Rebuilding The Castle

We are in December which means we are mentally getting ready to bring in new ideas, habits, and disciplinary practices that hitherto were not intense enough or never been practiced in our lives. We write them down in a paper or just make a mental note of where we would like to be next year. No matter how arduous they are, we would like to pursue them and some of them take off at full speed while others fall flat like a corpse buried deep down in a coffin. If they don’t take off, we analyze and find out that deep down there are no commitments in our subconscious mind to rigorously put them into actions. Sadhanas are never achieved through peripheral vision but through devoted determination to carry them out. We begin to evaluate at every level the progress we have made to see if there are improvements in the quality of our lives and when we see no substantial progress, we give up on our commitments.

Our subconscious mind is a castle built by our actions and reactions without any architectural plan unless one has understood the impact of subconscious mind in our lives. It is built brick by brick by our own thoughts, words, actions, reactions, feelings, and emotions. It builds on its own without much of effort but remodeling and maintaining them are complex processes. To remodel, one needs to be astute to understand the composition of the materials used to build them. There are only two choices, one is to build a brand new architecture and sunset the existing structure or remove the inefficiencies.

All our tendencies arise from the subconscious mind. Our prarabdha and Sanchita Karma are encrypted, one with a possibility of opening and another encrypted in a way can only be opened in subsequent lives. Our thoughts arise from here with reference to the past actions performed by us. Now the question is how do we eliminate unwanted tendencies that are embedded in our subconscious mind? While we focus so much attention on building new ideas, habits, and disciplinary practices, we fail to unfold the old tendencies that are already in our subconscious mind either through past actions, reactions, feelings, and emotions or present life’s emotions embedded in the subconscious mind. When we make resolutions, we also need to work on removing or unlearning what we have already accumulated as part of fixing the quality of our lives.

There is a traditional method recommended for removing the burden of the past we carry with us to reduce the baggage with unnecessary content in it. We all have unresolved emotional experiences in our subconscious mind. The method that is recommended in our scriptures is called, “Vasana Daha Tantra” – Vasana meaning tendencies, Daha means burning, and Tantra is a method. In other words, it is a method for burning our unwanted tendencies in the subconscious mind. President Abraham Lincoln used this method successfully throughout his life with great success.

This method is simple. We need to recall these emotions and write down all our reactions, emotions and feelings in a piece of paper as though we are writing a letter or a diary for ourselves. Once these emotions are out from our system, we need to crush this piece of paper and throw it into an inauspicious place such as trash bag or burn it in the fire-place. Even though it appears symbolic, these tendencies will disappear from the subconscious mind through this suggested action. Even the action of burning them physically will have deep impact in our subsconscious mind.

In a world where world wide web is ruling the humanity with all its might, we need to write a draft first before we post anything. It is not about what we said to others but how it impacts our tendencies in our subconscious mind. When we understand how each thought, word, action, feeling, and emotion impacts our lives, we become cautious about what we need to empower and what we need to eliminate from our subconscious mind. While we make resolutions for the new year, let us take a few of our past emotions out from the bag, unfold them, express them out in a piece of paper and destroy it by burning it. After all, the purpose of our lives is to burn our Vasana and liberate our soul from this mundane world.

 

Dear Sabitha,

Thank you for your first response here. I didn't know this method either until I read about it recently in a publication that this method was used traditionally and when I read about Abraham Lincoln used this method regularly. I have also used this method before but without knowing its significance.

The habits die hard and deciding the next year in December is a corporate habit that I built when I was working for a public company. I see many methods to eliminate Karma and this one is special. A list that is not all inclusive include:

1) Nishkama Karma
2) Consistent effort to eliminate Arishadvarga (six enemies of mind consist of Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha, Mada, & Matcharya)
3) Concentration of the mind only on the present moment (Vartamana Bhava)
4) Vasana Daha Tantra
5) Establishing Dharma in the heart

I will definitely attempt to do Vasana Daha Tantra going forward as the rest are life-long efforts.