Careful With Your Three Qualities

A king would have regular sessions of his courtiers & some invitees once a week to listen to the wise. One such session was in process where 3 identically looking human carvings were placed on a table and the wise man questioned the audience one of them deserves a higher price. The gathering included people from all professions and every minute detail of, weight, dimensions, color, material, even visual features, finishing & smell were reexamined but no qualitative difference could be identified. The king intervened and requested the wise man to help them identify.

The wise man replied they look the same but surely differ in a quality. I will come to them after sharing how humans get trapped by their 3 qualities and under its influence often live its consequences.

Scriptures across different religions caution against 3 Gunas (human qualities). Their learning’s come in different words but mean the same. A few scriptures classify them as: Sattva representing purity, goodness, calmness, harmonious and tranquillity, Raajas embodies passion, activity, and movement, Tamas signifying ignorance, inertia, laziness and darkness. These 3 Gunas (human quality) affect individual’s consciousness and actions, influencing choices, thoughts and behaviors.

The 3 qualities are described as being present in everyone constantly influx & interacting with one another in a playful state referred as maya or illusions. Their proportion varies and they cannot be separated or removed. Humans are known to bond to material happiness, to actions & to delusions and if one does not consciously act upon to encourage increase or decrease their influence they become personal traits hampering one’s spiritual practice & personal development.  

Gurbani for mankind in many of its verses details the likely consequences: hope and anxieties produced holds body in bondage and whoever comes into the world is subject to their play. The blindness in attachment to maya is a disease with which through its possessiveness individual’s loses awareness. In pleasure, pain and worldly cynicism they pass their lives acting in ego. They do not know the One who created them; but think up all sorts of schemes and plans. Their minds and bodies are distracted their fever never departs. Drowned in emotional attachments doubt does not depart. People are not truly at home in their own lives fixating on possessions and external factors. Acts of corruption multiply as the love of duality is corrupting.

There comes a state where the mouth is not satisfied by speaking, the ears are not satisfied by hearing, the eyes are not satisfied by seeing. One’s external actions and sensory experiences are insufficient to fulfil one’s true inner needs. To be relieved you have to utter the glorious praises of the praiseworthy Lord and this realisation is possible in every soul.

Renouncing egotistical love of self and the ways of the world, one’s perfect true Guru reveals His Shabad to manage the three qualities and attune the consciousness to the fourth state. That man who realizes the fourth state — he alone obtains the supreme state.

Walking to the 3 carvings the wise man says as individuals we represent one of them. He takes a thin wire and passes through each of their right ear. In the first one it came out from the other ear reflecting people listen but not learn. In the second it comes out from the mouth. Often one’s learning’s is to be for speaking to others but never for self-implementing. In the 3rd the wire remained inside ‘the worthy one’ reflecting a blessed soul who listens, ponders and applies learning’s to living.

In conclusion the wise man said awareness and conscious manipulation of the three qualities are a powerful way to reduce stress, increase inner peace and lead one towards enlightenment experiencing the universal truth of oneness.