I am habit. I inhabit every cell of the body. I train the body to respond. I help the body to adapt. I give personality to the body. I build the traits: the characteristics that uniquely define a person. I am the person.
I produce thoughts in the mind. I am the thinker. I generate the activity in the mind in order to help cope with the complexities of life, to handle the ever changing circumstances and to respond quickly, automatically to a given situation. I govern the mind: no, I am the mind.
I am as old as the hills, literally. I move from body to body through genes. A careful study of the genetic structure of a body provides clues to how I operate in that body. I modify myself and adjust to changing life situations. I am the attraction between the magnet and the iron filings. I produce anger when desire is thwarted. I can produce the same reaction to different situations or different reactions to the same situation. I am highly adaptable. I can be cultivated to produce new ways of behavior. I am the author of culture.
I dictate every aspect of the body: the tastes, the ideas, the idiosyncrasies, the thoughts, the beliefs, the reactions – every conceivable and inconceivable response of the so-called person is me in operation. Organisms come and go, but I can neither be created, nor destroyed. I have always been and will always be a constituent of everything in the universe. I am God.
I operate at a subtle level, at the level of the elementary particles that constitute all matter, including the living beings. I animate matter. I am the spirit that moves in the body, in its every pore and cell. I have no death, for I was never born: I have been there since the beginning of time. I am life.
All attempts to curtail me or to control me in some manner are the result of ignorance about me. The thought that says ‘control your habit’ is also born of habit. One kind of habit is trying to control another kind is like a child playing a game with itself. It maybe satisfying, but eventually it will not change anything. It is purely an illusory notion: something that is planted by me so that the brain will have some activity, something that gives the illusion that it is progressing. Improvement is a myth: I have no room for it. I am perfect.
I have the power to present myself differently. Even though I am the same in everyone, they hate me or like me as I appear in another person. I am good. I am bad. I am lazy. I am stupid. I am this. I am that. I am polymorphic. I am the changeless change in everyone.
I work hard to maintain the semblance of uniqueness in every person. Everyone feels different because I operate differently in each person. I work with the things that are common to every person: fear, desire, and so on. I take these things and produce combinations such that they appear different, and given the circumstances in each one’s life they appear entirely unique. This is my master stroke: I am genius.
The combination of characteristics that I produce gives a unique personality to the person. I have created personalities that I re-use. Every time a person dies, I come back in another form, at another time, in another place. When the body perishes, as it must, I wait until another is born and then imbue it with the combination of characteristics of the perished one. I reincarnate.
It was dead easy to work on lifeless matter: things always behave exactly the same way, no matter which part of the universe they occupy. Working with animal forms, I found some difficulty, but I have managed to produce a uniform behavior to each kind of animal. I have created a behavior at the level of the species. With human beings, it was comparatively harder; they have discovered other things like awareness, insight etc.
The majority of humans simply operate through me. It is so much easier and faster. The scheme I have set for them has been in operation for thousands of years now. The scheme that has evolved into the law of Karma. I am Karma, The Lord of life, of all sentient beings. It is only a few misguided souls who have planted the seed of doubt against its efficacy. Ever since, a few have been looking elsewhere for a new way of life. A life devoid of habit. A life bereft of me is a barren life. Woe betide humans who reject my dominion, when they stray from the path that I have set for them.
I have only one enemy and it is called intelligence. It has been waging a war for some time now. I discovered that it operates through awareness. In order to counter this menace I have split myself into the good and the bad, the evil and the divine, the sensible and the senseless. I now live in different forms – good habits, bad habits, expensive habits, sensible habits, divine habits, stupid habits and so on. Compared to this fledgling intelligence, I am ageless. It is infantile, arrogant, and utterly self-defeating to assume that intelligence will erase me from the very cells that I animate.