How do we differentiate between the mind and the heart?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
the question is that how do we differentiate between the mind and the heart when we say put your heart in service so how do you know what is the heart and what is the mind should I objectify the mind thinking of it as someone separate from me so that I can deal with it properly yes see firstly terms are multivalent it’s not that the same term has same meaning in all contexts there is a concept and there is a term so you can envision a concept is like a suitcase and a term is like a handle for pulling that suitcase so the concepts are mental terms are verbal and so terms are verbal tools for accessing intangible concepts now the word mind and the word heart are terms they are like handles but things become complex because if I am having I am collecting my luggage at the carousel and the only thing I remember about my suitcase is the handle but there will be 10 suitcases which have the same handle and I will say oh my suitcase has a red handle is this my suitcase it’s not my suitcase so I shouldn’t just be looking at the handle alone I have to actually look at I should also know what the suitcase is so like that sometimes we just get caught in words and don’t focus on the concepts so firstly the word heart itself has many meanings when we say oh you broke my heart we are not referring at the end of the biological organ heart that heart is not broken that heart is fine we are looking into the heart as a seat of emotion so the word heart itself has two meanings similarly the word mind it has multiple meanings so for example it is said Einstein was the greatest scientific mind of the last century now this mind means intelligence or intelligent person or sometimes give it your full mind your mind means attention or sometimes there is no ceiling mind your head mind your head means be cautious be alert be intelligent the word mind can have multiple meanings the word heart can have multiple meanings as I said the words are like handles so we have to understand which handle belongs to which suitcase so when we are talking about the mind when the Bhagavad Gita uses it it refers to the mind in a particular sense it says that the mind refers to that inner thing which often works against our interests which is short term which is impulse driven which is feeling driven now different people may call it by different names in the Native American tradition they say there is a good dog inside you and there is a bad dog inside you so because the bad dog is like the mind so we shouldn’t get too bogged up in the name itself the point is there is something inside us which is impulsive which pushes us into actions which we later regret that is the mind so we have to control the mind that means don’t act impulsively that is the essential point of saying that discipline the mind train the mind so there is definitely this impulsive thing inside us and it is good to personify to deal with that so for example say somebody was dieting I am not going to eat this or that and then somebody else comes and tells eat this obviously very proudly I am not going to eat this but if that same desire comes from inside I am going to eat this nobody is looking let me go and eat it so what happens with the same desire comes from inside we go and indulge in it because we think it is my desire but actually it is coming from the mind and the mind is different from us so we often think of inside and outside from the reference of the body this is my body so whatever is inside me is me and whatever is outside is external but actually if you understand I am the soul from the soul’s perspective the mind is also external and the thoughts inside the mind are also external so the part of us which makes us act impulsively that is what we refer to as the mind from the bhagavanta’s perspective so when we say we should control the mind, discipline the mind that essentially means don’t act impulsively and then the voice which is impulsive so it is good to personify that means if I feel like doing something if say right now we are all part of this class suddenly we have to fill a voice no I have to check my phone maybe I have got some messages so you can think if at this point if a person is sitting next to me why don’t you check your phone would I have done that maybe I would have, maybe I would not have but just putting it, treating the mind the way we would treat another person it removes the immediacy, it removes the identification with it and then we evaluate objectively sometimes there might be some emergency and we might need to check a message but we won’t just act on it thinking I should do it or I should do it because it is my desire we will evaluate it critically so to personify the mind, to objectify the mind is good to treat it as another person whose opinions we don’t have to summarily reject but whose opinions we don’t have to uncritically accept either we have to objectively evaluate now moving onwards with respect to the heart so in terms of the Bhagavad Gita the heart is more or less the same as the soul because the heart refers to the seat of emotions and consciousness and emotions they originate from the soul so we should put our heart in service that means put your emotions put your whole consciousness put your full effort in that service so the heart refers to the soul whereas the mind refers to the thing inside us which makes us act impulsively that is the difference between the two