attend to ourselves.
We are not aware of the light inside us, of the beauty inside us, we are not aware of the peace inside us. We are unable to be content with ourselves. That is why we want someone else to say something so that we can be content.

It’s really amazing. There is no better entertainer than your own mind. Your mind can provide you with non-stop 24/7 entertainment. Not one, but a hundred channels run in your head. Comedy, tragedy, thrill, all of these keep running. It is amazing. Just keep enjoying it, make sure you keep the remote control in your hands. Don’t be worried that - this should not be in my mind, that should be not in my mind - let it display whatever it is displaying, as long as the control is in your hands. When the control is not in your hands, then problems arise in life.