Gurudev

How to Use Regular, Daily Spiritual Practices to Retrain Your Brain Cells and Answer the Question: “What is Anger?”

Everything is of the very nature of the self. This sutra (wisdom phrase) conveys something very important.

Day and night, clouds and colors all appear in the sky and later disappear. Similarly, the mind imagines many things, which disappear just as they came.

You may have gotten angry many times, but do you stay angry forever?

Just as the light fades away in the evening, anger also fades away. It’s the same with envy. There’s a limit to everything. When one thought arises, another falls away. Where does it go?

All is in our mind. That mind is the self. Clouds may cover the sky, but the purity of the sky remains untouched. Whatever may be the state of the mind, the self is pure. There’s no such thing as a bad self.

As anger is a quality of the divine, it’s also a quality of the self! That’s why it’s said, “The mind itself is the self.” The mind is part of the divine.

Daily spiritual practices train our brain cells to work well.

When we say, “Do your sadhana (spiritual practices),” it means practices need to be done daily. This is because there are millions of cells in our brain. Some work today, and others work tomorrow, just like workers take shifts in a factory. The factory is running continuously, but the workers have shifts – they come, work and leave. Similarly, in our brain, neurons work in shifts.

There are millions of neurons in your brain. For them to gain knowledge, all the neurons need to be trained. Why do we have to do sadhana regularly? It’s because some neurons are trained today, others will get trained tomorrow and others will be trained the day after tomorrow. Through this process, one day you will reach perfection. Do you understand?

This will happen only if meditation is done regularly. That’s why doing sadhana every day is so strongly emphasized. If you skip a day, then those cells that are on duty that day will not be trained. They’ll have to wait for their next turn, and until then, they sit there untrained. That is why our daily practice is necessary.