Skip to main content

The importance of 'sanskara'

Any activity done periodically becomes a habit. Habits become a necessity. And necessities become your life. Simply put sanskara is nothing but the habit you form from a very early stage in your life.

Parents & gurus play a vital role in inculcating sanskara into a child. Sanskara is a set of experiences that the child has undergone in his early understanding of the world around him. So he reads, interprets and reacts as parents & gurus train them. A child's mind is like soft molten clay slowly being cast into a mould. With every passing day the clay solidifies with experiences gained from worldly endevours. Some experiences leave lasting & profound impressions on the mind that some recall even after years of rebirth !

Hence moulding the mind with the right view of worldly experience leads to formation of good sanskara & taking a negative, claustrophobic view of worldly experiences leads to cultivation of bad sanskara in an individual.

Sanskara thus also becomes a weapon used by the ego in disuading us from walking the path of rightousness. Ego uses this weapon to remind us of the good memories associated with materialistic pleasures & the bad ones associated with the deprivation of it. In the mahabharata the role of Dronacharya was a metaphor for sanskara. He was a common guru to the kuru-putras & the pandu-putras. He sided with the kuru's because before the battle of the mind is won, sanskara is tempted to side with the outward material manifestations of the mind.

This battle rages in the minds of all men everyday, but alas only a few are equiped with the knowledge or the wisdom to emerge victorious. The duty to impart this wisdom lies with our parents & gurus. With the right sanskara the world will definatly be a better place to live in...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finding Your δ (delta)

Every cell in human body is unique. It performs a unique function in terms of assimilation or diffusion in different proportions. They have unique proportion of proteins so as to be identified as an individual cell. Hence if one cell has a content say x, then the other has say x+δ (delta). Thus it goes without saying that every individual has a unique δ that makes him very different from another. Human body has 100 trillion cells and if every cell is unique, why is very hard to believe that of a population of 7 billion on this planet every individual has the potential to be unique?? I never fully understand when people talk about self realization, though I’ve used the term quite a few times in my blog. I believe the word is much bigger than what it is generally understood to be. One of the reasons for it being, the self itself encompasses a whole gamut of possibilities & probabilities that it’s very hard to believe that you could completely understand every permutation-combinati...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whose World Do You Live In ??

People often ask me a rhetoric question, “You live in your own fancy world, don’t you?” To which I have standardized my reply, “Yes I do. Why whose world do you live in?” It’s saddening to see people live in a world they don’t believe to be their own. Maybe that’s the root cause to every irresponsible step we take in life (it’s not my world anyways!!); that’s why people don’t own their problems and prefer to flee from it convincing their soul that the problem is bigger than them, but secretly, unknown to themselves, they nurture it within. A world lost on to them - a life, until now, not very well spent. It saddens me more that in what seems to be a stark contrast, we created a hue and cry to be “free”, to live in a world that belongs to “us” – a world that belongs to “me”. But it seems like we won the fight but we are yet to win the war. The concept of freedom is much trickier than we think it is. To most of us it means doing whatever you want to do in life. But were tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The principle of Duality

Decisions that we take everyday make us what we are. It is these decisions that begin to define us and give us the foundation to build on. Making decisions effectively thus forms a very important part of our present & our future. I remember watching the bollywood flick Deewaar & today when I look back I’m reminded as to how two brothers who faced a similar situation in life made two very different decisions. While one chose to battle it by imposing brutality on the circumstance itself the other decided to battle it by empowering himself with knowledge. There was aggression in both approaches, they stuck to their decisions fiercely and tasted success in their own ways. But only one decision was right & the success that came with it did not fade away with time or people. The Gita talks about how poorly we are used to making decisions & directs us towards a mechanism, if deployed can help us make wise and correct decisions. Not only will they bring lasting happiness bu...
Post a Comment
Read more