Dear Friends,
Namaste!
“Feed the Good Dog”?? “Hey” you will say, “But I don’t even have a pet!” And this, let me admit, would not be an abnormal or unnatural reaction.
But patience, my friends, pray read on…
Do you know that each one of us, without exception, is the master of two pet dogs? Do you also know that it is not any external stimuli, but these dogs alone, that give us all the happiness and misery that we experience in our lives? Sounds puzzling? It may sound like a riddle but it is true!
Of the two, one is called the “Good Dog” and the other “Bad Dog”. They are extremely loyal and give us company throughout our lives. The “Good Dog” is so called because it feeds on good thoughts only and the “Bad Dog” feeds only on bad thoughts we think. Because the Good Dog feeds on positive thoughts, he gives us happiness. Likewise, because the Bad Dog feeds on bad thoughts, he gives us misery.
The two dogs are quite quarrelsome and keep fighting with each other all the time. Each one is very keen to hog the master’s attention and in every matter, howsoever petty, one tries to overpower the other and influence his master’s (your) life. Also, the strength they have at any time depends on how much you have fed them. Sometimes, the Good Dog wins and gives you Happiness because you have fed it with positive thoughts much more than you have fed the Bad Dog with negative thoughts. Sometimes, the reverse happens and you experience Grief.
In inference, the more you feed your Good Dog and starve your Bad Dog, the happier you become! The secret of Happy Life is so simple. Yet, we suffer because we are not-so-blissfully unaware of (or only fleetingly notice) the existence of these two dogs, how they engage with us and influence our lives. We even forget that we are the masters – not them - and it is entirely up to us whom we feed and how much!
But now we have become a little more aware as to where we get our Happiness and Sorrow from. Consequently, we also wish to feed our Good Dog as much as possible. Still, we might sometimes get nonplussed in deciding how we accurately identify a benevolent thought from a spiteful one. And just like a Security Guard would need a repertoire of tools to differentiate between the good and bad entrants (as we saw last week), we also do need a powerful tool to separate out bad thoughts and deny them entry into our mind and into our life.
The good news is, each one of us has such a tool available - round the clock! We can use it anywhere, anytime and it almost never fails! We may not have consciously and consistently used it in the past. However, it is never too late to start using it and with use it will automatically get sharpened and become more and more foolproof.
This tool is commonly known as our ‘conscience’. It is also sometimes referred to as our ‘Inner Voice’ or ‘Higher Intelligence’. In the Science of Yoga, it is called ‘Sat-Asat or Saar-Asaar or Nitya-Anitya Vivek Buddhi’. Literally translated, it means, ‘faculty that clearly differentiates between the good and the bad, the permanent and the temporary, the beneficial and the detrimental, the true and the false, the positive and the negative, the reality and the illusion’. When we say we can fool anyone but not ourselves, what it really means is, whatever we make ourselves (and others) believe, in the heart of our hearts, we know the Truth. And it is our conscience that is clearly reflecting this truth in the same fashion as light falling on and reflecting from an object makes that object visible.
But just like a biased Watchman either does not use his tools or tends to overlook what they are showing, we also tend to turn a deaf ear on what our inner voice is telling us. The result? Compromised Security, misery, grief for us and for everyone else within the circle of our influence!
So, will all problems be solved if everyone starts using his or her conscience in choosing thoughts and actions? Will we start experiencing ‘God is in the heaven and everything right with the world’? Not exactly. Remember we said the tool is ‘almost foolproof’. While it is capable of preventing majority of the security breaches (a commendable achievement in itself!), it is no guarantee against all possible, unforeseen disasters. Why is this so? Is there a remedy? Can Yoga be the remedy?
Let’s discuss answers to these questions in our next tѐte-a-tѐte.
Keep smiling… :)
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