Patañjali Muni, who thousands of years ago wrote a book on psychology and how it relates to the manifestations that we have in our lives, mentions that when we leave this present physical body, the material nature then interprets all of the impressions we have in our mind and the overall feeling that we have when we leave this world. It then fills it in and gives us a new physical, gross body accordingly.
And this is described in detail in the eighth and 15th chapters of the Bhagavad Gītā, where the kind of nose—notice, you have a particular kind of nose; you might not have noticed it recently—or a certain kind of ear or eyes [is determined]. Your eyes are different from a fruit fly's eyes. I looked at a magnification of a fruit fly because I was talking about how cute they are the other day, but then when I looked at the magnification, I thought, "It's not as cute as I thought." But in any case, fruit flies have specific eyes that were given to them by the material nature as an accommodation. We have a particular kind of eye; so, one may then ask, "Well, why did I get this particular kind of eye—a set of eyes?"
These wisdom literatures answer that it's an accommodation of our consciousness. It's a way that we've developed our consciousness; the way in which we've developed our consciousness is then filled in. So, it's as if you made an impression with your foot in the wet sand and then filled it in with plaster of Paris—you get a perfect rendering of your foot. And in a similar way, our consciousness is what carries us or attracts to us our next physical body.
This all goes to say that we're always in the creative process, and we're a lot more creative and powerful than we know. We may turn off that system and forget to create, and just let things happen to us and just take in random information. So, I am taking from this point of Leonardo da Vinci: he had an idea, he conceived of it, he was creative—and how did he express his creative nature? He would write it down for posterity, and then it became manifest as a useful tool.
So, how many ways are we creating our next body or whatever is in our environment? It's called ātmakṛtam; it's what we are doing. So, this is a refined way, or a way of refining how we move in the world by being very deliberate and writing things down. This is what I'm trying to present: one of the ways of being very conscious about what we're thinking and where our mind is going, and also going in a predetermined direction—the way we want to go—by writing it down. So, that comes to also writing goals, priorities, and so forth.
For instance, I have always in front of me on my desk a list of all my priorities, and they're always ready at hand because in a 24-hour period I can forget my priorities. But because I've taken my intentions, I've written them down very clearly, and I have a list now. I can go through and review and recall them, and stay on track. So, I'm saying that this is a manifestation tool.
