Your Mind is the Most Powerful in Your Body - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Knowledge does not mean informative knowledge. Here knowledge means aware-ness, the sense of knowingness. When you increase the sense of knowingness in you, karma gets reduced.

Animals only have prarabdha karma. This means the karma of which they do not have any control. Nature runs them. They do not accumulate a future karma. If you are like an animal totally, you don’t accumulate any karma. As a human being, this is impossible, because your mind gets into those impressions.

Reincarnation means coming again into a body. Our mind is energy and the law of thermodynamics in physics states that energy cannot be destroyed. If the mind is energy, what happens to this energy when someone dies? Death is almost like sleep. What happens to you when you sleep? The most ironic thing is that we sleep every night but we have never met our sleep. If we meet our sleep, if we happen to understand our sleep, we will understand death also.

While sleeping, your whole consciousness, your attention, your mind, shrinks and shrinks, and then one by one you are shut off from the outer experiences and move inward into a void, a space. And then how do you wake up in the morning? The same energy, the same consciousness that was shrunk starts expanding, opens up, and you wake up. If you observe the mechanism, the last thought that you had just before falling asleep becomes the first thought when you wake up.

© "Deccan Chronicle" (dated February 5, 2003). Reprinted with permission.

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