Whether it is happiness or unhappiness, pain or pleasure, agony or ecstasy, essentially it happens from within. The seat of human experience is within us. The cameras may be outside, the microphones may be outside, but the drama happens only within us.
The seat of human experience is within us
Even in terms of external impressions. Based on the external impressions, if you are in a compulsive state of reaction, your experience of that imprint take shape from the basis of your past experience. Or to put it more technically, it is based on your Karmic memory. How your karmic memory is, that is how you will respond or react to the inputs or the stimuli that comes to you through the five senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching.
How your karmic memory is, that is how you will respond or react to the inputs or the stimuli that comes to you
You like something or dislikes something, is essentially dependent upon past experience of life, that may be in your conscious memory or not, but somewhere deep down it is there for you to make that judgment. Because between cognition and recognition there has to be memory, otherwise recognition will not happen. If you hear this and then you say, oh this is a dog barking, this is only because you have heard dogs barking before. Otherwise you would be confused. You listen to something and say oh this is an automobile. Well this is only possible because you’ve heard automobiles before. If a sound that you have never heard before happens to you, then you will be confused because there is no karmic imprint of that sort.
You have to move from compulsive reaction to a conscious response
So we must understand this – there is something called as cognition and then recognition and then reaction. This part of reaction or response is the dimension that human beings have the ability to take charge of. That is, you can either be an instinctive karmic reaction, or a conscious response. Once you manage to become a conscious response to every stimuli that’s thrown at you, it doesn’t matter what kind of stimuli comes to you, once it’s a conscious response, you can make the experience of your life the way you want it. That is, the stimuli, the external situations will not determine the nature of your experience. You will determine the nature of your experience. This is a sure way to be able to craft your destiny just the way you want it, or to become a master of your own destiny. This is important to understand that you have to move from compulsive reaction to a conscious response.
