"So, attention is the whole of the canvas of your being – is a complete canvas, is the attention. Complete canvas of your being is the attention. How much you have gone into it, how much you have discovered it, how far you have raised it is a different point.
So our attention is just a pure, completely pure canvas and is acted upon by the three gunas we have, to begin with. And the three gunas come to you, as you know, one from your past, one from your future sense and one from the present. Now, whatever have been your experiences about a particular thing or a particular occasion, so far, is completely recorded in your memory.
For example, if you see the black colour: all that goes with the black colour is recorded in your memory. As soon as you see this black colour, quite a lot of it comes up. That means, as soon as you see this with your attention, the attention gets muddled up, or you can say the attention gets coloured with all the memories about this black colour. And then your action takes place according to the way your attention is affected.
For example, just now something was burned by these flames. Now, all of you became aware of it. Next time whenever you will see a flame, first thing [that] will happen will be that you will be cautious about it. It is not going to happen again, but the whole memory will come to you and you will try to be cautious or warn others, because your attention will become aware of that as soon as you will see that, because that canvas of your attention itself will start throwing out these pictures, out of itself, through your past experiences, on to the canvas. This is a living canvas.
Or may be that if you have got some ideas which you have premeditated, or thought of, of the future. For example, you must have thought of somebody that, “If I meet that man I will tell him like this.” As soon as you will meet that man, your attention will start bubbling out with those ideas that are coming about this man, and you will start addressing to him accordingly.
It’s all stored up within you, whether it is about the future or about the past. It’s given out of the attention through that bubbling process which depends on your dragging nature, where are you dragged. That’s called as vritti, but I don’t know what you call it in English language. I do not know what is the, what you are prone to (tendency).
Vritti is a very neutral word. It doesn’t mean anything bad. It means where you are drawn to. Vritti means a temperament by which you are drawn to. And whatever is your temperament, it acts like that. For example, if you see a man walking, say, blindly – he cannot see things – one person may get angry with that person, another may have pity for that person, third may come forward to help him out. It’s the vritti, it’s the temperament, that you have developed through your three gunas. That’s why this attention becomes identified with you. And when you are identified with this, your vritti, your temperaments, then you are still in a misidentified area.
But after you get your Realisation, you are not still identified with that state of mind in which you see your ego and superego as myths. Still you get caught up into your ego and superego, and that’s why your attention is still in a mess. In a pure simple way of attention in an innocent child, he sees everything in pratyaksha, means in actual experiencing of something – for a child – because he has no memory. So he’ll have to burn his hand to feel that this burns. He has to touch something cold to know that it is cold. His memory is not yet built up. So into the actual experiencing of it he lives. But that actual experiencing becomes memory. And once the memory is built up stronger, the whole personality is affected by memory.
All the conditioning of all kinds come through that; your reading, even the whole atmosphere can come to you. You see, sometimes you smell a particular soap, or say a rose, you smell it – then all the memories of smelling such a rose, sometimes, comes to you and you may feel really elated sometimes, maybe sometimes, maybe, or sometimes very unhappy, whatever may be the situation. So you may feel happy or unhappy. Because, whatever experiences you have had, has given you a memory.
This memory might have given you a superego, or might have given you a ego. This scanning might have taken place. If it has been a ego and a superego, then may be that, if it was ego you must have felt happy. If it is satisfying to your ego you feel very happy. If it is not, if it is superego, if you are suppressed by this, then you feel very unhappy. So both things like happiness or unhappiness are the states where you are still in the myth, still the myth exists. You have to still go beyond.
So if you feel happy about some situation, you should know you are only happy before Realisation, because it is giving some support to your ego to bloat. And if you are unhappy, then you should know that there is some sort of a suppression on your ego and there’s a superego developing.
So both the situations have been of no help to you, of no help to you for your growth, except that both these institutions develop so much that you are away from the real experiencing. The real experiencing stops because your attention is so much muddled up.
So on one side if you move – on the left hand side – your attention is muddled up with fear, with pain, with unhappiness, with hopelessness, dejection. The other side, if you indulge too much on to the right hand side – little bit also – you start getting elated, excited, over-dominating.
The colour of the left side is blue. And the blue colour starts changing to the black. While on the right hand side it is, to begin with, yellow, light yellow or you can say golden, then yellow, then orange and then red.
So you go to aggression on the right hand side. On the left hand side you go into a complete state of entropy, you can call it, or a state where you are separated from yourself into a complete frozen state. So [on] one side you become completely frozen, on the other side you become completely heated up. Both these things are, again, movement on the wrong direction.
Even in the centre when the attention is kept – that you keep your attention more in the centre – there also, because it’s a very sensitive point, it doesn’t stay there. For example, when we, say, use fire, we can use it for burning the house. In the same way we can use it for creating smoke. But we can also use this fire in its proper way, if we use it, in its proper proportion, for cooking the food [or] for giving us light. If it is too much, it can burn like a big fire. If it is too little, it can burn like smoke. But in the centre when you know how to balance it, then you can use it for your own purpose – for cooking or for giving light, and then for a puja too.
So in the same way when we really balance our gunas properly, then we become gradually the master of the whole situation. The attention doesn’t get dragged into things that we have been doing or that we have understood through our memories or through our experiences or whatever it is, and is not also dragged towards, too much, on the right hand side that we try to overpower, or try to dominate someone.
Already your attention is sparkled because through your attention you can see what’s wrong with you, you can see what’s wrong with others and you can see how far you are going with yourself. But the progress is retarded because you do not know that this attention is pure form and all that you get into this attention is a mythical stuff, is a myth. If you drop this myth gradually, treat everything as a myth and not depend on becoming unhappy or happy – just seeing the thing – [then] your attention will take a flight and it will be at a much higher level residing there. Instead of that, every moment you go this way or that way – it goes on like that – and the movement upwards is much less.
So the difference between a person who is a realised and a not realised is this that the attention which was giving myth as reality to you is gone now, is gone higher. It can see that it is myth. Attention can clearly see that it is myth, and you can see that yourself and you can remove yourself from them. That, of course, I have to give you a push, no doubt, and I am working hard on that to give you a push. But you should also know that mythical things must be dropped out, otherwise you will not grow. All mythical things must be dropped out. And the best way to do it is to be in thoughtless awareness because as soon as you transcend these three gunas you become thoughtlessly aware. You have to cross Agnya. Once you cross Agnya, these three gunas, absolutely you go into a state where you are gunateet, you are beyond gunas.
So you do not deliberately do anything, but it just works out."
Shri Mataji - May 26th 1980, London (England).
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