All in the mind...Really?

The phrase “It’s all in the mind” has been beaten to death and yet it resurrects at various coordinates in our journey, (I choose to address life as journey; else I would be adding boundaries to my thought).

It happened more than 2 decades back, on a summer afternoon. My mother and grandmother were busy pickling mangoes, while my brother and me were trying to complete our holiday homework; (whoever coined the term and gave birth to the concept sure didn’t check the meaning of ‘holiday’. It’s even got Thesaurus rolling in his grave). We were solving basic arithmetic problems.

Kanha wrote 5+6 = 10 in his full squared maths notebook. I peeped from the side, and I knew 5+6/10, without even counting the pebbles that were Kanha’s abacus. Years went by, and today this incident revisits me, in a very different way.

As I sit and revisit the sequence, an obvious revelation divulges. I was able to comprehend that my brother had made a mistake, more intuitively than transactional, because I had been there, done that several times. Drawing a not so palpable analogy, on more occasions than one, my consciousness tells me whether a decision is right, the situation is favorable or formidable times impede. This time too, the feeling is more instinctive than transactional. Our consciousness has been there, done that, for several lives. Now, what is the vehicle for my consciousness to travel on? Soul?

The journey of my soul is as old as itself. It has transcended ages, situations, and moments with the same coordinates in the same or another universe. It is bruised with time, eroded with repetition, assaulted during the journey, only to come out bettered and progressed.

                                     A skilled sculptor hath no fingerprints

How true is that, when I contemplate on the journey my soul? It has lost its true attributes, travel records and diary of life…even the count of lives it has died. However, what the soul carried with each journey was its consciousness, awareness of the experiences, and realization of its impermanence. Only when we are fully aware of our ephemerality that we are prepared to move on to our next journey.

Soul, the solitary creation of God is programmed to strive for enhanced journey experiences. As a result, the soul is more evolved each time it embarks on a fresh journey. It ensures, no journey is wasted, making the same mistakes. However, new experiences fail thy consciousness, and that’s how we mortals make wrong, often self-sabotaging decisions, exactly how my baby brother was unable to see 5+6!=10.

While some call it intuition or sixth sense or gut feeling, it’s quintessentially our consciousness. We may want to interpret it as our memory from another journey or choose to leave it unfathomed, but we can never succeed in ignoring it.

Ironically, while each experience is momentary, journey is fleeting, and cosmos is transitory, the endurance of our consciousness is universal. Each time your consciousness begins to talk, you can overlook it, but not un-hear it. It’s all in us; the noise in your silence, resonance in your stillness, light in the darkness.