More Important Than Staying In Touch With The World Is Staying In Touch With Ourselves Gita 13.11

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
More important than staying in touch with the world is staying in touch with ourselves. We often want to stay in touch with the world, being aware of political, social, cultural news, sports news across the world.
And we often think that by staying in touch with events, we can be better prepared in case something happens somewhere that impacts us. The principle of being prepared is good. At the same time, we need to be prepared about the things that happen in the inner world as much as we need to be aware of the outer world, if not more.
After all, whatever happens in our inner world impacts us much more than what happens in our outer world. Suppose we experience some uncomfortable emotion such as loneliness, annoyance, insecurity. Such discomforting emotions point to inner issues that need to be addressed.
Instead of such challenging confrontations, we prefer the escape way of outer distractions. And staying in touch with the world is one such distraction. The world nowadays offers unlimited distractions with constant breaking news.
Little do we realize that such breaking news may well break our connection with ourselves. When we don’t address our inner issues, when we are not in touch with ourselves, we can’t address our inner issues. And when we don’t address those issues, then they fester and worsen till they cause us to explode or implode.
Sometimes if some small trigger takes us beyond the tipping point and wild reactions erupt within us. Later we feel perplexed about why something so minor made us feel so enraged or so dejected. Our moods and mood swings remain a maddening mystery for us.
While trying to be prepared for things that may happen in the outer world, we end up unprepared for the things that happen in our inner world. No wonder the Bhagavad Gita urges us to not get too caught in the world’s ways. But to instead stay spiritually aware.
13-11 states. Stay in a secluded place and stay distanced from the world’s topics of discussion, the world’s ways. Adhyatma Jnana Tattvam.
Tattva Jnana Artha Darshanam. And know, philosophically understand the nature of reality, knowing that spiritual alone endures. Ultimately it alone matters.
13-12. So how can we stay in touch with ourselves? By becoming more aware of our feelings, becoming more attuned to our feelings and by becoming more aware of the feeler of those feelings. We are not just our emotions, we are the observer and experiencer of those emotions.
We are essentially souls. Once we become aware of ourselves as the unchanging ground for our changing emotions, we can have the inner stability with which to deal with our emotions. We can accept them, we can analyze them, we can address them.
Now to stay in touch with ourselves, we need to give adequate time for introspection, meditation and spiritual cultivation. Thereby we will be grounded internally. We can better anticipate our own emotional reactions to outer, the world’s ups and downs.
Thereafter, when those ups and downs do occur, we will be better prepared to deal with them.