We all are bundles of body, mind, and soul. All our decisions have different shades of input from all three of these, some hidden and some apparent. Our mind is quite complex. It has so many motives based on the likes and dislikes that it has developed with experiences. We undergo different experiences and form likes and dislikes without awareness of the soul. We go to meet a friend and see his lovely well-decorated home he receives us warmly with his family members and all of us spend a good evening. We develop a desire to have a happy home like his. Our mind develops a desire without analyzing what happiness really is. We spent almost a decade running after getting a similar home and family just to realize that our friend was happy not because of the home or family but because he decided to connect to his soul and that happiness was actually a reflection of the soul and not the possessions.
We form many such desires each of the moment. Many of these desires remain in the conscious mind while many others go deep down in the unconscious mind. Some of these desires fall within the moral and legal framework of society, while some fall beyond the same. A complex interplay of these desires decides the decisions we make. Sometimes we understand them well while sometimes, we are quite oblivious of this complex interplay.
Sometimes, in fact, many of these desires come in a disguised form. For example, disguising the desire for praise by pretending to be helping others, the desire to be considered a perfect husband by pretending a happy married life, the desire to be indispensable by pretending to be working for the organization, the desire to use somebody by pretending to be a good friend, desire to go abroad by hiding it behind the need for the career, desire to get some favors pretending it to be a fair decision. Our mind has an immense capacity to pretend.
These pretensions are probably our defense mechanisms to stay clean. Our soul is clean. It has no impurity. Our mind is also an offshoot of the soul. That is why it has an image of itself as pure as the soul. However, somehow it gets caught in the play of desires. However, it is almost impossible for it to accept that. Therefore it develops and maintains a facade. It develops a self-image, starts believing in the same, and makes active efforts to implant that image in the minds of others. However, that image has very little to do with the reality. However, the mind uses all types of tricks and pretensions to maintain that image.
Since we work on ourselves images the whole of our lives, they become even stronger than reality. We shy away, in fact, run away, from all the opportunities to look at ourselves naked. We become restless if somebody punctures the balloon of the self-image that we have created in and around ourselves. Sometimes, we develop such a good friendship with somebody that our friend gathers courage to show us the mirror and we have the trust to hold his hand to walk down the room to see the mirror of reality. The moment we see the mirror, reality reveals itself and there is no effort therein.
The moment we see our ambitions and desires naked, uncovered from the pretensions, it is quite easy to see where they take us. They lose their powers to change their form to deceive us. That gives us a lot of power to observe their real movement and what are they doing to our lives. We see clearly that we need to drop the impurities to make space for purity. The soul can not take center stage in our life so long as it is full of desires and pretensions. That gives us the courage and determination to drop many of these desires and ambitions and the connection to the soul is a natural byproduct of that dropping.
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