What you think, you become

Sri Annamalai Swami

Q: How can we avoid getting attached to the form of the Guru, to his personality and to the place where the Guru lives?

AS: If you completely avoid attachment to your body and mind, then all other attachments will vanish. Identify with That which is neither body nor mind, and all your attachments will go. You can only put your attention on one thing at a time. While it is on the mind or the body, it cannot be on the Self. Conversely, if you put attention on the Self and become absorbed in it, there will be no awareness of mind and body.

Every night during sleep you let go of your attachment to both the body and the mind, and the result is silence, peace and an absence of duality. You can have this silence, this peace and this absence of duality in the waking state by not believing the rising thoughts that create duality for you. Resist limiting thoughts. Replace them with thoughts such as 'All is myself. Everybody is myself. All animals, all things are myself.' What you think, you become. If you understand and experience that everything is yourself, how can you have likes and dislikes? If everything is you, there will be no desire to avoid anything, no impulse to discriminate in favor of anything.

If you want to discriminate at all, avoid bad company and bad thoughts. At night, when you suddenly start to experience the cold, you pull a blanket over yourself. Pull the blanket of discrimination over yourself when you feel that there is a possibility of bad company and bad thoughts dragging you down.

You may need to do this but the jnani will not because nothing can ever drag him back into the realm of false identifications again. He will always be in that state in which he knows everything to be himself. He will never again have the idea that anything is different or apart from his own Self.