Why Do Mistakes Recur? In the journey towards the experience of absolute purity, seekers face many challenges from their inner world. Pujya Gurudevshri exhorts to identify the mistakes and understand the know-how to remove them. It is difficult to overcome passions. They are deeply rooted in you since time immemorial. When desire for sense pleasure, ego, anger, deceit, greed etc. create turbulence within, you get dejected. Seeing your mistakes, a kind of helplessness, depression, or frustration arises. The Enlightened Ones say that if you perceive your mistake in the right way, despair can never arise. The reason for your sadness and despair is that you actually do not want to accept your mistake, but are compelled to do so. You have believed and made others believe that you are very good and are not ready to let that image break. The Play of Ego Your ego does not let you admit that you are bad, filled with passions and mistakes. When you are caught red-handed and have to reluctantly admit, you feel sad, depressed and develop complexes. This occurs when you intend to defend your ego and not honestly own up. The negative emotions reveal the importance you have given to your ego instead of uprooting your fault. Your suffering is not because you did what you shouldn’t have done, but because you could not protect yourself from being seen as guilty, you could not secure your self-created image. When the image you have created gets tainted, you cannot bear to see it. He who honestly accepts his mistake so that he can uproot it would never go into depression or inferiority. His goal is to be pure and peaceful and so he zealously puts right efforts to remove it. If you are controlling your passions, say anger, only so that you can protect your image, then the anger will keep erupting every now and then, because you are continuing to nurture its cause, the ego. Like the shadow following a man, a thought of regret that, ‘Now I will never be angry’ follows anger. But such thought does not make you good. With thoughts of austerity after food, of charity after greed, of repentance after committing sin, you try to mend your image that, ‘I am not all that bad. I am quite good. In a weak moment this mistake happened. But my intention was good only.’ With this false repentance the ego gets revived. You feel, ‘I am so humble. Even though I became angry I soon asked for forgiveness from all.’ In doing this you removed whatever little pain of regret you had and prepared yourself to sin again. False Repentance You ask for atonement for a wrongdoing and you perform it too. But the next time you get a wrong desire, you feel let me fulfil it and later I shall ask for atonement and cleanse myself. In this, your focus remains on the deed and not on the impurity latent in your intention. Thus by falsely repenting and taking atonement, you try saving your image but not move in the direction of transformation. The meaning of true repentance is death of the inclination that had committed the mistake, end of the intention that prompted you to sin. And false repentance is to revive the inclination that had sinned. You do cleanse but you soon reach the state from where you had started. There is no regret for your faulty state. You regret for the theft or violence committed but not for the way you are. Instead, thinking that, ‘In reality I am a good person, this was just a mistake’, you try covering up the mistake. In the name of repentance, you try defending your ego. If the list of your mistakes becomes long, your ego feels hurt that, ‘Am I really so bad that I became angry? I am not, it’s just that such situation arose and I happened to act like that.’ You repent and become the ‘good’ person you think you are. This so-called repentance does not transform you but makes arrangement for you to stay the way you are. You keep repeating the same mistake but do not bring any change in your inner state. You think you are a good person and when you use abusive language, it breaks your image in front of you. And so you regret, ‘Why did such offensive words slip out of my mouth? I didn’t even intend to say that. Surely this happened because of the pressing situation or I was pushed by a momentary impulse. But I am not like this from inside.’ This alleviates the pain of using derogatory language. Now, abusing again will become very easy. Don’t Blame the Circumstances Ouspensky in his book ‘Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’ writes about Ivan Osokin who goes to a mendicant and says, ‘On the whole I am a good person. Yet mistakes have been committed. Walking through an unknown path, I fell in a pit. I am not the kind who would fall, but the path was unfamiliar, there was darkness of the night and a pit. May be someone pushed and I fell in the pit. If I get to relive the past and walk again, I want to prove that I would never fall in the pit.’ The mendicant said, ‘I make you 12 years younger.’ Osokin said, ‘You see, in 12 years I will become another person. I was wishing I could get another chance so I don’t repeat the mistakes I had committed in ignorance.’ Osokin returns to the mendicant after 12 years and confesses, ‘I seek forgiveness. The mistakes I had committed in the past was not because the path was not known. The mistakes were mine alone; because I have repeated the same mistakes. I have realised that I have been living exactly the way I had lived in the past.’ The mendicant said, ‘I knew it will recur. Because the mistakes are not in the action but in the intention.’ Not just Osokin but you too live a strange life; you live your life in exactly the same way as you have been living. Even as you age, you keep repeating the same mistakes, because the doer remains untransformed. You do the same things you did in the past and so you remain the same as you were. Life gives you many chances. But you cheat yourself by blaming the circumstances. Carefully introspect on your inner and outer conditions, and you will realise that though circumstances that can arouse anger in you had risen many times in the past, you did not become angry every time. You got angry only three out of ten times. This shows that circumstances cannot make you helpless. You yourself commit mistakes without any coercion. The problem is not of others, or any situation, it is yours. You alone are responsible for your mistakes. Without breaking your mechanical behaviour, you will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again. This inner war against your passions demands a lot of faith and commitment, understanding and awareness, yearning and patience. Without the yearning, it cannot begin. Without patience, it will not come to an end. Topicscircumstancedesireegointrospectionmistakerepentance Quotes You are in prison if you cannot let go of your painful past. You are free if you unhook from it. The Guru is like a mirror. Looking at Him turns your focus towards your pure and powerful self. Are you emotionally fit? Your emotional strength is measured by how quickly you become reactive. Be ready to go wrong, but take responsibility and think independently. View All #SadguruWhispers Are you emotionally fit? Your emotional strength is measured by how quickly you become reactive. Select category for which you wish you receive updates via email - SRMD Updates Wisdom Updates Subscribe for updates
