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THE FAMILY AND THE NATION
In our lives, similar situations occur repeatedly and we respond to them in the same way. But each one of us responds differently to any given situation because everyone has a different background. Regardless of how each one responds, if the response accompanies strong emotions like fear, hurt, etc., that emotion remains even after the situation is over. Later, when a similar situation revisits this emotional impression (samskara), the same emotion is revived from the memory and the same response evoked. Furthermore, this emotional charge grows stronger each time and attracts similar situations. This is because the samskara, or the emotional charge stored in the memory, is a vibrating energy that attracts the same frequency by the force of resonance. Indeed, our past is our future. The past winds itself through the present and manifests into the future. To be free from the hold of our past, we have to cleanse the samskara.
Samskara reduces us into a programme. We live just as we are programmed. Unlimited possibilities lie before us but we respond to our life only in one stereotyped way and lose sight of all the other possibilities. All our fear is either about the unknown or about losing our knowledge. That's why we lose all our knowledge and understanding when we are caught in the fear of something. When we start responding to our life with fear, we lose our own choice, and it is from this point that our whole life starts. Everything starts to feel old and boring. What is a family but a bundle of collective experiences or samskara?
By working on past emotions and cleansing them (samskara shuddhi), life becomes different, perception of the world changes, living becomes easier and many answers to the problems of our life emerge. Emotions still come, but they don't have the same influence any more. When we cleanse samskara, our heart flowers. We become connected
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