Ego Prevents You From Accepting Your Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. But if you perceive your mistake in the right way, despair can never arise. The reason for your sadness and despair is that you actually do not want to accept your mistake, but are compelled to do so. When you are caught red-handed and have to reluctantly admit it, you feel sad, depressed and you develop complexes. This occurs when you intend to defend your ego and not honestly own up. Your suffering is not because you did what you shouldn’t have done, but because the image you have created gets tainted. He who honestly accepts his mistake so that he can uproot it would never go into depression or inferiority. You ask for atonement for a wrongdoing and you perform it, too. But the next time you get a wrong desire, you feel, ‘let me fulfil it and later I shall ask for atonement and cleanse myself.’ Your focus remains on the deed and not on the impurity latent in your intention. Thus by falsely repenting and taking atonement, you try saving your image but not move towards transformation. There is no regret for your faulty state. You try covering up the mistake. In the name of repentance, you try defending your ego. If the list of your mistakes becomes long, your ego feels hurt and you think, ‘Am I really so bad that I became angry? I am not, it’s just that such a situation arose and I happened to act like that.’ You repent and become the ‘good’ person you think you are. This so-called repentance does not transform you but makes arrangement for you to stay the way you are. You keep repeating the same mistake but do not bring any change in your inner state. Ouspensky in his book ‘Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’ writes about Ivan Osokin who goes to a mendicant and says, ‘On the whole I am a good person. Yet mistakes have been committed. Walking through an unknown path, I fell in a pit. I am not the kind who would fall, but the path was unfamiliar, there was darkness of the night and a pit. May be someone pushed and I fell in the pit. If I get to relive the past and walk again, I want to prove that I would never fall in the pit.’ The mendicant said, ‘I make you 12 years younger.’ Osokin said, ‘You see, in 12 years I will become another person. I was wishing I could get another chance so I don’t repeat the mistakes I had committed in ignorance.’ Osokin returns to the mendicant after 12 years and confesses, ‘I seek forgiveness. The mistakes I had committed in the past were not because the path was not known. The mistakes were mine alone; because I have repeated the same mistakes. I have realised that I have been living exactly the way I had lived in the past.’ The mendicant said, ‘I knew it will recur. Because the mistakes are not in the action but in the intention.’ Not just Osokin but you too live a strange life; you live your life in exactly the same way as you have been living. Even as you age, you keep repeating the same mistakes, because the doer remains untransformed. You do the same things you did in the past and so you remain the same as you were. Life gives you many chances. But you cheat yourself by blaming the circumstances.
Source: Times of India, 24/09/2018
Everyone makes mistakes. But if you perceive your mistake in the right way, despair can never arise. The reason for your sadness and despair is that you actually do not want to accept your mistake, but are compelled to do so. When you are caught red-handed and have to reluctantly admit it, you feel sad, depressed and you develop complexes. This occurs when you intend to defend your ego and not honestly own up. Your suffering is not because you did what you shouldn’t have done, but because the image you have created gets tainted. He who honestly accepts his mistake so that he can uproot it would never go into depression or inferiority. You ask for atonement for a wrongdoing and you perform it, too. But the next time you get a wrong desire, you feel, ‘let me fulfil it and later I shall ask for atonement and cleanse myself.’ Your focus remains on the deed and not on the impurity latent in your intention. Thus by falsely repenting and taking atonement, you try saving your image but not move towards transformation. There is no regret for your faulty state. You try covering up the mistake. In the name of repentance, you try defending your ego. If the list of your mistakes becomes long, your ego feels hurt and you think, ‘Am I really so bad that I became angry? I am not, it’s just that such a situation arose and I happened to act like that.’ You repent and become the ‘good’ person you think you are. This so-called repentance does not transform you but makes arrangement for you to stay the way you are. You keep repeating the same mistake but do not bring any change in your inner state. Ouspensky in his book ‘Strange Life of Ivan Osokin’ writes about Ivan Osokin who goes to a mendicant and says, ‘On the whole I am a good person. Yet mistakes have been committed. Walking through an unknown path, I fell in a pit. I am not the kind who would fall, but the path was unfamiliar, there was darkness of the night and a pit. May be someone pushed and I fell in the pit. If I get to relive the past and walk again, I want to prove that I would never fall in the pit.’ The mendicant said, ‘I make you 12 years younger.’ Osokin said, ‘You see, in 12 years I will become another person. I was wishing I could get another chance so I don’t repeat the mistakes I had committed in ignorance.’ Osokin returns to the mendicant after 12 years and confesses, ‘I seek forgiveness. The mistakes I had committed in the past were not because the path was not known. The mistakes were mine alone; because I have repeated the same mistakes. I have realised that I have been living exactly the way I had lived in the past.’ The mendicant said, ‘I knew it will recur. Because the mistakes are not in the action but in the intention.’ Not just Osokin but you too live a strange life; you live your life in exactly the same way as you have been living. Even as you age, you keep repeating the same mistakes, because the doer remains untransformed. You do the same things you did in the past and so you remain the same as you were. Life gives you many chances. But you cheat yourself by blaming the circumstances.
Source: Times of India, 24/09/2018
