IBPS Clerk Prelims Mock test in Hindi
Question - 1
Directions (Q. Nos. 1-6) : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below it. Certain words have been given in bold to help you to locate them while answering some of the questions.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for the fact that in the ego-mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it -who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfilment there. It says: "One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be okay, happy, at peace."
Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees. It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you'll see that this is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We need to go on to the next stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster. Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much more focused and effective way than before. You use it mostly for practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal dialogue, and there is inner stillness.
When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer connected with the much vaster realm of ….(1)... quickly becomes barren, insane, destructive.
It wasn't through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on Earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1000 of an inch across contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1000 books of 600 pages each?
The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realise just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.
Question-1 : ‘Consciousness' in the passage stands for