Never allow an unclean thought to enter your mind. If it does enter your mind, drive it out at once. Purify your mind so that an impure thought may not be able to gain entrance. Strengthen your resolve.
Swami Sivananda Saraswati
When your mind is clouded, when you are in utter confusion, then you cannot find the right answer, but when your mind is cleared and purified by meditation, then you can see your real face in the clean mirror. When the mind is broken, knowledge is mutilated. True knowledge depends upon purity of mind. Yoga is the broom that makes a clean sweep of one’s inside rubbish.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati
What is a clean mind and what is an unclean mind? The unclean mind is the negative mind. The clean mind is the positive mind. The unclean mind is the hopeless mind. The clean mind is the hopeful mind. The unclean mind is the tamasic, the pessimistic mind, and the clean mind is sattwic and optimistic.
It is like night and day. Day is totally the opposite to night. The clean mind is totally the opposite to what our normal mind is. Our mind is not positive. This can be noticed and observed by the first reaction that you have to anything. It is always a reaction of doubt, negation, questioning, but it is never of happiness and joy. When the first behaviour of the mind is doubt, questioning and avoidance, how can that mind be called sattwic? How can that mind be called positive?
One person wakes up in the morning and says, “Oh, today the day is very beautiful, I woke up laughing this morning, so everything is happy.” Then there are people who wake up grouchy and for them the whole day is grouchy.
It is this mind, this behaviour and expression of the mind which has to be changed into positive, optimistic, hopeful, joyful, and that is where your effort has to be. Try to keep yourself happy – not with a plastic smile on the face. Be really happy, not just show-piece happy. Be really happy where you know that there is no problem in you, and you can experience, you can express that freedom, happiness and joy.
Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati 9 December 2017, Ganga Darshan, Munger