The Pit, the Seed, & Myself.

One of the founding aspects of the universe is its quality to be constantly changing, from one form to another. There’s no constraint for the cosmos to remain inert, unmoving and still, yet, here we are… Or so it seems at first glance.

This phenomenon that we call “life”, “existential reality”, “happening”, or “The Great Event”, is not actually, happening.

As I type the words that manifest inside my mind, on this keyboard, I see my fingers moving, I see my thoughts bubble up, phasing through various stages of articulation, until a clear — meaningful English sentence manifests itself in my mind. My fingers respond and type to them.

Here’s a question. At what point do you think that thought became me or mine?

What am I?

A few days back, I sowed a peach seed in my garden. These little life machines, they are so fascinating and beautiful, aren’t they? A seed is barely an inch or two in size. But if you give it the right environment, it grows itself into such a big, complex and efficient machinery, that manufactures a variety of items. And even more interesting is its ability to replicate itself.

If you look at a seed carefully, you’ll see, no matter which seed you pick, a seed stays in inert state, and doesn’t carry life-energy/prana until you sow it in the soil. An unplanted seed can stay on dry racks for years and still be planted.

Seeds rot, they don’t die. Plants die because they are living creatures! Seeds are not.

The seed contains memory (like a hard drive), it also has the potential, but it’s not a living entity. The whole seed is but a mere shell that holds gas (carbon dioxide) inside it. You can call it a natural hard disk because it’s exactly that.

This makes you wonder, at what time or state does this seed become a living entity, how does this life enter the seed, and if it does, what is this life anyway?

The mind.

When you dig a pit, sow the seed, life happens to it automatically. Life is the very quality called transformation or sacrifice (yagya). The movement that happens between the soil and the seed, itself is life-energy. And that same movement is the cause of this existence. Movement (a more accurate term in Hindi called “गति”) by itself is one of the fundamental qualities of existence. This is also called the Ram-tatva (who is an avatar of lord Vishnu in Sanatan dharma).

Nobody controls the movement of their mind because it happens automatically. See for yourself! You can’t even see what your next thought is going to be. It just happens automatically, and you can’t do anything about it.

You are not the seed, nor the soil, neither the pit. The seer can only see, it is not self-conscious in its early stages. So, by very nature, the seer’s very being believes that he/she is the object that it’s seeing.

The godhead by its intrinsic nature moves your prana into the seed (the seed that the world sows into you in the form of desires, beliefs, etc, through your 10 karmendriyas). You’re not doing anything anywhere. It just happens by itself.

The self.

The movement of the mind is so fundamental that it seems like you are it, when you are not. When you hold something in your hand for too long, you lose the sense of it, and look for that object everywhere. Likewise, you have forgotten what you are because the presence of this impermanent body has numbed down your perception.

You believe you are the sensation, the movement of the mind, and the knots you create in your head to point at, when someone asks you to become self-aware. That knot is a sensation, not you.

Transformation is the only way out of misery.

Desiring to get rid of the seed, or desiring to sow a new seed, will not work. Desiring, planning and visualizing, will not happen without a seed. And the kind of seeds we perceive and accept in our lives depend on the type of soils we are, which stays quite the same through numerous past lifetimes.

And if there’s no seed, growth is not possible. The seed comes from outside. There are a variety of seeds out there, and you have the ability to choose which seed you want to grow.

People germinate and spread their own seeds all the time, which means your company determines which seed is sown into you. And this is the very reason why sat-sang (which roughly translates to, companionship for truth’s sake) is considered so sacred and essential in India.

Secondly, you need to prepare the soil for the seed. Here, the soil is what you put inside your body (the food, the content of the world and internet).

For example, when the ocean sacrifices its water to the sun, the sky doesn’t rain fire. It only does that when the object of sacrifice is impure. If you consume the impure, that impurity will destroy the soil, the seeds will remain dormant and become prone to rotting.

Change comes when you plough the soil, sow desirable seeds and nourish them daily, not when you complain about the weeds and plastic plants and ask them to wither.