Are we born with our modes – can we change them?
Answer Podcast
So are we born with our moods and if we are born then are we meant to live throughout with them or can they be changed yes definitely we are born with a particular combination of moods and that is based on the way we have lived in our previous lives Krishna says we are born certain people are born with certain kinds of qualities so in this life the moods push us to act in certain ways but again they push us they don’t force us we can counter push a simple example that say if somebody has a tendency to be lazy because that person is in a mode of ignorance and now they have to study for an exam now if they think that you know let me go in my bedroom lie down in bed and let me study now that is a sure fire guarantee that they will just go to sleep but if that person says yes I have the tendency to sleep but I will go to a library where everyone is studying seriously and then I go there I place myself in that environment even if I feel sleepy because everybody is studying I will resist that sleep I somehow stay awake and I do some studies so you know we can change the externals and the certain externals make certain actions more likely certain externals make some actions less likely so by changing our externals we can assist in changing our behavior also so the modes are like the default settings of a device default settings if it comes say if a particular say mobile is coming with say google chrome as a default browser for some reason I don’t like google chrome I want something else then what I have to do if I want firefox or whatever then I will have to go into the default settings find out where the default settings are and change them that is going to require some effort so like that all of us have certain default settings which are the modes which we have acquired from the previous life but they can be changed and it requires conscious choice now can everything about the mode be changed not necessarily so if somebody has an overall intellectual nature that’s how they are going to be somebody has an overall Kshatriya nature they have manager nature that’s how they will be but even while doing managerial work some people can be Tamasik some people can be Rajasik some people can be relatively speaking Satrik so what we can do is increase the composition of the higher modes in whatever we are doing and that is where spiritual association plays a big big role in the 11th canto actually there is a whole list in the Uddhava Gita of 12 things that we can change by which we can affect a change in our modes so I can’t go into all 12 I just mentioned some of them one of them is association second is food, third is reading fourth is fourth is the kind of praying praying means basically it refers to what kind of worship we do what is our conception of the absolute truth so basically for our purposes if we change our association if we change the kind of things that we read and we bring in spirituality into our life we can definitely increase the composition of the higher modes in our nature does that address your question?