Pran Rangan: One Who Has Conquered The Mind - Has Conquered the World

This is often said that one, who has conquered the mind, has conquered the world. On conquering the mind, one gets connected to the Almighty and starts seeing his divine presence in every thing – living and non-living. Now a question arises as to what are mind and its nature. The following paragraph by Osho highlights its nature. “Mind is simply a combination of all the thoughts, of all the clouds. Mind has no independent nature of its own. When all the thoughts are gone and the sky is clean and clear, you will see that everything that you have paid so much attention to is nothing but emptiness. Your thoughts were all empty. They contained nothing, they were void. Whatever you thought they contained was your own energy. You have withdrawn your energy -- just the empty shell of the thought falls down. You have withdrawn your identity and immediately the thought is no longer alive. It was your identity that was giving it life force.” Mind has a collection of our various memories. It is a treasure house of our all experiences. Our good or bad experiences, thoughts and emotions are stored in it as memories, which were felt by our sense organs. They become our beliefs, which constitute our value system. Mind along with all its memories assumes significance and thus gives birth to Ego. Whatever we experience whether good or bad, happiness or sadness, it is judged against our beliefs and memories. This clearly shows that we live in our past but not in the present. Whatever pleasant or unpleasant occurs in our life it has nothing to do with the soul. We judge the pleasant or unpleasant from the perspective of the mind, which gets conditioned as a result of our interaction with others. It means that it is the decision of our mind what is pleasant or what is unpleasant. So, mind makes us happy or unhappy. When the mind is overflowing with unhappiness, we will find unhappiness all around us and when it is overflowing with happiness, we see happiness all around us. In order to be happy, we will have to tame our mind. It is, therefore, evident that we are the creator of our mind, which dons a garb of our individuality and is driven by our ego. We have energized our ego so much that it starts leading an independent life, overwhelming us. Firstly, we have created the mind and then have strengthened it. Secondly, we have been overpowered by it so that we have lost our independent and divine nature. Our soul, representing the divine essence, is overshadowed by our mind. So, the mind acts as a bridge between our soul and us. The relation of the mind with the soul is quite deep. Soul is the miniature form of divine universal spirit. This is capable of divine creativity but we are not able to make good use of this. We have forgotten how to utilize our creative force; it has become a mystery to us. To revive our divine nature, we have to fill our heart with the love and absolute devotion for God. With His grace, we will become full of love and compassion; we will then start treating all with love and compassion; we will see His divine essence in all. With love and compassion for all, we can tame our mind. Our ego will also start dissolving. Overflowing with divine love, we will be able to have power over the vagaries of mind.