The Mind - An Owner's Manual

In recent months, as the pandemic spreads and we have been forced to spend more time at home, with ourselves. It's given us a chance to get to know ourselves, our minds and it's innate wandering nature.

The importance of the mind has been recognized from classical times. The Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, says "The mind, unconquered by violent passions, is a citadel, for a man has no fortress more impregnable in which to find refuge and remain safe forever."

"For corruption of the mind,” he writes, “is a far graver pestilence than any comparable disturbance and alteration in the air that surrounds us; for the one is a plague to living creatures as mere animals, and the other to human beings in their nature as human beings."

According to classical Indian thought, the human consists of the body, the mind, the intellect, memory, ego and ultimately the Self, which is the changeless witness to the human condition. You are born with some mental predispositions, you cultivate the mind - feed some tendencies, suppress some tendencies, and all Indic religions have it as a tenet that it is the one thing you can take with you when you shed your mortal coil.

The biggest question in ancient India was, "What is that by knowing which everything can be known?". The quest for this started in the external world, but when the realization came that the universe was infinite and human life finite, the focus changed to an internal search.

The greatest contribution to understanding the mind came from Patanjali, who lived in the 2nd century BCE. Patanjali was the ultimate polymath. He wrote the definitive guide to understand and manage your mind - the Yoga Sutras, the definitive guide to the Sanskrit language with his commentary on the grammar text Ashtadhyayi by Pāṇini  and the definitive guide on Ayurveda, Patanjalatantra,  to take care of the body. 

In more recent times, the first scientific study of the mind on the body was a decade-long work in the 1980s by Dr.Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School. With the support of the Dalai Lama, he studied the impact of meditation on the body on Tibetan monks in the Himalayas. His rigorous studies showed that the monks, by their meditative practices, could control their body temperature, oxygen levels and their brainwaves.

A more recent study showed that mind-wandering created unhappiness. On the other hand, other studies showed that deliberate mind-wandering resulted in improved creativity.

Given that is a long term capital asset, it behooves us to take the best care of it - from understanding its nature, the factors that affect its well-being and how to make it our trusted companion rather than an enemy in the house so that we have something valuable to take with us when we are done with making circles around the sun. My hope over the next few months is to understand Patanjali's view on the mind and how to use it most effectively.


Comments

S Pai said…
The mind is our business, really the only business if you will. Can easily take a lifetime to get a handle on this business or many. But for the blessed ones, it could simply be a glance from the Master. But the one who has a Master is already blessed, glance or no glance.

In fact, the learned ones say, the only way to get a handle on it, is to lose it. But most of us are busy trying to find it so we can lose it.

Drop it. Find the Master first. Hari Om
Aug 25, 2020, 10:13:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A walk around the lake

Image
Henry David Thoreau, in his 1854 book, Walden , narrates his experience of living in solitude for two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst the woodland. While we didn't have the luxury of spending as much time around our neighborhood Kaikondrahalli Lake , this Saturday morning walk around the lake was a delight with the variety of birds, bird calls and nature on exhibition. We reached the lake at around 9 AM by when most of the joggers and serious bird watchers with the telescopic zoom lenses have left. We start the walk with the call and sighting of a White Cheeked Barbet.The barbet is rarely seen outside the thick green foliage of mature trees and it is a rare sighting for us to see it perched on an electric wire. A White Throated Kingfisher flies to its perch - a wall on the edge of the lake and a little egret takes flight, splashing along its liquid runway. We walk towards th...
Read more

European Travelog: D1E1 - Winging it

Image
“Paris is always a good idea.”  - Audrey Hepburn On Summer Solstice day in June 2024, when the world was looking east for the International Day of Yoga, we headed west to Europe.  We had an ambitious plan of conquering Paris in three days,  swinging by the sunny coastal town of Montpellier in South of France,  hopping over to Marseille and then a flight to Rome  where we would see the legacy of the Romans and the Renaissance before heading to Florence to see some of Michelangelo's classics  such as David. We would then come back towards Asia by taking the  morning train from Florence to Rome,  the afternoon flight from Rome to Paris  and the night flight from Paris to New Delhi. The morning flight from Bangalore to Mumbai at 8:30 AM was packed with mostly people heading to Maximum City for a day of business and perhaps try to come back by a late evening flight. We reached Mumbai, crossed Immigration and reached the Vistara gate for our Paris...
Read more

Sikkim - A State of Mind: Day 2

Image
Day Two We're awake at 5:30 AM and it's bright daylight. Our first sight of Sikkim in the daylight shows a land bursting with greenery and flowers.     The valley is shrouded in fog. Occasionally the fog lifts to show glimpses of the mountainside. Everything we see is in  panoramic mode - sweeping hills, rolling clouds and the fog appearing suddenly shrouding the entire landscape in grey. Before we have breakfast, we go for a quick round of birding - there are Mountain Bulbuls, Oriental White Eyes and lots of Mynas. We have a breakfast of Alu Parathas with yogurt and pickle, some toast and marmalade and the teas for which North East India is famous. Our plan for the day is to leave after breakfast for the town of Lachung, in Northern Sikkim. Lachung is the gateway to the Yumthang Valley and Zero Point in Yumesamdong beyond. While it is just 129 km (80 miles) away, the uphill ascent and the bad roads mean that it would take us close to six hours to get ther...
Read more