For protection amid pandemics seek not just a hand sanitizer but also a mind sanitizer Gita 13.26
But also a mind sanitizer. During pandemics, we protect ourselves from germs by using hand sanitizers. Simultaneously, we need to protect our mind from germ-like unhealthy emotions, especially fear and panic.
These emotions can easily infect us during the overall atmosphere of anxiety that accompanies a pandemic. How can we sanitize our mind? One powerful resource is meditation. Meditation sanitizes us when it takes us to the indestructible, to the unchanging core of our being, the center that is beyond the world's dangers and the mind's fears triggered by those dangers.
When we experience our spiritual core, then naturally we become free from fear. The Bhagavad Gita explains that we are at our core indestructible spiritual beings. Meditation helps us experience who we actually are.
Among various forms of meditation, especially empowering is sonic meditation. Sonic meditation essentially means immersing our consciousness or meditating on sounds that take our consciousness to the spiritual level of reality. These sounds can be verses from spiritual texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, quotes that convey spiritual truths succinctly and especially mantras that invoke divinity.
When we bathe our mind in such spiritual sounds by hearing, reciting and remembering those sounds, that immersion of our consciousness becomes a form of meditation. And this meditation helps us realize our indestructibility, our spirituality and takes us to a place of inner calm that frees us from fear. The Bhagavad Gita recommends immersion in spiritual sound in 1326.
Even if we don't have much spiritual knowledge, if we just immerse ourselves in spiritual sounds, we can become purified. So whenever fear starts attacking us, starts rising within us, we need to turn towards the mind sanitizer of spiritual sound. Just as we know that we need hand sanitizers for cleaning our hands, then we keep them accessible to us.
Similarly, we need to keep mind sanitizers accessible to us. We can memorize or note mantras, quotes, verses that we find especially helpful in taking our consciousness towards the spiritual reality. And thereafter, whenever fear arises, if we expose our consciousness to those spiritual sounds, our mind will slowly but surely become sanitized, free from fear.
When we sanitize our mind with spiritual sound, we can face the pandemic prudently with due caution, but without undue fear.