Why do we need to be mindful at all? – Chaitanya Charan

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Yes, sir.
Our world today, we may say why do we need to be mindful at all? So, our world is characterized by an alarming imbalance and this was talked mentioned even 50 years ago by Martin Luther King Jr., the pioneer of the civil rights movement in America and he said that our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. So, we have enormous power to control the outer world.
Right now, just by pressing a few buttons, we all may be in different parts of the country, different parts of the world. We are connected. So, this is extraordinary level of outer power we have but misguided men.
He spoke this code before we had gender neutral language. So, it’s misguided human beings in general that he was speaking about. There is something inside us that misguides us.
Something that makes us do things that hurt others and hurt ourselves. So, probably the most tragic example of this kind of misguided people is self-destruction. Self-destruction can be in the form of suicide.
Suicide is literally the mind attacking and killing the body. And over a million people commit suicide every year. That means since I started this talk, already two people have committed suicide.
That’s one suicide every 40 seconds. So, it’s more than that actually. It’s almost 5-6 people have committed suicide.
So, now what he talked about was actually you can say the internet is not there at that time. In today’s world, this misdirection of the mind is even more alarming because it’s not just the imbalance that we have a lot of control over the outer world and little control over the inner world. Rather, there is a systematic propaganda to get our inner world, to get our mind out of our control.
We in today’s world are subjected to these three factors. There is ever-increasing competition among ever-expanding distractions for ever-decreasing attention spans. In the past, if somebody wanted entertainment, okay, they would go watch TV at home.
Maybe TV in India 20-25-30 years ago, there was one channel, Doordarshan. To go and watch a movie, to go to a theatre. Now, there is ever-increasing competition among ever- expanding distractions.
So, we have not just movies, we have the internet with so many websites and not only so many websites and so many apps and so many forums, but they are all competing with each other. Every new app that comes up, there is first Facebook, there is Twitter, there is there are so many new apps which keep coming up, there is Instagram, there is there are so many new apps which keep coming up and they all seek and want to capture our attention. And what is happening is not only are there more factors pulling us from outside, but our own attention spans are decreasing.
So, ever-decreasing attention spans. And thus, our mind gets pulled in hundreds of directions. Sometimes, our mind is like if we have a computer browser and some people have 35 tabs open and one tab is frozen and from that tab some big noise is coming.
Maybe some alarm noise, some unwanted beeping, some music, whatever. And we don’t even know from which tab it is coming. So, to stop it, we can’t even stop like that.
So, sometimes we just find ourselves in a bad mood and we don’t even know why I am in a bad mood like this. What exactly happened? So, some part of us is annoyed, some part of us is angry but what is it angry? What’s going on? So, getting a sense of our inner world is vital. And that is actually the whole process of yoga.
If we consider the process of yoga, it goes from outward to inward. From yam, niyam, asan, pranayam, it goes inward, inward as we learn to calm our mind. So, there is practically no activity which can provide us greater returns than the activity of learning to manage our mind.
Learning to manage our mind. And there is no activity that can cause greater danger if not done than failing to manage our mind. So, we all worry if we invest our money somewhere whether we will get good returns or not.
We think a lot about it. But what about investing some time, some thought, some energy in managing our most important resource? So, managing the mind is vital for us. So, I said I will talk about four simple steps for managing the mind and these are education, experimentation, evaluation and elevation.
So, what do we mean by education over here? Nowadays, education is big business. Millions and billions of dollars are spent by people to try to get the best education. When we want to talk about education in the context of mindful living, it’s somewhat different.
What does that education mean? We are referring to how do we, how are we perceived internally? How do we perceive what is inside us? So, if we consider our inner world, it’s like a mine. It’s a mine and there’s a lot of stuffs over there. Mine is a place where we have to dig and a lot of dirt has to be removed before we can get to the gold or whatever precious item is there.
So, one of the key insights that we all need to get sooner or later in our dealing with the mind is this. Everything inside me is not me. Generally, whenever thought or idea comes up from inside, let’s eat this, let’s watch this, let’s touch this, let’s go there, let’s buy this.
Nowadays, with online shopping available, it’s so easy to buy whatever we want. So, but when these desires come up, what happens afterward? If somebody asks, some people buy a hundred things and then they ask, why did you buy this? Why did you buy this thing? They themselves don’t know why they bought it. Just something inside spoke to them and they did it.
So, the key thing the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga text tell us is that there are factors inside us which are actually not us, which are different from us. So, inside us there are many thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, aspirations, but they don’t exist in harmony. You can’t have a label.
Okay, this is a good thought, this is a bad thought. It just stays. Sometimes we go to a classroom where there is no teacher and all the students are talking and we can’t discern anyone’s voice and maybe if some student talks much louder than others, then maybe we can hear their voice.
But just because some student is talking loudest doesn’t mean that that student is the wisest. What that student is speaking is the best thing to do or even that that student represents the whole class. So, inside us there are various voices going on.
So, it’s important for us to get a sense of what is happening inside. Without that it’s like whichever voice speaks the loudest, we listen to it and then we neglect sometimes values that are important for us. We do things that we end up regretting.
So, that is