The most counter-intuitive and yet brilliantly simple gem emerged in the form of the realization that what’s inside my mind is what manifests in my life outside.
Thus, if my mind is filled with impurities, defilements, worries, anxieties, enmities, fears, superstitions, insecurities, foreboding, that is precisely how my external environment organizes itself and provide me validation for these mentations through my lived experiences. And on the contrary, if my mind is filled with peace, harmony, joy, friendly vibes, equanimity, compassion, empathy, I am gifted in turn with these conditions in the real world.
I have come to appreciate this emergence both at a mundane level and also at a karmic level. At the most basic level, it is easy to understand that our mental state drives the nature of our actions – which typically mirror our emotions and feelings. These actions when conceived in the womb of defilements and impurities, result in the sort of action that then interacts with the outside world with that framing.
It is not hard to follow that we typically receive reciprocal activity in response to our actions. So, when we lead with these negative conditions, we find the same negativity being returned to (or directed toward) us in the form of events or actions from others that confirm our inherent inner state of mind.
Take for instance anxiety about with one’s career development and trajectory. If I spend time fearing a negative outcome associated with a potential promotion for which I am being considered, I will likely misperceive that actions others maybe taking are oriented towards upstaging me or I might myself start acting in ways that would sabotage my own success.
And with such self-sabotaging behavior, others will likely actually start wondering if I am actually deserving of the promotion in the first place (even if they were positively or neutrally disposed towards the idea in the past), which will only serve to further perpetuate the downward spiral.
If on the other hand, I focus my entire capacity on putting in my best effort toward the desired goal and not inflict myself with the anxiety associated with the future outcome, I will more likely give myself the best chance to true success.
Now let’s understand this insight also through the lens of karmic energy and connections, which relates to the popularized law of attraction indicating that we magnetize towards us situations or people based on our thought process. This could apply to both favorable and unfavorable thoughts which would then manifest into parallel outcomes. While it is not clarified what causes this synchronicity, my own understanding is the following.
Essentially, in aspects pertaining to the inner mind’s wavelength, like attracts like and creates resonance. In other words, our mind (or brain for those more scientifically inclined) transmits electromagnetic waves of varying frequencies. Just as in physics, when sound waves of similar frequencies come together, they create resonance or amplification of those waves.
And thus, if we are emitting waves of peace, harmony, contentment, and equanimity, these get synchronized with other energy centers – human or non-human, visible or invisible – that are also creating similar waves, leading to an intensification of our virtuous qualities. On the flipside, if I generate neurobiological activity corresponding to defilements like anger, anxiety, fear or inadequacy, well, now these destructive qualities also get amplified and magnified instead.
Much like intense sound waves in high resonance don’t just limit themselves to the quality of producing music or cacophony, they can also shatter glass that is in its path. In other words, the waves can also create physical impact. Similarly, the brain waves when in strong resonance don’t limit themselves to being mere thoughts, they can actually cause actions and situations to manifest in their accordance.
With this parallelism and link between inner thoughts and outer manifestation clear and repeatedly confirmed through frequent investigation and observation, it begs to reason that the purer my inner mind becomes, the better my outer circumstances will be from a karmic connection standpoint. This realization has served as another reinforcement to continue on the path to focus inward and continue the lifelong journey towards inner purification.
Time and again, I return from my meditation retreats (where the environment is naturally more conducive to deeper cleansing of the mind relative to daily meditation in the urban jungle of New York City or my nomadic travelling locations) to find that while I was away and working intently to remove (or sometimes fully eradicate) certain defilements from my mind that correspond to certain life situations associated with those conditioned complexes, have actually been removed already while I was out of the material arena in dealing with them!
Initially, I almost wondered if these apparent miracles were either figments of my creative imagination, truly random and accidental occurrences, or just temporary fixes. Having examined them deeply and identified the correlates to my inner work, they now seem rather intuitive even as I don’t have the direct ability to pick and choose what defilement gets removed when I meditate!