Part II — The subconscious mind and psychological analysis

Question: How can I bring back to my conscious memory things that I learned once but have now forgotten — such as my medical knowledge?

Sri Chinmoy: Let us forget about the past; let us think of the present right now. What should you do when you study something? Instead of reading a page line by line and word by word, you have to look at the page all at once. Look at the page with your open eyes and do not read any word that is written there. Rather, try to bring the knowledge, the information, the wisdom that the page wants to offer, into your being, into your existence, into your heart. Once your heart has accepted this knowledge, it becomes natural to you and it will then be much easier for you to learn it with the mind.

When you study word by word or sentence by sentence with the mind, you will get information, but when you want to learn something permanently, you have to learn it with your heart. You have to open yourself like an empty vessel and allow the knowledge to enter into you and become part of you. The moment the heart accepts something, it feels that it is its own. When something is your very own you do not lose it because you give it due importance. But something you have borrowed from somebody else or from somewhere else, you will not be able to keep forever. When the mind gets something from the world, the mind feels it has brought in some foreign substance. Then a day comes when the mind discards it because it gets more joy in taking in new thoughts and ideas. The mind is like a grasping child; as soon as it gets a new toy it throws away its old toy because it feels that the new one is more beautiful. The heart also cries for new ideas, new knowledge, new wisdom, but it does not discard the things it has already achieved. To the heart, the things that it has already possessed and cherished and the things that it wants to cherish are equally important.

So when you read something or think of something, instead of using your mind to scrutinise it, or taking it idea by idea, try to make your heart an empty vessel. Look at the page as if you are going to devour it with your heart. The heart possesses things permanently; the mind possesses things for a moment and then throws them away and cries for something else. The mind is very limited, but the heart is the home of the Infinite. The whole world can stay inside our heart, but not inside our mind. Try to bring it into your heart and possess it there. Once the heart has possessed it you can never forget it. It is yours. What you have in your clean and orderly room you cannot lose, because at any moment you can look and see it there.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Mind-confusion and heart-illumination, part 1, Agni Press, 1974
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