Mind Your Own Business: The Power of Focusing on Yourself Instead of Others

Mind is like a cloud, you can make it any shape. So your sense of happiness is only when everybody is doing worse than you. What kind of life is that? Have you ever thought about how this universe functions and what is your role in this universe? Should we be spending time focusing on others? Well, Guru has the answers to these questions. Let's listen to him.

Do not act like you are running the whole planet, or you are running the whole universe for that matter. You are not. It is happening by itself. You're a tiny little creature who is here for a little bit of time. Don't make so much fuss about it.

To handle a few years of life, do not make such a big fuss. If you sit here, this person is a pleasant experience for you. If you are a pleasant experience for yourself, everybody else will also experience this person as a pleasant experience.

What great things you will do or not do, that is subject to various realities. Nobody can fix it hundred percent. You must understand our actions are largely determined by the times in which we exist.

But you need to understand what we are doing, our actions and what we do and do not do is the times in which we exist. If you are here five thousand years ago, you would not be writing software. You would be doing something else. You would not be doing all the things that you're doing today. Don't think you are doing it. It is the times. The times that we are in has its own weather, some smooth weather, some rough weather.

If you learn to ride this weather gracefully, then people say you're a success.

If you create a problem about every little fluctuation that happens, then you become a failure in your life.

If you were a wave surfer, you know you've seen people surfing on the waves.

What is his dream? He would like to have a tsunami, and the dream in a surfer's mind is a tsunami, a hundred-foot-tall wave, riding it. That would be the dream. If you know how to ride it, even the tsunami is a wonderful thing.

How often do you test your memory power? Let's see Guru explain how success is not confined to education alone.

We are mistaking information for intelligence. Once you heap yourself with too much information, now attention is a serious problem. Once you have no attention, once you have no ability to hold your attention, you have lost your ability to access your intelligence also. You will just churn out the information from memory. In the yogic system, there are four main aspects of the mind. I'll not go into the detail, but the memory part of the mind is of least importance. It's a chitta, which is connected with the consciousness, which is most important. If you find a shape for your chitta, that shape will manifest always because it's empowered by life-making material, which for lack of words, we're using the word consciousness. That which is the basis of life. Once your mind is yoked to that, then what shape your mind takes. Mind is like a cloud, you can make it any shape. You can make it Godlike. You can make it a devil out of it. You can make a pig out of it. "You can make whatever out of it. You know, it's a nebulous thing, so what shape you give to your chitta, it will always manifest in the world because it's empowered by life-making energy behind it. So that is the most important aspect of the mind, not the memory.

There's a beautiful incident you've heard of, Andrew Carnegie. When Andrew Carnegie started his enterprise, in a short span of time, he became so super successful and made so much money. At that time, okay, this is not the age of Google or Facebook or Twitter where in two years they become multi-billionaires, and all those days people had to set up manufacturing this and that and make money, which would take decades or generations.

So this guy made so much money in a short span of time. People suspected, the U.S government suspected, he's doing some malpractice, to set up a senate investigation committee. So they questioned him in every way possible, and they found nothing wrong with his business. Then they asked, 'How do you manage to make so much money and be so successful?'

So Andrew Carnegie said something very simple, 'See, I can keep my mind focused on something for five minutes at a stretch, five minutes. Can any of you do it?' All the Senators thought, 'What's the problem with five minutes?' and he set up an experiment. They tried to keep their attention. They couldn't keep it for a few seconds, one moment here, one moment there. This is the fate of most human beings.

So then he said, 'You should not be running United States. All of this must have competed for something or the other.' According to Guru, here is something we should never compete for. Life is not a competition. Life is not a race. Life is a race; you must get to the finish line soon. If you think life is a race, you must be at the finish line today.

I can tell you how you want to go there. No, this is not a race. This is a tremendous privilege that we have come as human beings. This means our ability to experience life is of a much larger proportion than any other creature on this planet. That is the significance of who we are. Yes, we can experience life in many more vivid ways than how an ant can experience, how a grasshopper can experience, how somebody else can experience.

This is our privilege, is of experiencing life. We are trying to win the race. If you win the race, you should be in the crematorium today. Which will help improve yourself, focus or attention? We clear this doubt by listening to what Guru has to say.

If I had only focus without the general attention about everything around me, indiscriminate attention, I'm talking about attention, not even about something, just being attentive, because only because there is a certain level of attention and awareness within you, you even know that you exist. Otherwise, let's say in sleep, in your experience, neither the world exists nor you exist.

All that's happened is there is no attention because there is no attention, there is no perception of any kind. So first thing is attention, that there is a general grasp of everything. Then there's a particular interest, then we focus it down to that particular interest. We are focusing on something only because our attention is not keen enough.

If your attention has to be very keen about everything, then you should stop discriminating in terms of "I like this person, I don't like this person, this is good, this is bad, this is nice, this is not nice, this is useful, this is not useful." If you do not make any kind of discrimination, you just work on your attention, not about being attentive about something, just being super attentive, not about anything. See, right now, if you increase the voltage in this Hall where you're sitting, when light comes on, light is not thinking in terms of whom should I focus on. When light comes on, everything that is there in that room will be seen. This is important. This is a very important aspect of yogic process, that we go on working on our attention, that we keep on keying up our attention to a higher and higher level, a higher and higher voltage and intensity.

How focused are you after reading this article?

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