Controlling the Mind🔗

Time and again Krishna talks about detachment. This is the whole crux of the Gita. This detachment is renunciation. Renunciation of attachment is true renunciation.

You can give up all material possessions and move into a forest or an ashram, but if the mind still hankers for those possessions, renunciation has not happened. It has happened in the body, but not in the mind.

One can still be very much in the material world, busy with wheeling and dealing, and yet be totally detached about the outcome. Action without attachment is renunciation. It is only this renunciation that leads to liberation.

See the lotus flower; it grows in a dirty pond; its stalk is completely inside the dirty water. But the flower is so beautifully above the water. It is so beautiful, that when someone looks at it, you can see the beauty of the flower and the dirt around it is hardly noticed! Similarly, when you are neck-deep in the activities of the world and yet unaffected by what goes on, when your core is undisturbed, you have reached the goal of renunciation.

A small story:

A master was walking with his disciple when they came to a river. The disciple asked, 'Master, are we going to cross this river now?' The master calmly replied, 'Yes, we are. And be careful not to wet your feet.'

The disciple could not understand what the master was saying. The master was trying to tell him that spirituality is all about crossing the ocean of life without getting your feet wet. Spirituality is not about running away from worldly things. Be very clear about this.

A beautiful story about Swami Brahmananda, a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa:

One day Swami Brahmananda was meditating in Brindavan. A devotee came and placed a costly blanket before him as an offering. Swami Brahmananda said nothing.

He just silently observed what was going on.

A couple of hours later, a thief came by, spotted the blanket, came up to him and took away the blanket. Still, the Swami watched in the same way, silently, with no reaction.

Some of the junior disciples were very perturbed that a costly blanket given to him by a devotee had been stolen. However, it made no difference to Brahmananda.

Another story from the life of Bhagavan Ramana Maharishi:

One day some thieves entered Ramana Maharishi's ashram. They took whatever little they could find and before leaving, even gave him a blow. Bhagavan showed no reaction. Even the pace of his breathing did not alter during the incident!

These realized souls were so centered in themselves that the outer world incidents happening in the periphery did not affect their core in any way. When we can become like this, we won't internalize the outer world incidents. We will not get caught in the sway of emotions and in the push and pull of fear and desires.

The basic principle, the basic truth behind imbibing this sense of centeredness is really this: Existence is a loving mother caring for us every moment, providing all that we need. When this understanding happens, we surrender to Existence. The wave drops into the ocean, blissfully aware that it is a part of the ocean. It no longer feels it is a separate entity trying to fight Existence, thinking that the ocean, the Whole, is its enemy.

Surrender needs to happen out of a deep understanding, not out of a superficial acceptance of the inevitable. If it happens out of acceptance, it will be just a compromise. There is no point in saying, 'Oh, it is destiny. It is written on my forehead and it is foretold by the stars.' This is not true. We have free will and we can do what we want. We have to accept the flow of life with the true understanding that we are being taken care of. When this awareness happens out of deep understanding, it is beautiful. It is total and it is true.

One more thing about this is important. To whom or to what we surrender is not important. What is important is the surrender itself.

Swami Vivekananda, in his commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, says that all our prayers to God do only one thing: they awaken our own inner potential energy. When we pray intensely, our own inner potential energy is awakened and it showers its blessings on us in the form that we believe as God, irrespective of what form we worship.

Having the wisdom or buddhi to understand that Existence cares for us, and surrendering to Existence is the ultimate intelligence. Realizing that Existence is not just a brute force or power but that it is intelligent energy is the key to a life of bliss.

Again and again, in all the verses so far, Krishna is repeating a single point in various ways: action without attachment.

Again and again, He emphasizes that life happens only when we live as a witness to everything that happens around us, when we do not internalize external incidents. He again and again says that we just have to watch what is happening around us. We should not let what happens outside affect us, affect our inner space.

The moment we catch this thread and start living life this way, we will find that all our troubles simply disappear. It is not that anything outside has changed. It is not that situations have changed or people have changed. It is just that what we wish to see has changed.

Of course, the way in which we live automatically creates an effect, a transformation in others as well. We attract incidents that fall in tune with our desires and thoughts. When we are blissful inside, whatever happens outside will also be blissful. This is because what we see outside is just a projection of what is inside us. It is just a mirror.

It has been scientifically proven that the results of experiments conducted by different researchers under identical conditions vary depending on the mood of the scientists. In one study of elementary particles such as quarks, scientists were amazed that the behavior of these particles varies with different observers. What we see is our reality. If we see without wishing to change anything, we are in tune with reality, that's all.

So whatever happens outside is always for our good if we just watch with this understanding. Rather than analyzing and trying to control all the time, we will be at peace.

Even the same situation will be seen in a completely different way when we witness. Automatically, no emotion can sway us because now we are just witnessing, we no longer have any vested interest in the situation.

We are no longer operating from the mind, analyzing and categorizing. The incident is there, the person is there, we are there. That's all. Our state is in no way affected by what others say or do. Then, we are masters unto ourselves.

You see, we are never totally involved in anything that we do. Take a simple example of what we do when we feel hungry. We eat something to satisfy the hunger. But do we completely enjoy the food? Do we even focus on the food we eat?

Most often we are thinking about everything other than the food when we are eating, 'What should I complete at work before I leave for home?' 'What do I need to make for lunch tomorrow?' 'Where should I go this weekend?' There is always something or the other in our mind when we are eating. We are actually dumping food into our system without awareness.

That is also the reason why we tend to overeat. Be very clear, we can never overeat if we eat with awareness. Just being aware of what we are putting into our system is enough to control with intelligence what and how much we are eating.

The person who is aware, who is in the present, is completely involved every moment. He feels the hunger completely through every cell of the body when hunger happens. He lives the hunger totally. When the food is before him, he enjoys every morsel of the food completely. Every cell of his body feels satisfied, energized with the food.

Just like having the sense of taste is very natural when we eat with awareness, so it is with all the senses.

A small story:

Once a man went to a Zen master and asked him, ‘Master, please tell me what is meditation.’

The master replied, ‘When I eat, I eat. When I sleep, I sleep.’ The man was perplexed. He asked the master, ‘Master, what you are saying is what you do. But, please tell me what meditation is.’

The master replied, ‘This is meditation. If you can eat totally when you eat, if you can sleep totally when you sleep, you are in meditation.’

Just being totally involved in whatever we do is meditation. Just living in the present moment, enjoying the present moment is meditation.

You must have experienced in your own life, when you are intensely involved in something, you forget yourself. It can be anything that you do. It can be as simple as coloring or painting or reading or anything. When you go deep into it, you forget yourself.

When you have an intense headache, just try doing something interesting very deeply; your headache will go away.

You see, when there is a headache, the body is intelligent enough to allow energy to flow to that part of the body. But we resist that energy flow by being aware of the headache. When we remember our head, what we actually remember is the headache. We associate headache to head. So whenever we remember our head, we are actually aware of the headache. Because we are continuously aware of our head, our headache continues to bother us.

When we forget about the head, we drop the resistance to the head ache and so the energy flows and heals the headache.

Or you can even try another method where you intensely watch like a witness, the energy flowing to the head to heal it. Just look at the energy flow with full curiosity. Be a complete outsider and not participate in the headache. Allow the energy flow to that area and work on it.

You can use this as a technique for dissolving pain, physical pain in any part of your body. Focus on that part without thinking about the pain, with curiosity. Initially the pain may seem to increase, but soon it will reduce and disappear.

When we go deeply into any emotion, only that emotion remains and we cease to exist. This is what we mean by 'totality'.

This moment of 'you' disappearing, you may experience for a just a few seconds in your current lifestyle. But if you work on being intense and total in everything, this experience of 'you' disappearing will happen more often to you and for longer periods also. Soon, you master the art of doing work intensely, and just being absent. We become independent of the work that goes on outside.

Here, Krishna gives us a technique to realize who we are. By giving up attachment to the sense objects, by dropping all false identifications with the body, senses and mind, we can live life with intelligence and this leads us to self-purification.

Krishna tells us that our job is only to do the work, not to be concerned about the results.

We need to keep doing things because we have so much loving energy inside us. We can just exude energy without any reason or any expectation. When we are like this, we are not bothered about the results.

When I say we are not bothered about the results, I don't mean that out of a frustrated or cynical conclusion, we are not bothered. What I mean is that we don't even know to expect results because we are continuously moving and expressing our blissful inner energy, that's all. So we can't even say that we don't expect results. We are just living in the present moment and doing whatever that comes in our way to do. We take things as they come. We do not worry about what comes out of what we are doing at the present moment. We are just flowing joyfully, that's all. We flow with the universal energy. This flowing energy is real love.

When we identify ourselves with our body, mind, with our ego, we alienate ourselves from the rest of Existence. Instead of playing our role in the divine drama as an actor, we start thinking that we are the actor and we actually go through all the emotional turmoil that we were just supposed to enact. When we become entangled thus in our role, we miss the whole joy of the drama and feel that life is a big trauma!

In the same way, when we just do what we have at hand, what we are supposed to do at the present moment, and when we are not bothered about the result, we are always happy. Once we start thinking about the result of our actions, we start to entangle ourselves in that worry and we lose the joy of doing what we are doing at this moment.

When we are established in ourselves, we are automatically in peace irrespective of anything that exists or does not exist around us. If we are centered in ourselves, we are not worried about what the result of our actions is going to be. We are not bothered about the result because we have given our best.

Once a man went to Ramana Maharishi, enlightened master form India, and said, 'Bhagavan, I want peace!'

Ramana replied, 'From your own statement, just remove the word 'I', remove the word 'want' and what remains is peace!'

All our want for peace is all a want. We don't know how not to want, how to be satisfied as we are. Just think, how can we want something like peace that by its very nature has the absence of want as the criterion to be able to exist? When we start to want peace, we create desires in us. That desire drives us to do various things for getting peace and we once again start to worry about the results of those actions. These worries take us away from peace and then again we want peace. So this becomes a vicious circle. We wanted peace in the first place; so we do something to fulfill that want. Doing something creates worry and then once again we want to be free from these worries and be peaceful.

This is a vicious circle because we want peace. When we drop the idea of wanting peace, when we can just be and let Existence take care, peace automatically happens. By dropping the want or the desire for peace and by living in the present moment with whatever we have, we are already in peace. So absence of want is the criterion to be peaceful.

Some people say that they want to be left peaceful without worries. The peace they are talking about is not a living peace; it is a dead peace. It is a lifeless and dormant peace as a result of not knowing how to handle the various emotions in life. It is a peace that they crave because life is too much for them to handle. It is like saying 'sour grapes' and moving away. They haven't got solutions for how to handle life so they just want to escape.

Real peace is something that is in us all the time irrespective of what is going on outside. We are simply happy unto ourselves. Our peace is in no way related to or dependent on the people and situations around us.

Real peace is nothing but the bliss that we feel inside ourselves. When peace is born out of bliss, it keeps us as well as others in a peaceful state. When we are satisfied with ourselves, we do not depend on anything external to be peaceful.

Actually, with modern man, because of all the influences from media and the internet, a cerebral layer has formed. Man relates only with the imagination and fantasies that he has collected from the media. He can no longer relate with reality. If he had collected the images from reality, it would be fine because these exist in reality. But he starts to relate with fantasies. He lives in that imaginary world and does not see what he really has. Once he associates with that imaginary world, he is no longer in the present moment. He is already dreaming.

Even if the dream gets fulfilled, the moment it gets fulfilled, the mind will start running behind a new pursuit, a new imagination. Only when it does this can the mind survive. If there was nothing to run behind, the mind or ego cannot exist.

We don't understand that every tomorrow comes only as today. When the tomorrow comes as today, we simply miss it because we are now looking at tomorrow once again!

When we work without unnecessarily thinking about the result, all our energies will be used towards realizing the goal. The energy will not be dissipated in imagining the results. The power of desire, icchā śakti, will be converted to the power of action, kriya śakti. The desire may initially be a goal, but what is important is the path that the action must focus on and not the end result. The goal is merely a byproduct.

Suppose a child is playing with some small toy and you bring him a new big toy. If you take away the small toy from its hands, what will the child do? It will start yelling and crying. Even if you explain you have a much better, bigger toy, will it listen? No! Just give it the new toy and suddenly, it will forget the old one and start enjoying the new one.

In the same way, Existence also tries to give us a big toy. Existence is so vast and wondrous, beyond imagination. Just imagine the kind of toy that Existence has given us -the whole of Itself! Enjoy it to the fullest. Celebrate it and express your gratitude! Your mind will always tell you that the small toy, your little dreams, your ego, is the most important thing and you need it to survive. Just for a few days, try to drop your fantasies and your expectations. For a few days, decide to drop your fears and your protection of the ego.

Just live life in a simple way, enjoying every moment, enjoying the splendor of nature. Enjoy each and every thing that Existence has created. Start observing simple yet wonderful things like the sunrise in the morning, the play of the vibrant colors and hues in the morning sky. Listen to the chirping of the birds as they get ready to enjoy a new dawn. See the flowers blooming in all their glory in the morning sun, ecstatic to open up to the warm rays of the sun.

Just these few moments will show us a whole new dimension of our Being. They will show us what it is to enjoy life without a reason, without running behind or away from something. They will teach us how to relax into the welcoming, embracing arms of Existence.

In these verses, Krishna refers to the body, which has nine gates to the external world: the two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, mouth and the two organs of evacuation.

It may seem strange and absurd that we can just be neither doing nor causing anything to be done. Here, Krishna does not refer to not doing anything out of laziness and indulgence.

Actually, if we can become intensely lazy, we can be in meditation, in liberation! This is not the normal laziness that we all experience where the body is lazy but the mind flips from one thought to another unrelated thought just like a monkey. Here, the laziness is a deep mental laziness where the mind has been stilled. It has stopped all activity but the body moves according to the will of the divine. We are in the midst of intense activity and yet are not doing anything, because the mind has dropped identification with the activity.

The mind separates the doer from the action. It is the mind that defines who the doer is and what the action is. In the conventional sense, when we say lazy, we are referring to the body. The body is lazing around but the mind is completely active. It is carrying on its work of creating and linking unrelated thoughts. When the mind becomes lazy, instead of the body, we drop the mind also. That is when we stop identifying the action as being separate from ourselves.

Krishna is talking of being so completely involved in something that we no longer are doing anything else, we have become the very action itself. First, we become the witness to the action, only then we can become completely involved in any action. When we start distancing ourselves and become a witness, only then we can be completely involved in the action and then the doer and the action merge into each other. The doer no longer exists separately.

It is not the action that gives us the joy but the conscious experience of the bliss within us through the action that actually gives us happiness and bliss.

A small story:

A dog found a piece of bone and was very happy. It started chewing on the bone but the piece was very dry. It chewed and chewed and after some time, its own gums started bleeding from rubbing against the dry, hard bone. The dog was very happy to finally taste blood.

It licked the bone even more, making more blood ooze from its own mouth.

Little did the dog realize that the blood it was enjoying was its very own! The bone had nothing to do with the taste of the blood!

When we realize through experience or understanding that the joy of life, the bliss in life is completely within us, we will get over our misconception that external pleasures are what give us joy. Then, we can just be without doing anything or causing anything to be done.

When we really understand that we are already all that we can imagine we want to be and much more than that, we have reached the ultimate goal. We will relax into the loving arms of Existence and just flow with it beautifully. Until then it will be a struggle to achieve what we already are.

The enlightened boy sage, Ashtavakra from ancient India, taught the enlightenment science to Janaka, the king of Mithila and Sita's father, saying:

'Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and are no concern of ours. We are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, so we are always free. We are the one witness of everything and are always completely free. The cause of our bondage is that we see the witness as something other than this.'

Here, Ashtavakra tells us that all the emotions of pleasure, pain, joy, happiness, sadness, sin and righteousness happen in us because we associate ourselves with the actions and their results. It is our mind that plays the game. Our mind and our ego associate us with whatever we do and we attach an emotion to each of it. Our ego says it is we who do what we are doing. Our ego takes charge of us.

So we get involved in our actions and their results. We get emotionally attached to whatever we are doing. This attachment to our actions ends either in happiness or in sadness, pleasure or pain, depending on the outcome of our actions.

Ashtavakra further gives a way to get out of this attachment to our actions. The only way out is by witnessing our actions. We have to see the action and the result as a third person. We have to disassociate ourselves from the action that we performed. We have to let the universe take charge. We have to let ourselves be doers only.

You see, when we leave the ownership to someone else, we are free. The burden is not on us. That is when we can be peaceful. That is when we can be blissful. As long as we think we are the owners, we always have to face the worry that comes with ownership. Why do you want to carry that worry? Let the universe take care and you carry on with your work!

A beautiful story from the life of Buddha:

A disciple of Buddha was going to spread the message of Buddha. The monk was not enlightened though.

Buddha called and told him, 'I have to say this because you are not enlightened yet. You are clear, you speak well, and you can spread the message. You may not be able to sow the seeds but you may be able to attract a few people to come to me. But use this opportunity also for your own growth.'

The monk asked, 'How can I use this opportunity?'

Buddha said, 'There is only one thing that can be done in every opportunity, in every situation and that is watchfulness. You will sometimes find people irritated by you, angry with you because you have hurt their ideologies, their prejudices. Just remain silent and watchful. You may have days when you cannot get food because the people are against you, they will not even give you water. Watch your hunger, watch your thirst. But do not get irritated, do not get annoyed. What you will be teaching people is of less importance than your own watchfulness. If you come back to me watchful, I will be immensely joyful. How many people you approached does not matter; how many people you spoke to does not matter. What ultimately matters is whether you yourself have found the solid basis of witnessing. Then all else is insignificant.'

Buddha clearly says to be watchful of all your actions. Only when we are watchful, only when we witness our actions as a third person, we do not associate any kind of emotion either to our action or to the result of that action. By doing so, we are always blissful. Whatever goes on outside does not affect us because we do not associate any emotion to any of it.

Also, what is important is that we practice what we preach. That is what will lead to the true understanding, to imbibing what we understand intellectually. We should live out our principles in life and stand up for what we believe in truly. When we walk the talk we will automatically inspire others to follow. We don't even need to try. We will simply inspire people. The inspiration will be just a by-product while our own transformation will be the joyful end-result.

Q: Swamiji, I understand the truth of what Krishna says. Giving up sensual pleasures and treating everything as the same, is the answer. But how can I practice this understanding? As a normal human being, I am controlled by my senses. Please guide me.

You underestimate yourself. No human being is just normal. You have the potential to be supernormal, but then you decide to be subnormal or even abnormal! You are a superman. Please believe that. Instead you believe yourself to be something very inferior.

You rating yourself as normal is your internal evaluation. This is called mamakāra, how you perceive yourself. Ahaṅkāra is how you project yourself to others. That is what you like others to see you as. You tend to project yourself outside as something bigger than what you feel inside, and inside you always have doubts and feel smaller than what you really are.

Most people, right from childhood seem to be filled with false ideas of self-esteem. You may say, 'No, you are not right, I have a high self-esteem. That is not my problem'. But I still say you have a low self-esteem because any idea that we have of ourselves that is less than us being God is low esteem! We are divine. We are God. If we are living with awareness and truly believe it, we are enlightened.

The only problem is that we refuse to believe that because society has told us that we cannot be God.

Man is not meant to crawl and creep on the earth. He has the capacity to fly to the ultimate. And that is possible only when one becomes an initiate, a disciple. The word 'disciple' means readiness to learn, readiness, receptivity, openness to learning. There is much to learn: the whole infinity. There is much to know from this tremendously beautiful Existence. There is much to love and to live. One should not be satisfied with the ordinary. That's what spirituality is all about: a deep, divine discontent with the ordinary.

People are concerned with the superficial, with the mundane, with the mediocre. To be a seeker of truth is the real beginning of life. Then life takes wings, one starts soaring higher. There are planes upon planes.

We breed our ego and through the ego society manipulates each individual, making him a slave to the powers, to the establishment, to the church, to the state, to the politicians, to the priests. A miserable person cannot rebel; a miserable person clings to whatsoever he has.

He cannot even risk his miseries because he is afraid: 'Who knows? I may get into deeper misery. At least this misery is well-known to me. I am acquainted with it. I have become adjusted to it, I can cope with it. Who knows about the new misery? It is better to remain confined to the old.'

First of all, understand this about your sensory perceptions. All sensory perceptions are illusions. Whatever we hear, see, touch, taste and smell are very transitory inputs. Over 90% of them go directly into our unconscious. We never even get to feel them. The 10% we seem to retain in conscious memory cannot give us a coherent idea of what we have experienced. It is like reading 100 pages of a 1000 page book, and that too a few bits and pieces here and there, and then thinking we are qualified to write a review.

Quantum physics has established that we connect unconnected events to form logical chains. This is what I call 'clutching'. All our sensory inputs, all our thoughts are unconnected. But we link them based on our unconscious memories of the past and start experiencing pain and pleasure. This is what leads to all our suffering. When we 'un-clutch' and disconnect and experience thoughts here and now, our experience will become real and our suffering will dissolve.

Secondly, our senses perceive something and that drives us into action. That action is based on expectations of what we think we will get. The future is always about pleasurable expectations. When we move towards the future with great expectations, chances are that we will be disappointed. This is the teaching of Krishna right through the Gita. He does not tell us not to act, but He tells us to act without expectations. Be happy with whatever you get. Do not prejudge success and failure of your actions. You will be free and happy.

Thirdly, we can either express or suppress our sensory inputs that lead to desires. By suppressing we enter into a danger zone. Whatever we suppress will burst out later. It will only lead to fantasies and worse still, physical ailments. When we express, the desire grows. We do not have the intelligence to fulfill our desires. We only partially fulfill them, and they grow again like a multi-headed snake. This is what karma is.

However, we can learn to transcend the desires by not following what we think our senses convey. When we stay in the present moment and, with awareness, witness our sensory perceptions, we will find that most of them are our own creations, fantasies.

This is why time and again, I tell you all: Enjoy what you have, but renounce what you do not have.

When we are in the present moment we can truly enjoy what we have and fulfill our desires. If we focus on what we are eating without watching television or chatting, we will find that we eat less. We become fulfilled. If we focus single mindedly on the work that we have at this moment instead of being bothered about when we have to finish it, we will finish faster, better and without stress.

This is what Krishna advises us to do. He tells us to master our senses instead of the senses being our master. As of now we are like a dog being led by a leash, without even being aware that we are on a leash. All we need to do is to drop the leash. We need to move beyond the control of our senses.