Control, Alter & Delete

Viswamitra · Mar 19, 2012

A few years back I was listening to one of the young but greatest spiritual speaker in our Spiritual center. He is software professional with a great insight into spirituality and understanding of Indian scriptures. He was talking on the subject of controlling the mind and he referred to the mind as a frozen screen in the computer. We immediately resort to using Control, Alter and Delete button to reboot the system so that the computer will start all over again. He suggested that is exactly the way we need to approach our thoughts and desires that are built through those thoughts. He suggested the first step is to control the desires, then alter the desires to be noble and finally delete all desires from our mind and allow our soul to take over our life.

This talk from a young spiritual seeker had profound impact in my mind so that I kept contemplating on it for several months. He had taught one of the finest lessons in my life. I realized that control, alter and delete principle applies almost for everything and anything in our life. For example, if we face a crisis situation in our life, the first step for us is to control the situation. Later, we attempt to alter it through our effort and then try and resolve that crisis so that it is no longer a crisis. The same thing applies when we are suffering from an inhibition that is hurting our health or life. The first step is always to do damage control, then slowly change the habit and later delete it from our life.

When we lose loved ones in our life, we normally get shattered in our mind right after their departure. In situations like that, we need to understand that this body is transient and everyone who is born in this world need to leave one day or the other. Every departure ahead of us is only a dress rehearsal for us to learn from it. Moreover, when we talk about someone’s body or mind, we refer to “His body was hurting and I am glad that it is not hurting anymore” and “He had conscious mind till the end” and so forth and so on. We need to understand who that “He” in those statements is. If we understand that then we understand who we really love in our life. That soul we loved was never born and never dies. If that is the case, where is the need to cry for someone’s departure? We always say that we paid respect for the departed soul and we don’t say that we paid respect to his body or mind even though we actually paid our respect to the body. Therefore, in situations like that, we need to control our mind from thinking that someone left us. Then, we need to alter it to think that there is no birth and there is no death to the soul. When we firmly place our mind in that thought, we could successfully delete our thought of grief in our mind and pay respects for the love someone showered on us. If we think carefully, a person who loved us the most would not be happy if we were to spend the rest of our life thinking about their physical form.

Let us assume that someone did an action or speech that was hurtful to us. First of all, our ego part of our mind would be bruised and make us believe that we need to settle a score with him. If we decide to accept that action or speech, then we need to control our mind to think the facts in that action or speech. If they are factual and deserving, all we need to do is to alter our mind to rethink on that matter as it was our ego that was hurt but what they said or did was correct from our in-depth understanding. This is possible only when we use our intellect to review the action or speech. Alternatively, if we come to the conclusion that it is a wrong action or speech, then, we need to think about a) communicating the feelings faithfully to the person or b) forgive them in our mind. Forgiving can’t be done by merely by words and it could be done only by removing our bad feelings deeply embedded in our thoughts. Otherwise, such feelings hurt us more than hurting them.

A good trained mind always gives and forgives while an untrained mind gets and forgets. Therefore, we need to control, alter and delete thoughts that are not noble in our mind consistently as an exercise every day as part of our spiritual discipline.