Do you know that if you are convinced about some problems due to your powerlessness, it just becomes your reality?
Many times, instead of going to the root of the problem and solving it, completing it, you go on holding onto the surface and enjoy the suffering. For some people they are afraid that if they go to the root of the problem, it may just disappear and what will they do in their life?! With the unconscious mind, we can get so comfortable with our problems that we are afraid to come out of the comfort zone and live without any problem. Sometimes the problems have become our companions and we just love our problems because we can get attention from others. Worrying about the problems has become a pattern that one may feel lonely without problems. Hence we don’t want to look into the root of the problem.
In the 8th Yoga Sutra, Patanjali says “Interpreting based on past conditioning leads to misconception or wrong understanding”. In this one Sutra, he analyses and describes ALL our problems.
First of all, most of the time we suffer only with our conditioning, not with the situation itself. If you look deeply, 99.9% of the sufferings are not related to the external situation, they are related to our internal conditioning.
Here’s an incident which happened to my client. This lady once witnessed the infidelity of his father when she was a child. Her parents fought frequently and her mother was depressed. Once a fight broke out and she asked her father not to leave them alone but he did. Her entire world crushed because her idea of her father loved her was completely shattered. She lost the trust she had in her father and in men. Her relationship with her partner become a problem because of inability to trust and she tortured herself with the pattern of spying on her partner. The incident is nothing but the past conditioning which stops her from experiencing the reality. The good news is she had completed with this incident by letting go of the anger and had since started building up on her trust.
From this incident, we can see that it is our mind that is programmed at a young age and we start living life based on our programming. We walk, talk and take decision based on those programs. The scary part is many of us are not even aware that we are programmed and we continue to live in unawareness!
That is what Patanjali calls as wrong knowledge, the very cognition or input in which we receive life is distorted because it is based on past conditioning and incompletions. So naturally, whenever wrong data and process are done, the way we take decision will also be wrong.
Here is a simple exercise you can do just to see how you make the same mistake of interpreting the present moment using the past conditioning. Sit and pen down at least 10 incidents where you made the same mistake using past conditioning. You will begin to see how your mind is behaving, how your life is happening and how you are struggling with this pattern.
The big problem is, before you even understand the depth of the problem, you start trying to correct it from your past conditioning. Then the problem can never end because the very knowledge is wrong. If you just understand the depth of the problem, that’s enough to trigger a transformation inside you. Just by understanding the depth of the problem, the transformation starts happening in you. Be very clear, understanding brings clarity, clarity brings change.
Upanishads declare again and again that all the Enlightened Masters declare – Whatever IS, is divine, it is God. If you see anything other than the Divine, if you have any other experiences other than bliss in life, you are stuck with this pattern, this is the sutra for you. Contemplate on this sutra – Interpreting based on past conditioning leads to misconception or wrong understanding. Decide to get out of this pattern and go to the depth of each problem and see it without your past conditioning so that you see each situation as it is. Namaste 😀