Live consciously
Understanding the mind and how it makes us unconscious
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Ashwatthama character analysis – Just because we are empowered doesn’t mean that we are right
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Karna character analysis – Are we doomed by destiny or by our own decisions?
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Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
So, I hope that I can be of some service to you and I apologise for being late somehow we miscalculated timing when we started. So, I will be taking this talk in a first this first session I will be giving some background the topic is live consciously and what this means is I will talk this theme of live consciously I will talk in three parts you know how we live unconsciously what makes us live unconsciously and how we can become more conscious and then we will be taking three characters from the Mahabharata three characters who act in wrong ways but to three different degrees I will talk about Duryodhana who is the most villainous character in the Mahabharata then Dhritarashtra who is more like a passive villain and Ashwatthama who is more like a one time villain that means one time he acts in extremely villainous way. So, we will analyse their actions in terms of the framework that I will be developing in the first class so we will try to analyse how the minds of people work and how it makes them act so the first session might seem a little abstract and philosophical but whatever I talk about even if you do not understand the first session it will become clearer as we move forward to the later sessions because I will illustrate the principles of the first session in the subsequent sessions.
Now to start with how to live consciously means that we all go through life but our consciousness is often caught in various things say for example at a very gross level suppose we are travelling through very beautiful scenery but if we are fast asleep then our consciousness is in dreamland so then we are not conscious of whatever beautiful scenery might be there around us so that time it is very obvious that we are not conscious of things but even when we are awake quite often our consciousness is not where we are or where we are physically and that is why we can often two things may happen we may miss on something good that is happening in the actual reality or we may end up doing something bad in the actual reality. So, if you are driving along a car and I was in America and one devotee is a traffic cop she is telling how people get into trouble so there was this boy he was driving along and on his phone he was watching a baseball match and while he was watching that match till then he had a clean driving record no problem but at that time he was watching the match something happened in the match it caught his attention and as it caught his attention his attention went there and at that moment it was a school district a child ran into the area and hit the child fortunately the child was not severely damaged but for him it was devastating it was a permanent black mark on his driving record so in that case this one moment of unconsciousness led to severe consequence so here I am using the word consciousness in the sense of being attentive basically so now in this case we will see there are three things the person is here the road is here and the phone is here so he had hung the phone in front of his car and he was looking at the scores periodically and looking at the road so when the phone was showing something so that means he as the person the observer is here the reality is here the phone is here so he is meant to focus on the reality and he had kept the phone on the front view window so the front view window is meant to show us what is in front of us but if the front view window has something else or is showing something else then the person becomes disconnected from reality so for us if we consider that there is the so we the Bhagavad Gita explains are the observers we are the soul the body is like a vehicle in 18.61 Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita yantra rudhani mayaya that all of us are situated in a vehicle which is the body so when we are going through life the soul is the is like the passenger and the body is the vehicle so the driver we could say so this person driving the car and the body is like the car and for us we don’t perceive the world directly we perceive the world through the senses the sense and the senses are integrated around the mind Krishna says in 15.8 in the Gita 8, 9 he talks about this concept of how the soul interacts with the body so in 15.9 he says that the five senses which are knowledge acquiring the eyes the ears the nose the tongue and the skin from all these inputs come in and these inputs come on a screen that screen is like the mind and on this screen which is the mind we see a image of the outer world so for example right now you are hearing so this is one sound coming in now some kids may be making some noise that’s another sound coming in so now both these inputs are coming in on the screen of the mind now depending on who is the kid who is making that noise if it’s your kid or somebody you know then oh what is happening is something wrong with him then immediately that’s what becomes prominent and that’s what we focus on so if you consider the physical reality out here and the soul in here the mind is the via media the mind is the screen on which the physical world appears and because there are these five senses we can imagine that it’s like a multi screen window sometimes if you have a high security building then in the high security building there may be security centre is there and that security centre the security in charge will be sitting and all the doors to that house to that building at all the doors there will be CCTV cameras and the inputs from the cameras all the cameras come on one big screen so when we have this big screen where the where the inputs are coming at that time for the child for the observe the security in charge they have to see all the windows and whenever any suspicious activity happens on any window any activity requires attention and they click on it that window zooms out and then that’s where they focus so now similarly for us we could say there are these five windows each of the senses and from these the inputs are coming in so now we have to consciously choose which window we focus on now this are not that simple because sometimes from one window itself two inputs may be coming say for example right now you may be hearing the sound of me speaking you may be hearing sound of a child making some noise you may be when we are driving we will be seeing someone in front of us but at the same time we will be seeing someone on this road and that road so from each of these windows multiple inputs are coming there is five windows and to live consciously means to make sure that the window that deserves attention is the window that zooms out if some other window zooms out then what will happen is the attention will get caught somewhere else and the person will be misled suppose a thief comes to a child a child is wearing a golden ring the child doesn’t understand the value of the gold and a thief offers the child a chocolate a candy a chocolate a toffee and the child starts eating it and a child enjoying the taste so much that the child is not conscious the thief is slipping the hand behind the neck and slipping out the necklace and taking it away so what happens even the mother may have told this necklace is valuable take care of it but still in that case for the child because the chocolate is so delicious so for that time the taste window zooms out and the touch window becomes minimised and the touch window becomes minimised at that the child can’t perceive anything at all and the necklace may gets the ring or the jewel necklace whatever it is may get stolen so similarly for us going back to the security example all of us when we function to live consciously means that the window that needs attention that is the one which we give our attention to so our consciousness goes where the consciousness is needed to go to complicate this example further I talked about these five windows I talked about these five windows and now and each of these windows can also have sub windows but there is another sixth window which can have many many windows that is the window of our recollection our memory from our memory this can pop up that can pop up so sometimes if we look at someone and sometimes we have the experience we meet someone a person just keep staring at us staring at us staring at us now that may be because they have some they have some evil intention or they may tell later that you look like someone I know are you related to that person now what is happening for them do you think why is this person looking at me like this staring staring is impolite but for them it’s not just that input coming but along with an input some recollection has been triggered and they’re thinking about that person that person is the same person is it brother twin what is it sister twin what is it so then a recollection window in each of us is unique because all of us have gone through different experiences in life and therefore a stimulus from outside what input what it will trigger from inside that we don’t know and sometimes the recollection window may get activated without the stimulus from outside also sometimes suddenly some thought comes up why is this thought coming today suddenly we were remembering that person I had given him $50 10 years ago he didn’t give me back why am I remembering right now $50 is important okay but why now sometimes what pops up from the recollection window we just don’t know so for us the mind is like the screen on which the outer world should be reflected or should be depicted and then we can respond to it but the mind because it depicts many many things apart from the outer world or it depicts only one part of the outer world so therefore we tend to become unconscious so unconscious here doesn’t mean that we are lost consciousness we are not like fainted we’re not soon but it is that we are no longer conscious of things because we are caught in our own thoughts now this is we could say the broad way in which the mechanism of the mind functions that there are the five senses and then the five senses which are like windows on the inner screen and there is a recollection and on these in these it’s not just a pictures that are photos that appear movies also appear because what happens some perception and some recollection may combine together and then the whole movie will start playing over there so it may be that say in India when the world cricket World Cup is going on then cricket mania goes on sometimes we may see young people walking on the streets and they are swinging imaginary bats they are swinging imaginary bats on the road now what is happening they’re walking on the road there is no bat there is no ball there is no ground but there’s a cricket match going on in their mind and in that cricket match they are stars I think this ball will come I’ll hit it like this so here what has happened it’s not only a movie that is being played in the mind but that movie that is being played in the mind is also being enacted some at some degree at a physical level so they are not conscious at all of the road where they’re walking of people who are watching them they are conscious only of the mind and how they are responding to it so basically to the soul is here the mind is here the world is here and the soul’s consciousness is meant to go through the mind to the world and help us focus on the particular thing in the world that we need to interact with that we need to do but instead on the mind something else will appear either some other irrelevant stimuli from outside or some other irrelevant memory from inside and these two may combine in unpredictable combinations now beyond these this is the general principle in which the mind works but for each one of us we have our conditionings we have our individual natures and as per our individual natures each one of our minds works in different ways so far so the mind has impressions within it and impressions within the mind become its propositions that means whatever the mind has done previously it suggests again that is how the mind repeatedly works say for example somebody has repeatedly if they have a phone browser or computer computer on which they have repeatedly visited a particular site so say they have visited Bollywood.com so many times they have visited Bollywood.com now they come for a spiritual programme and in spiritual programme they hear about the Bhagavad Gita and now they want to know what is the Bhagavad Gita so they go and type Bhagavad Gita they type B and what happens immediately Bollywood comes up so what has happened over here they type B they wanted to go to Bollywood but it ended up Bollywood this is because their previous choices are stored in the browser of their device the previous choices are stored in the browser as preferences and they keep popping up so similarly for us our mind is like that browser where previous choices are stored so whatever actions we have done in the past they are stored in the mind as impressions and those impressions come as the propositions propositions means do this what about this what about that they come as proposals from the mind and we if we are not conscious if say somebody is just typing B and they are not very conscious then Bollywood.com comes Bollywood opens up and they start watching Bollywood ok let me look at this movie review let me look at this movie trailer let me look at what is going on in this actor’s life what is happening between this couple that and they may spend a lot of time maybe half an hour they spend and they wanted to visit Bollywood what happened so because they are not conscious whatever is the auto proposition that comes up they just go along with it so similarly for each one of us the mind based on the impression stored in it the mind gives some propositions and those propositions they become like our default actions we don’t conscious we are not consciously aware that we are doing those actions but we just do them and these impressions they propel us or we could say impel us to act in particular ways and broadly speaking these impressions can be of two types there can be now Sanskrit into an English the two different languages so I will first explain the concept and then we will look at the terms there some impressions within the mind can be positive and some impressions can be negative positive impressions means some people come into a room and even they are visiting as a guest to somebody’s house as soon as they enter into a house actually if you move this sofa over here you put this picture over here you put this flower set over here still look so much better and somebody might have been staying in that house for three months and they are thinking how to rearrange this house to look good some people just get it and now it’s not that they are consciously thinking it just comes to them some people are trying to say write a letter they spend hours and hours thinking how should I write this sentence this sentence this word this is not exactly expressing it somebody else comes along and just in five minutes they get the right words now where do they get it so these are the impressions that are stored within us which are positive and when the positive impressions come up so in in the both cases when the impressions are positive or negative at that time these impressions come up without much conscious thought so somebody who is good at music and some people just some kids just they pick up a Kartal and after a few tries they start playing nicely and some other people they try for hours and months and still they don’t get it right so how do some people just get it right that is because certain impressions good impressions are stored and those good impressions come as default propositions so we could call these as instincts. Instincts are in terms of biology we can they are called as programmed intelligence animals are also very intelligent in many ways the way a bird builds a nest the way a sparrow builds a nest using simple straws even the best architectural engineer or civil engineer using straws to build a nest like that will be quite difficult so the animals do have intelligence but it is instinctive that means they don’t consciously think okay let me put this straw here put this straw here just they get it so all of us have certain instincts and those instincts so instincts so basically whenever the impression comes up when something from an impression comes up that means we don’t consciously use our intelligence to analyse it it just comes up within us now of course we may use intelligence to further refine the proposition so if somebody gets an idea let’s play this music like this somebody let’s write like this and they may think further and they may get further ideas out how to improve it but right from the beginning itself something good or something better than what comes up in others minds comes up in their mind so the impressions that are positive can be called as instincts.
When the Pandavas were living in the forest the Pandavas lived in the forest twice doesn’t even know the two occasions first was yeah when they were they were in the forest okay that’s true okay with the exile exile anyone else okay but okay maybe I my question was wrong yeah so Pandavas went to the forest two times so yes so one is well known when they were exiled so they were born they were actually born in the forest because Pandu had taken retirement and they came back to the kingdom then we know about the famous time in the forest into the forest when they were exiled but before that they were in they were in the Varanavar house of lag from where they were burnt and when they were burnt they fled to the forest they escaped yeah so at that time they came to the while living incognito they came to the kingdom of Drupada and there Draupadi swayamvar was going on and in Draupadi’s swayamvar Arjuna won the hand of Draupadi now at that time the Pandavas were dressed as Brahmanas so now naturally Drupada was a concerned father and he wanted to know who who are the people who actually got the hand of my daughter who married my daughter so he invited them to his house for a feast and when they came in the big hall which there was some they sat on some seats and he said I just come in a few minutes you relax and on the other side of the hall there was a long table on that table he had kept various items so on one side where the items related with Brahminical activity so there were some sacred texts there were some fire sacrifice utensil the spoon the ladle and things which will interest some Brahmanas then second there were some weapons different kinds of weapons were there then third there were some things related with Vaishyas so there were some equipment for agriculture there was some equipment related with cows for cow protection and the last were some tools of artisans related to the Shudras so the Pandavas sat down they relaxed they looked around and they saw the table and they got up and all of them went straight to the weapons and they picked up one of them picked up a bow another picked up a mace another picked up a lance and they all started talking this is good this is not that good you know we had that weapon that was much better but this seems better and within minutes they were lost in talk and you know behind a closed door Drupada and his son Dhrishtadyumna were watching and they saw the Pandavas absorbed they started smiling they are not Brahmanas they are Kshatriyas so what happened is that for them because they were Kshatriyas the Kshatriya instinct naturally drew their attention towards weapons although they were devotees but still their attention didn’t go to Shastra they would study Shastra but their primary service was with weapons they were naturally attracted towards weapons so this is the example of a Kshatriya instinct so we all have certain instincts certain things which we are good at and we can know our instincts by noting consciously what we note automatically by noting consciously what we note automatically if we come into a room some of us may immediately note what kind of dress who is wearing and we might have a more visual aesthetic sense some of us may note okay you know what kind of place is this okay that okay this looks like a very expensive place this looks like this this looks like this so you might have more financial sense now when I come into a room the first thing I notice is all the notice boards and I become like a self-appointed proofreader of everything it’s just my brain works like that so I have I have a reasonably strong language instinct so there are some all of us we note certain things automatically and sometimes we can’t understand why others don’t note it sometimes the especially Indians in India they use English for very functional purposes and in the process they massacre English grammar so there are notices which just don’t make any sense so if there’s so many spelling mistakes then I tell somebody what is it do this change this typo over here change it so often the response is everybody understands why don’t you understand so so for me the language instinct is very strong and I notice certain things very quickly of course I also make mistakes but when I make some mistakes in my writing I feel embarrassed but there are others when they make mistakes they don’t feel as they feel annoyed that you have pointed out the mistake so if we note consciously what we notice automatically that is that points to our instincts so again why are we talking about instincts over here I’m talking about how our mind functions so by the so there are all these windows which open up which are there in the mind so which window will zoom up so for somebody with a strong language instinct the text will all zoom up for somebody with a strong fashion instinct you know what kind of fashion what kind of dress who is wearing that’s what will zoom up for somebody who has a very strong environmental instinct okay you know who is using plastic bags how dare they so so what happens is certain things they just zoom up within us automatically these are little now instinct some instincts we are born with and some instincts come by also but instincts cause certain things within our inner screen to zoom up and there so generally I’m using the word instincts in a positive sense it is something which so instinct is like programmed intelligence it’s intelligent choice intelligent perception but it is something which is which is intelligent without conscious attention conscious thought it just automatically comes up there are negative impressions also within the mind and those we can call as some as impulses impulses means these are unintelligent or anti-intelligent stimuli that pop up say somebody is an alcoholic as soon as they come into an establishment the first thing they will say okay is there a bar where can I drink so that is the impulse that will pop up within them so all of us have certain impressions on the past which cause certain impulses to pop up now these impulses when they pop up so like going back to the example of this boy who got caught in watching the match on his phone now he had an interest in that subject in interest in say the sports in baseball and while he had an interest in baseball the it was not just the screen that distracted him it is first of all in his mind because of interest in the baseball he said no I want to know what is the score and even when I’m driving I can’t wait till I get home I want to stay updated about the score so that impulse can sometimes be about trivial things and sometimes it can be about very dangerous things also but whatever it is it is the impulse that comes up so just as some people may have a language instinct and some people may just not have that language instinct it does not matter to them whether things are written properly or not like that all of us have certain impulses and some of us may just all of us have some impulses all of us some don’t have some impulses so for example somebody has never drunk alcohol they pass by a bar there is no impulse to drink that pops up with it with some people the impulse to drink pops up and depending on how much they have drunk that impulse will pop up more forcefully so when that impulse pops up at that time by default if we consider screen of the mind the screen gets filled and then it is possible say for example when we are working on a device some window suddenly pops up now it is possible to minimise what has popped up but for that we have to be conscious oh I was doing this work from where this pop up but if say some student is studying and is anyway bored with studies and suddenly a pop-up comes up about your favourite cricket match some news comes up then anyway they’re bored with this so immediately they have caught in this and then they watch that and they click on that and they go somewhere else and suddenly an hour may go away may not realise it also so similarly for us either based on our instincts or based on our impulses instincts I have discussed earlier now let’s focus on impulses based on our impulses we may be doing certain things but certain other things pops other thoughts pop up within us and when they pop up within us then if we are not conscious we get carried away by them once we get carried away by them then after that there is just like when person watches one movie say somebody is studying but then some YouTube notification comes up of your favourite channel has released a new video and then you look at that and we look at that it doesn’t end over there what happens YouTube gives a series of other related videos and then you watch one video and other series of related videos comes up so like that for us whenever impulse pops up it starts showing us something and then from one little second to the third to the fourth to the fifth it just goes on and on so for all of us we become unconscious of certain things because we become ultra conscious of some things so there is no such thing as we could say complete unconsciousness in our philosophy unconsciousness is also a state of consciousness in medical science when we say somebody is fainted that means they are unconscious they are no longer conscious but in our philosophy when we say somebody is unconscious all that it means is the soul is here the body is here the brain is here see the soul’s consciousness is coming okay the soul is here the mind is here the body is here the soul’s consciousness is coming through the mind to the body but when we say somebody is unconscious all that it means is the soul’s consciousness is not been expressed through the body to the outer world but the soul is still conscious soul’s consciousness is coming through the body from the soul to the mind and because the brain is damaged because the person is injured so the consciousness is not coming out to the physical level so in that sense unconsciousness is not lack of consciousness it is just lack of consciousness at a particular level of reality the consciousness is there but it is simply caught at the level of the thoughts it is not coming to the physical level so same way when we are saying live consciously what it means is that our consciousness needs to be attentive to where it needs to be but based on the impression stored within us the consciousness gets misdirected in particular directions and when that consciousness gets misdirected in particular directions we become conscious of that thing and we become unconscious of other things so this one devotee from Russia I was telling me about how in the end when the Soviet government was there there’s a lot of poverty so they had caricatures of what are the condition of people there was one caricature he said that there was a family that they got the news on TV that the price of vodka has gone up so in the price of vodka has gone up so then the child the son fearfully asked the father dad now the price of vodka has gone up will you drink less and the father says no you will eat less no you will eat less now what father would want to deprive his own children of food so that he can drink more but what has happened over here the consciousness has got so attached to drinking vodka that the normal human concern that a parent has for the child and has become desensitised to that so this is the extreme example and I will talk when I talk about Dhritarashtra how something similar happened to him but in his interaction in the Pandavas so when we become too attached to something our consciousness stays fixated on that thing alone means because of the impulse to drink is so strong that that is what pops up and one has to drink and everything else forget it if after getting this other things work it’s fine if for getting these other things have to be given up doesn’t matter so sometimes the mind becomes so conditioned that certain stimuli not only pop up but they dominate the mind now sometimes there are some programmes are like viruses when those programmes come up they start off and when they start off you try to stop there is no cross to stop it there is no minimise you try to quit it it doesn’t quit so just the only way some other programme starts off is that you just have to reboot it so like that sometimes certain habits become so compulsive that the thought comes in and just don’t know how to get rid of this thought just dominates the screen of the mind and the people can’t think of anything else so the impulses that we have they as I said impulses are unintelligent or sometimes anti intelligent also whereas instinct is programmed intelligence so when the impulses so either way our impulses or our instincts they both direct our consciousness you if we can channel our instincts you can develop our instincts then our consciousness can be directed constructively but if our impulses grow our consciousness gets directed destructively and for all of us the mind is popping up various stimuli at various times and we need to respond to it so to live consciously means that we are aware of our mind and we are aware of the world and then we have to see whether what the mind is saying and the world is saying in proper alignment or they are misaligned if you get carried away by what the mind is saying then we may do something which has counterproductive effects in the outer world so the so we have to become so become conscious of the mind and conscious of the world. In the next session we will start with the case of Dhritarashtra where I’ll talk about how his mind was distorted by his attachment to the kingdom I’ll summarise and we can have a few questions so I spoke about what does live consciously mean the three parts what makes us unconscious then or rather first is how we live unconsciously what makes us unconscious and then how we can become conscious so to understand what aware our consciousness is directed I talked about the mind so the mind is the inner screen on which the outer world is depicted the mind is like a big screen on which inputs from the five senses come up and now each of these windows are a big screen they can also have sub windows and then there is a big sixth window that is the recollection window and sometimes the the outer perception and the inner recollection they can combine in unpredictable ways and suddenly they can start off a movie so although all of us may perceive the same outer situation the inner thoughts that start within each one of us will vary because what becomes prominent in our inner screen and how it combines with memories from the past that varies from person to person so the mind when some unwanted window pops up then we become conscious of that and we are no longer conscious of that which is important so to live consciously means to be aware what is appearing on our inner inner screen and how it relates with what is in the outer world then I talked about how what pops up on the inner screen varies in different people that is based on the instincts and the impulses instincts are like programmed intelligence we all are good at something some some thoughts just come whether a language or be music or aesthetics of a room or interior design or whatever home design what certain things just come to us instinctively and that means that the inner screen just gives a proposition this is what we should do it so our past impression our past actions they become impressions and the impressions become propositions so I give the example of Bollywood and Bhagavad Gita and the propositions may be good if this instincts which directors in intelligent ways or they can be bad their impulses impulses are very short term and they are concerned with immediate pleasures and they are non-intelligent or anti-intelligent so it may be it may be for somebody may be drinking so much that you just can’t think of anything else that’s what prominently pops up in their inner screen and they become desensitised to others basic needs also so for each of us when we want to live consciously we need to understand how our mind works and how the mind sometimes allows us to see the things properly or sometimes it distorts our vision so to become conscious of our mind and to become conscious of the world and to become conscious of any mismatch between the two that is foundational to living consciously thank you very much are there any questions yes please you had a question okay fine I’m sorry I notice you okay is our instinct the basic soul has a predetermined well I’m not talking much about the soul here I’m talking primarily about the mind the soul is presently almost like inactive the soul is a source of consciousness but the soul is not conscious of spiritual reality so the soul we could say is eternally meant to love Krishna but that is almost like dormant it’s like says giving back the earlier example of the security in charge who is watching the outer screen watching the screen on which inputs from the various doors in that high security building are coming so that security in charge is so absorbed in watching the screen that they don’t even notice what is going on in the room nearby that their consciousness completely glued on the screen so like that the soul currently is so fixated on the mind and the world outside the soul is not even aware of one’s own spirituality Purusha prakriti sthohi bhoomte prakriti janmanan karanam guna sangosya sat asat yoni janmasu so Purusha prakriti sthohi the soul becomes situated in material nature because of bhoomte prakriti janmanan because of the desire to enjoy material things the soul is distinct from matter but because the soul has a desire to enjoy the soul’s consciousness gets caught in matter and so right now we are not talking about the soul’s instincts at all we’re talking about the minds so the soul is practically not conscious of itself at all but that is not so relevant for us because spirituality can be cultivated by the thoughts at the level of the mind as well as by spiritual objects in the outer world but the important thing is the soul is almost like dormant say a child is watching a horror movie and a child completely forgets where I am child’s consciousness completely caught in whatever is happening on that screen but similarly for us our consciousness is more or less caught in the in the screen of the mind and in the world which is being depicted on that screen so when we are talking about instincts we’re simply talking about the particular screen and what pops up on that screen the instincts are related with the body not the soul with the subtle body that is the mind the soul in a sparrow’s body might in a future life come into human body but in the sparrow’s body the soul knows how to make a nest in a human body the soul doesn’t know because they’ve got nothing to do intrinsically with the soul does that answer your question? yes please okay yeah okay so if we want to change something fundamentally in ourselves do we need to go to some subconscious and change that or can we just bypass it? it can work both ways basically if we firstly become conscious that if I’m working on a particular machine say if my computer is spoiled and somebody’s given me their computer and then in their computer certain preferences are stored so if I may want to go to Bhagavad Gita but as soon as type B Bollywood comes then I’m not interested in Bollywood but if I’m aware that Bollywood is going to pop up then still because I’m using that machine Bollywood will pop up but then I will cancel it and I will put Bhagavad Gita and I’ll go there so so like that sometimes we just become aware of the conditioning it is present and we can’t immediately get rid of it but if we distance ourselves from it we identify it instead of identifying with it we identify the mind don’t identify with the mind so if we just identify the conditioning then we can distance ourselves from it and then it will still be it will be like a thought which is there there’s a proposition that is there but we don’t pay much attention to it and gradually as we start doing other activities that proposition will recede into the background so the first step is identification we have to identify whatever our default conditionings are and then how to address them one is with a with alertness we just distance ourselves and another level is so we could say that there is a soul here there is the mind here there is the body here now in the mind we could just become more mindful more aware and then we distance ourselves from those conditions another is we practise bhakti yoga we purify ourselves of it then bhakti yoga purification means new impressions are formed on it so so powerful that the past impression just go back so for example there might be some data in our computer now we don’t even know what all is there in our computer in the computer we may just be able to press format and delete everything but we can’t format our mind like that but if we just put in we put in new data we visit new sites and the new sites what our period of time they become the preferences so the old ones don’t matter so much but the old ones are coming very forcefully and sometimes it depends on different conditionings and different people some conditions may be very strong then they may need to be consciously dealt with it is okay what what where is this coming from okay this is what happened to me and because of this I am thinking like this so then but that stimulus is no longer there now so I don’t have to worry about it so I we may have to consciously connect with as if somebody is very fearful of water now they may go to a sacred level like Ganga Yamuna and still they will be very fearful now if somebody saw somebody just sprinkle some water on them during aarti hey don’t sprinkle water on me now it may be that in the childhood they may had some trauma where they had been about to drown and they say so they got fear of water so now in that case they may have to do some cognitive processing okay you know I am associating this fall of water on my head with that stimulus with that event but is not happening now so then sometimes understanding the cause of a particular phenomena going back into the concept conscious that helps but because subconscious contains so many things unless it is essential there is no need because we might just get lost in it completely because it’s like sometimes if you look at the data and if you have been using a computer for a long time and then we download many things we say many things and we wonder where did this file come from I don’t remember some sometimes we search for one file and 50 other files come up where did these files come from did I ever download in my computer I don’t even remember it so like that there is a lot in our subconscious so only if a conditioning is very strong which cannot either be neglected or which cannot be purified that means which cannot be replaced directly or it will be eventually replaced by bhakti practise but if it is not happening immediately enough for us then some cognitive processing to understand where it is coming from can help us in addressing it okay any other questions okay we’ll come to you we differentiate between the impulsive and say the intuition or the instinctive sometimes they may just get combined together yeah say somebody may naturally know they will be very good at shooting a gun and they know how to hit a target expert in that some people have to practise so much so much and still now the target is here and their gun goes over there some people they’re just accurate at shooting a gun but suppose somebody can shoot a gun accurately and they have a very strong angry impulse within them then that is a deadly combination they get angry with someone and before they understand even even they understand what they’re doing they’re picking up a gun and shot that person what did I do why did I do that so so the in the instincts can sometimes be be misused by the impulses you could say so the some people may be very good at language but sometimes they may use that language to speak so sarcastically that they may hurt people for a lifetime they may create scars in the hearts of people for a lifetime so sometimes some people get angry and even in their anger they’re incoherent so you know that they’re angry but what they’re speaking doesn’t make much sense so it doesn’t hurt much also but sometimes some people they are very articulate and when they’re angrily articulate their articulateness hurts other person a lot also so in that sense having good instincts and bad impulses that can be a deadly combination so we need to so when these when this combination is there then actually the person has to work to curb the impulses and they don’t work to curb the impulses then they can act in destructive ways so if we understand that I have a particular impulse then we have to be alert in this situation I tend to get angry and just like if we are going on a road and we know that this road has a bump ahead then we’ll slow down so similarly if we just observe ourselves a little bit we can make out and these situations I tend to get angry so today I’ve had a bad day you know one thing went wrong second thing went wrong third thing went wrong now is fourth interaction if this becomes it turns out to be negative starts going wrong I’m going to explode so then better avoid the interaction defer it for another day so we can ourselves by observation understand the triggers for our impulses the trigger is the external stimulus which activates the impulse so for an alcoholic it is I was at alcoholic anonymous meeting and in America and anywhere so they’re telling that we were discussing how different alcoholics are different triggers so so for example if this is the home and this is the office a straight path from the home to the office but along the way there is a bar which they are frequented repeatedly then for them the the straightest path may not be the best path because while going along that path this impulse will come so they may want to take another path although it will take more time actually it will save more time for them particularly so if we become aware of our triggers then we can avoid those triggers stay away from those triggers and thus we can protect ourselves from being hijacked by our impulses okay yes okay okay where do we get these instincts and impulses it’s to some extent by our past life karma all of us have particular karma which are done in the past life you know so based on that certain impulses certain instincts come up now some babies even when they are in their cribs you know even there even when they started not started walking they’re looking out of their cribs and thinking when am I going to take over the house and not not necessarily in a bossy sense actually you know if they grow up and they start organising they’re able to organise also well so Krishna says Ishwara bhava at one level to think I am Ishwara I am the controller and enjoy this demoniac mentality but another level in 18.43 he says Ishwara bhava is a characteristic of the of the Kshatriyas so in life in the world somebody has to take control somebody has to lead somebody has to delegate somebody has to organise so some people have that instinct so that comes from the past life the Kshatriya instinct can come from a past life the Brahman instinct from past life similarly certain impulses may come from past lives so even among babies some babies may from their birth itself to be very angry and some babies are relatively peaceful and all babies may cry but some babies when they cry it’s more out of need and some babies if they cry it is all of anger so the degrees vary these come from our past life they also come from our upbringing broadly speaking I was going to discuss this more elaborately later but I’ll mention it now but broadly speaking there are there are three factors that affect our behaviour that is our past life our childhood and our neighbourhood a childhood is our upbringing our neighbourhood we can say is our association so what we did in our past life create some impressions create some instincts how we were brought up create some impressions and instincts create some instincts and impulses and the kind of people we associate with that also does that now apart from all these three we all have our free will so the free will is not controlled by this just like what appears on the inner screen it’s a proposition it’s not an imposition just because say Bollywood.com has opened up on my browser that doesn’t mean I have to watch it but that is a proposition that has come so our free will still remains distinct and how we use our free will is up to us but sometime the proposition may become so forceful that it appears as if we don’t have free will and then beyond that is Krishna’s mercy by Krishna’s mercy now all these past impressions their force can start going down the negative impression their force can go down so our past life karma our upbringing our association our free will and Krishna’s mercy all these five shape the way we act okay so thank you very much.