Tilak with one’s moments of happiness

 Tilak:

            There was a strong reason to associate the tilak with one’s moments of happiness. Whenever there is a happy event, let a tilak be put on your forehead.

Both the happy event and the tilak will be remembered through association. 

Experiments in this area:

                    Pavlov, the Russian scientist, did many experiments in this area. He said anything can be associated with anything else – our lives are just the sum total of our associations. One of his experiments is well known. It involved him offering food to a dog. Pavlov would keep some food at some distance so that the dog would start salivating while he was looking at the food. Then Pavlov rang bell. There is no connection between a bell and the secretion of saliva, but whenever the food was offered to the dog the secretion of saliva began and then the bell was rung. This was done for fifteen days; the mental association between the bell and the saliva was now established. On the sixteenth day there was no food, but when the bell was rung the dog began to salivate. The ringing of the bell activated the dog’s memory of the food: the bell became a symbol for the food. This same law of association has been used with the tilak: it has become associated with happiness.

                 Whenever a happy event occurred, a tilak was used; so the tilak and happiness gradually became so associated that the tilak could never be forgotten. So whenever you become happy, you will first remember the agya chakra. We always like to remember happy moments, and whether we were really happy or not, we live in happy memories. Even small happinesses are exaggerated; we magnify the happy events and minimize the unhappy ones.

                         When you first met your beloved, how happy you were! Today when you think about it, it was such a great event. But if you actually meet her today, the happiness will become contracted. Then again within twenty-four hours you will magnify it. There is so much unhappiness in life that if we don’t magnify the happiness it would be difficult to live.
                         If the tilak is associated with happiness, as the happiness is magnified, so also is the tilak. With this happening frequently the happiness is associated with the agya chakra. When this happens, understand that you have made use of happiness for opening the third eye.

                          The more we activate it from different directions, the more
helpful it is. Those countries which have not used the tilak have not known what the third eye is. Those countries which had no concept of the third eye could not invent the tilak; there was no basis for it. Some society will not suddenly get the idea to start applying a tilak to the forehead without any reason. There is no reason to apply a tilak just at random on any spot. So it is not just accidental, and such a practice can survive only if there is a deep reason for it.