#5

The Greek Philosopher Pythagoras once said,” A wound from a tongue is worse than a wound from a sword for the later affects only the body, the former affects the spirit.”

How profound and intense this statement is!

Feeling submerged in the whirlpool of my precious childhood memories, I am reminded of nostalgic evenings of that time. Once during summer vacations, my cousins visited us. Our joy knew no bounds when we all were together and used to have lots of fun. In those days our favourite pastime was flying kites, playing badminton, hide and seek, colour-colour, blind spot, kho-kho, chor-sipahi, stapoo, tippy-tippy top and many more along with reading comic books, stories etc. While playing any game, fighting would always take place as boys of neighbourhood being mischievous would cry over trivial issues. Still mom was very strict regarding usage of right words while fights during play.

As a child I loved reading story books. Once mom brought a story book based on the epic Mahabharta. This story depicted Draupadi’s reputation as a shrew and a trouble maker because of her notorious sharp tongue. Her calling Duryodhana,’’A blind man’s son is always blind’’ provoked wrong actions of Duryodhana. It is known that Draupadi was the cause of Mahabharta, a most spoken war. Each character in this saga, teaches us something whether we like or dislike. At that time, we were too young to understand the deep meaning of the moral lesson which those stories illustrated.

Growing up, we could recall and understand those life lessons given by our parents. I remember my Dad had written in his diary, ’’To speak is to act; for speech is an avenue of action. Wise people discipline themselves and such self-discipline includes the control of speech.’’ said Lord Buddha.

Our scriptures too suggest that our tongue is a small but a very lethal weapon which is housed in our mouth. If we feel pleasant inside ourselves, we would be pleasant to everybody around us. Without creating a thought inside our mind, we cannot do anything outside. Our mouth only speaks but thoughts are stored inside our mind. Sometimes people don’t want to speak wrong words but in a certain situation they speak and say it’s a slip of a tongue. If we carefully observe, this was a wrong thought already stored or was created then only in a form of energy and came in the shape of words. If we want to clean our mind, we must filter our thoughts first. My grand mom used to give a beautiful example according to her, when we cook daal and it has dirty particles or tiny stones, what do we do? We first take them out right at the initial stage. If we don’t do this, all dirt will be cooked and will affect the final cooked product. Therefore its quality depends entirely on the quality of the raw material. Attention must be paid before the daal is being washed and cooked. Likewise our mind is a vessel in which we have to cook clean raw material. In other words, we shouldn’t feed it with negative thoughts.

What about the emotional baggage which we carry in our mind? The pain of insult, hurt, humiliation, inferiority, bad treatment by people etc. causes our positive energy to deplete from our mind. If we really want to cleanse our mind, the process is similar. We have to get rid of negative emotions which lead to stress and vacate our mind of such thoughts which are not productive. If one apple is rotten it will spoil the whole basket of apples. Therefore the rotten apple has to be removed from the basket. My parents taught us a very simple method to remove negative thoughts from the mind. They directed us to register good thoughts by thinking righteously. One pure thought can change everything. On the contrary, one impure thought can lead to utter bad words and spoil everything. We live in a society where the educated is the first to blame in crisis for not thinking on their feet while the illiterate is considered a prerequisite faultier. Our words reflect our thoughts and feelings. We must think about our words, understand them, watch and weigh them before they come out of our mouth.

Whether it’s a house, a machine or even a relationship, maintenance is always cheaper than repairing. We must honestly taste what we are going to serve.

Stay happy, healthy, thoughtful and blessed!