Swamitioning and Swaminess by Kaivalya

Gurudev is putting so much efforts by gracing us with three live sessions every week to shower the #osdotme family with his unconditional love. The least we can do is follow and abide by his principles. Taking motivation from Komal and Hemanya for adding words to the Swamitionary (dictionary with terms dedicated to our loving Swamiji), we can add two more terms to it:

Swamitioning: Conditioning our minds to be like Swamiji, i.e., being full of compassion, truthfulness, and unconditional love.
Swaminess: Imbibing politeness in our speech and mindfulness in our actions. (Even though Swaminess is a subset of Swamitioning, it may help us all in reminding ourselves to be polite in our speech at least for this week, and then further.)

Many of us may never have realized how powerful conditioning of mind can be. Below is an exercise from Walk The Dragon program by Swamiji. I request you not to scroll more than needed to see the exercise and make visible the answer to the question before giving it a thorough thought at least for a minute. You will be amazed by it.

The exercise was as follows:

These are some example of straight lines: | _ / –

And, you are familiar with roman numbers: 1 = I, 2 = II, 3 = III, 4 = IV, 5 = V, 6 = VI, and so on.

Now, can you add just one line to IX and make it equivalent to 6?

For those who are not aware of Walk The Dragon program and want to know more, please check out the session wise summary by SMisra ji.

Now, if you are done thinking let’s look at the answer.

SIX

Yes, it was as simple as adding “S” in front of “IX” to make it equivalent to 6. Don’t be sad if you didn’t get it right. A lot of us didn’t during the session and some of us had to hold our jaws from hitting the floor after Swamiji presented the answer.

The first two statements, even though completely irrelevant to the question, conditioned our minds to think only in terms of straight lines and roman numbers. Imagine, if just one minute of conditioning can create such a strong bias, how would a lifetime (and even more) of conditioning affect us? We can decipher two takeaways from this exercise, which Swamiji has taught us many times in various discourses:

Small actions towards changing our behaviour and mindset can and will go a long way in helping us become a better version of ourselves.
To be gentle and not get dejected while working to change ourselves, as we are looking at changing years of conditioning imbibed by our minds from family, friends, teachers, colleagues, media, movies, etc. What is important is to keep walking, one step at a time, one day at a time, and remember Swamiji’s words “Any profound change comes slowly and gently”.

Now let us all keep reminding each other to follow Swaminess and obey our Gurudev for the 7 day challenge he has given to us. If you haven’t already read the wonderful method on how to intensify Swaminess, please read Mindful Speech by Jayshree ji. And if you haven’t heard the Mind and Divine series in the melodious voice of Anu ji on intensifying mindfulness in our daily lives, please do so at the earliest, it will do wonders to you, promise!

May Diving Grace be with us all to do Swamitioning of our minds and follow Swaminess.

Jai Shri Hari 🙏🏻