Refuse to Comment !

Just as you see something or read something, the first layer it impacts is your ego because the ego is the outermost shell.  The nature of the ego is to ‘react’ and hence immediately some reaction arises in your mind.  The egoic reaction usually stems from comparison and you compare your own views and expressions and feel a subtle need to say something either as a put down or as a standalone disagreement which defines your position as being different.  It is all right.  It is in the nature of the human construction itself.

 

When a baby first learns to talk, one of the first words it utters is ‘No!’.  This is the beginning of the expression of the infant ego that feels the need to oppose.   As a teenager, you feel like rebelling, you feel like doing exactly the opposite of what someone tells you to do.  This is the adolescence of the ego and most of us don’t really grow out of it.  Whenever you act from your egoic layer, you are not performing any useful action.  You are merely causing a reaction which in the end depletes human energy. 

  

Pass this phase.  Give the ego a go by.  Let the ego bus go past your stop.  And then you will reach the mind.  The natural mind reads something and if there is something uplifting likes to acknowledge and express disapproval if something deserves it.  However, as we grow, we rarely are in touch with the pure state of our natural mind.  The mind has become more of a repeat performer.  The basic property of the mind is to stick to what comes to it and keep repeating it like a broken gramophone.  It reads something and reads it again and again.   And this repetition will gradually lead to either an addiction or lower into an egoic reaction. 

Instead of plainly agreeing or disagreeing and going on with your life, if the sticky nature of the mind is allowed to take over, you may feel the necessity of coming back and reading again.  And if you like it, you’ll want to forward it to many friends and through this cycle, seek a repetition of the same.  Or an egoic reaction takes place and you feel that you must strongly express some disagreement.  When you react from the mind layer, you waste your energy in the game of influence.  In seeking to influence you move into the egoic layer and become the influenced.  Without knowing you have caught yourself in the web of reaction once again.

Therefore, pass this phase too.  Let the mind bus also go past your stop.  You will then be able to reach your intelligence.  Unless you have given up the mental talk and the egoic reaction, the pure intelligence cannot be reached.  In the grip of the mind or the ego, a pseudo intelligence, a sort of cleverness, uses up your energy and poses as your intelligence.   It is only when you consider what you have read in the light of a deeper pure intelligence, that you understand the real import of what you have read.  You reflect on your wisdom, weigh the input, accept what can be accepted, acknowledge and reject what ought to be rejected.  This is a sign of discretion.  You are interested in living an intelligent life.   Not just in accumulating ideas.  And you quickly absorb the wisdom into your life and grow in wisdom.

Any rise in consciousness can happen only through a giving up of something, only through a denial of acting on options that become available.  As you give up the choice to react from your ego, you rise to your mind.  As you give up the addictive nature of the mind, you rise into intelligence.  As you learn to act on discretion and give up that which does not suit you, you rise in wisdom. 

Isn’t it a wonderful thing to rise in wisdom and have our relationships free of egoic reactions and words?  Isn’t it a wonderful life where our energies are not sapped by a mind that repeatedly says the same things, so that we can use our energies to savour that which is bright and sunny and enjoy the external world to the fullest?  Let us therefore give up something that is worth less even though we are tempted by it.  Let us therefore, refuse to be drawn to comment and thereby, rise into something that is valuable and lead a life of enthusiasm, abundance and quiet wisdom.