THE memory of your first appearance on stage can still make you nervous. The long-gone insult you once bore can still make you smart. Your college-days’ jokes are still fresh enough to make you laugh. The huge response to your first performance, years ago, can still fill your chest with pride. The moments that brought you unexpected success are still strong enough to boost your confidence. That moment of your life’s unprecedented romantic encounter still makes you... you know! Mind is like a museum. It saves all the ‘stills’. But these ‘stills’ are actually more live, like the live templates in your computer’s internet history -- one click and the ‘still’ goes live, with the same intensity.

 

The museum of mind, therefore, is far more sophisticated than the physical museum, that has a collection of mere symbols of the past, gathering dust, dead, in a way. In fact, these templates in the mind are the ones which are coming into play one by one each moment. It’s just one of the templates in his mind that has just gone live playing in the form of action. We only come to know it when it plays those templates up one by one in the form of this often carelessly used word – Karma. Our own Karma. Thus, the Karma that one usually calls the Cause of suffering or pleasure, is actually the Effect. Isn’t it obvious from the fact that the templates of memories from the past can still make us laugh or cry or angry? Those are definitely not like lifeless paper albums which we open and close at will. Even memories trigger a lot of action. Everything that is in mind trigger action. Every action has its root in the mind. The Karma that we see happening is just these things in the mind playing one by one, like a playlist.

 

That way, what one does right now is out of one’s control. The Museum of Mind thus differs with the Museum of Ancients on a major point which can be locked out or opened, checked out or ignored at will. The Museum of Mind is something more than just a hall of can-be-ignored-at-will things. Central to life, on the contrary. There is nothing ancient about it. It is live. And, open all the time, gathering templates of events and emotions, non-stop, without limits -- so much so that it is difficult to go back and count. The only choice left with us humans is to remain alert, and watch, and choose extremely carefully from what the templates that are getting played, are serving in the form of our own Karma, because it first takes place in the mind. Museum of Mind.n