Gita 14.11 Our mind can be a transmitter distorter or reflector of our consciousness

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you life is so complex so dangerously unpredictable sometimes even our jokes may cost us terribly and ashashvatam that this world is temporary is something which we all know so sometimes our feelings can betray us so there was a NBA baseball basketball star Pete Maravich he was known as pistol and he is playing a game and he said I feel great and then he collapsed on a court of a pickup game and he died there itself so his last words were I feel great but it turned out that he died so the feeling that the notion that he was feeling great was a great illusion death can come in the most unexpected and horrendous of ways and often we are rendered helpless when such death comes so our feelings are not always reliable indicators of our condition it’s like now usually we may say that if I feel good I must be healthy and if I feel bad then there may be something wrong with me with my body also I don’t feel so good but it’s not that simple actually our emotions are sometimes reflectors of our situations and sometimes our emotions are distortors of our situations just like we may have a mirror if it’s a see through glass then it shows us whatever is there on the other side if it’s a mirror we will simply see we won’t see what is on the other side we will see only ourselves in it and if it is a see through glass which has certain color tint on it then whatever we see will be tinted according to that color this means that actually the heart of living is learning to know what is it that we are seeing through not just what we are seeing to now what we think we want to see some things I want to see the sunset it said that this particular way the sunset is beautiful I want to see this movie it said that it has very very riveting special effects I want to maybe see this person said that that person looks very beautiful or whatever now we often are eager to look at things by things we are using generically to refer to places people and objects everything but sometimes or most of the time we could say we hardly notice what it is through which we are seeing even if we go to a very beautiful place say a falls like Niagara Falls and while we are there if our mind is agitated then maybe somebody has insulted us and we are planning to take some revenge fantasy have some revenge fantasy going on in our mind then so when our mind is acting like a mirror we don’t perceive the world we project our own conceptions into the world so our vision can be in that case sometimes it can be unfiltered perception although almost always we never have totally unfiltered perception because we are always shaped by our conditionings but still we could say relatively unfiltered perception we can have if we are calm, we are observant if our mind is chilled sometimes it’s a total projection that means we see something even if there is no there is almost no reality to it we see somebody making a phone call and if there is a suspicious of that person we start thinking this person must be making a phone call somewhere to plot against me sometimes based on the tiniest shred of evidences the mind goes off on a goes on a wild ride of imagination on other occasions there is maybe a little maybe there is some reality and then there is some distortion so we have to be very careful in that sense Krishna says the mind can be our friend and the mind can be our enemy also Krishna says in 6.6 in the Gita that the mind can be the friend and the mind can be the enemy so understanding that the mind can work in various ways can help us to recognize what the mind is doing to catch the mind when it is doing wrong and to get it back on track sometimes it may act as a distorter sometimes it may act as a reflector where it shows us what we are rather than what the world is there is an old saying in Talmud that we don’t see the world as it is, we see the world as we are and the world is a mirror of our consciousness so if a person is filled with greed then they see everything in terms of money a person is filled with lust then they see everything in terms of sexual objects that way we all perceive according to our situation in our particular ways and we end up making things often worse for ourselves the gates to the body are illumined with knowledge in the mode of goodness Krishna says now when there is darkness at a door then we don’t know who is coming in we can’t recognize that person but when there is light at the door then we can see who is coming in and we can respond should this person be allowed in at all or should this person be allowed in but treated suspiciously or should this person be not welcomed at all so all this we can understand based on our situation so for us as spiritual beings we need to work towards protecting ourselves purifying ourselves and purging ourselves of the distorting influences the mind is having on us when we study the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and we understand the inner workings of our mind based on all that we can perceive and we can understand what exactly is the nature of the way we are perceiving are we perceiving reality as it is are we imagining certain things or are we simply letting ourselves get carried away by things without even considering letting ourselves get carried away by our emotions without even considering the nature of the reality of things the best way for us to move forward in our lives is by taking the time to clean the mirror of the mind to clean the mind which is a vehicle so that it can help us to perceive ourselves properly and perceive the world properly knowing that the mind can sometimes act as a reflector, sometimes as a transmitter sometimes as a distorter we have our alertness our intelligence to understand when the mind is acting which way and then moderate our response appropriately the mind is of course the reservoir of emotions and therefore when our emotions it is a the mind colors distorts or enhances our perception through our emotions and that’s why we need to be very careful to perceive properly whatever it is that we are doing that’s why rather than thinking that I have so many things to do we can know that we need to see things properly before we can do things properly and the time spent in seeing things ensuring that you are seeing things properly is an investment which will enable us to actually do more not take our time from doing more