SRI SRI SHUDDHAANANDAA BRAHMACHARI

Your mind is the inner space in which you live your life, the space from which you create your life, the place to which you return for rest and regeneration. In other words, your mind is your home. The question is: who is taking loving care of the home of your mind? Who can take care of it, if not you?

The moment you assume responsibility for taking care of the home of your mind, you hold the key to your own happiness. You have always held that key. You might not have known that it was in your hand, but it has always been there.

If you want happiness, if you want peace, then you have to be attentive to what is going on in your mind. To what and to whom do you open the door of your mind? What energy is generated by the thoughts you entertain? Just as it is up to you to keep your physical home clear and clean and healthy, you and only you can assure the quality of the inner space created by the thoughts that fill your mind.

Most of us are carried along by the demands of life and by our reactions to those demands. There is no end to the external pressures on us or to our reactions

to them. We move along, doing what we need to do, handling what we need to handle, without true attention. We are reacting. We are coping. Our attention gets lost. Yet attention is everything; it makes all the difference.

In the ocean of consciousness, waves of thought continuously overlap and feed into one another. Thought after thought generates wave after wave of kindred thoughts. Thought is repetitive by nature. Thoughts become mantras, repeated again and again. Soon an indelible pattern takes root.