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.