Respect – Thus Spake Mohanji

Welcome to Mohanji Speaks. Hello friends, hope you are doing well.

Today, I want to share with you a couple of thoughts. I’ll come to the point straight away without much ado. Before I start, a story that came to my mind. I read this when I was in my teens, but it stayed with me. This is from the Sherlock Holmes series by Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m sure most of you would have read most of his work. Here we have the super-intelligent Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson who is always fascinated by the intelligence of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes has the ability to see what others don’t see usually, which helps in solving mysteries effortlessly. This always fascinated. Dr. Watson.

One day in that story Watson is asking Sherlock Holmes, “How do you have this clarity, this intelligence? How do you manage this?” Sherlock Holmes answered quite matter-of-factly. He said to Watson, “My mind is uncluttered. What information I need, that’s the only one that I store. In other words, I only store information that I can use, that I need. I do not store anything random in my mind, so I can retrieve it effortlessly.”

Now you consider your mind – how much of information have you collected and stored in your mind, which is pretty much useless, or pretty much irrelevant when time passes by. The information that I have in my mind is always fresh and usable. We have so many different information entering our system, entering our minds every day. Politics, sports, various things of life we are interested in, and we collect that information, and we store them without our knowledge. While the information that is essential for us to remember gets mixed up with the information that we have collected and stored unconsciously, or spontaneously. What happens eventually, everything gets mixed up and to retrieve something at the right time becomes impossible, you don’t remember. The lack of memory in most cases is because of the clutter in our minds. It’s because we have stored too much. Just like Sherlock Holmes said, if you store only what you really need in your life, what is essential in your life, you can prevent memory loss. Memory loss is usually connected to an over-burdened mind, too much data, too much information that causes clutter.

This was the thought which came to me this morning, which I thought I’ll share with you, and it continued to another dimension. This is a thought about the wastage of time. How much time do we waste in life, chasing rainbows, illusions, and illusory things? Quite a lot. If we can avoid chasing rainbows and stay with the reality of everyday existence, life will be uncluttered.

We get fascinated by others’ stories, opinions, concepts, temptations. We chase them, and we deviate, taking detours to chase them, to find them, or to experience them. And often we don’t get there because they don’t exist. Rainbows are beautiful from a distance. But you try going towards it, when you reach closer it’s just water vapour, pretty much invisible. Many things that you see from a distance do not have value when you come closer to it. Like when we do not have something, we attach a lot of value to that thing. But when you really get it, it loses value. This is our life. This is how we live every moment.

This understanding might help you to reposition yourself to choose what is relevant and what is not so relevant in life. If we choose what is relevant in life, based on practical, realistic criteria, we can ignore the irrelevant things spontaneously. We are what occupies our mind. What occupies our mind holds us, molds us. So, we are what occupies our mind. This is our choice. We can occupy our mind with high elevated thoughts, thoughts of grandeur, thoughts of higher elevation, thoughts of super-conscious states connected to a Master, thoughts of the Masters. We can occupy our minds with great things, but there will be struggles, struggles because of our desires, our native laziness, our tendencies, and inclinations. They will all try to pull left and right, up and down. We have got to tackle them because they are living with us. They are like family members who have an interest in you, who believe that this is what you’re born for. Or these tendencies are a part of your system and you can’t avoid them.

What occupies your mind makes you. If this understanding is clear, you can choose to fill your mind with the right thoughts. In fact, you don’t have control over thoughts, thoughts just happen spontaneously with time. But we can choose to occupy our mind, engage to apply our mind on the positive, regenerative, and rejuvenating matter. Such information will enhance you and enhance the world around you; so that the world reciprocates that back to you. What you give to the world, you get from the world. When you give yourself to the world, the world gives itself to you. This control is in everybody, you can all choose to do this. You can control these factors. It’s an attitude. So we can definitely choose to be different, to be ourselves. Connect to our highest possibilities and express that to the world. Our value always is what we give to the world.
Today I would like to tell you about one aspect of our life. Just throw some light on it, so that you could ponder on it.

We have so many people around us who love us unconditionally, who care for us, who respect us, those who have value for us, or we have value for them, and those to whom we have a value, they value us. Often, we ignore those people in life, and we try to impress or chase people who do not really care about us, who are indifferent towards us. I’m sure all of you have experienced that. There are people, who really love you, care for you, but they’re insignificant in your life, or you don’t care, you’re indifferent towards them. And there are people who really don’t care about you, they don’t love you, but you really want their affection and you do everything possible so that they love you, they accept you, which won’t happen. And the result is a disappointment. Usually or sometimes, it so happens that we’ve hurt the people who love us because our mind is occupied on what we do not have. We totally ignore what we have. This is one of the tragedies of existence.

All of us have some people who really care for us. And all of us have people whom we love and want them to care for us. But due to whatever reason, they are indifferent towards us. What should you do, ideally, what is the right thing to do? Ignore those who are indifferent, even if you love them. If you would like them to love you, or like them to be affectionate towards you, but if they are indifferent towards you, ignore them completely. Respect them, love them, but ignore them. And ignore their impact in your life so that you won’t get hurt by their indifference, which will help your self-esteem. Meanwhile, focus on those who really love you, care for you, and give them back, reciprocate the same. If we live our lives in this manner, that means, love those who love us. That means you reciprocate love and we ignore those who do not love us or those who are indifferent towards us. And don’t analyze the reason; it could be simply unmatched frequency. Frequency is not matching, that’s why they can’t communicate with you. That’s probably why they don’t understand your love, care, or your need for their attention. So, ignore them. Accept, respect, and deeply love those who really care for you. Do not hurt them ever so that your life will be stable, you will have a better balance in life, and you will feel good because you are reciprocating evenly, the emotions that you receive. Imagine you are getting love from somebody, but you are giving back hatred – that is already an imbalance. If you get love, give love, reciprocate evenly, and that will stabilize you.

I leave you with these thoughts, how to unclutter your mind, how to prioritize, and how to balance yourself in society. Think it over. Share it if you liked it. And we’ll meet again later.

This is Mohanji for you.

Transcribed by Ulla Bernholdt

Proofread by Shyama Jeyaseelan

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Dear friends, this is Mohanji.

Welcome to another podcast. I hope you’re doing well and you’re enjoying the podcasts. We would like to have your comments and suggestions, and I hope you are able to share it with others as well if you liked it.

So, today we talk about spaces. What is space? Space is a facility that we have for experiencing our existence. All of us have it; all beings have it. Everybody has their space, everybody has their own set of experiences, and they have their own set of expressions. So, experiences, expressions, and space, they are all interconnected; you need to have space, you need to have an environment to experience and express. Then where is the problem? That’s when we try to encroach into another person’s space, or when we believe that the other space also should be ours, or the other person need not have that space. In other words, if you think, another person’s space is not significant, then we have conflict, and that’s what we see in the world today. Every country or each country is trying to gather or acquire spaces from other countries, and then they have a conflict. Most of the wars are created like that. So, we have to be very careful when we look at spaces or when we think in our mind about spaces. We must accept that every being has an equal right for their space. And every being has their space, and we respect it. So, if you respect the space of everybody; it can be called your own privacy zone; it can be called your own area of activity. Whatever space you have as your own, that space has to be respected.

And eventually, at the end of the time, at the end of our life, how much space do you need? Six-foot space. So that’s all a human being needs; a person needs only six-foot. If you are very tall, probably eight foot. That’s it. We don’t need a lot of space that way. So, we need to understand, we need to be modest. And whatever space we have, be happy. You must be happy that we have space. It’s gifted, God-given, be thankful, be grateful. And at the same time, don’t ever think that you own this space forever, because when you die, as I said earlier, all you need is about six-foot land, that’s it.

So, we should not be too proud of our spaces, nor should we be disrespectful of our spaces. We should appreciate that we have this space. We have all the people who have their own spaces, and we respect everybody’s spaces, respect our space so that we have a great coexistence in this world. This is what we need. And the same goes to all the beings of nature – a tiger, a lion, a deer, a rabbit, a snake, a monkey; everybody has their space and their spaces belong to them, and it should; we should not encroach into that, as well. Because when we encroach into those spaces, they have to come into our spaces. That’s what we see when the wild animals encroach into the city, which we have seen in the COVID-19 times when human beings are all indoors and animals and other beings are roaming around free, they’re all walking around. So, this means that we have occupied their spaces and we have encroached into their spaces. So, when they get a chance they come inside, and they are occupying our spaces, so this is exactly how it works.

So what is ours legitimately, we must use, we can use, but we should not encroach into anybody’s space, and we should not kill a being, or disturb a being, because we are greedy to keep our space. We should allow everybody to have their space. We have no right to disturb any being. While we are on Earth, we should have a peaceful existence, we should be peaceful inside, and we should also make sure every being is peaceful, all beings are peaceful. So, this way, we can have a perfect coexistence.

I leave this thought with you. Spaces are very important to remember, and also the spaces that we use, and the spaces that others have, we should respect everything. We should respect our space; we should respect everybody’s spaces. And then we have a great coexistence.

I love you, and I leave this thought with you on your plate. Let me know what you think about it, this is just to give you certain thoughts to digest, to ponder. You know, this whole podcast idea is not to teach any lessons or give any lessons, it’s basically to give certain thoughts, so that you can think about it and you can talk about it, you can discuss it, you can share. This is what I would like you to do so that it improves you, it gives you more energy and it gives you more stability because many times we don’t think about it. Just like I said, why do wild animals encroach into our spaces and we kill them sometimes, we have seen that. Why do they do that? It is because we have encroached into their spaces; that’s why they don’t have spaces. So, these small things which if you can ponder and you can discuss with your children; it might be a good idea, they may start thinking, ‘Hey, we should not touch other’s spaces, while we have full right to occupy our space.’ And our space is absolutely as important as others have their own spaces and that’s important. So, we have to understand that everything is important, and we should keep respect, we should respect everybody’s space. I leave you with this thought. Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.

Lots of love. This is Mohanji.