Ramayana Relationships & Mental Health Insights Chaitanya Charan Part 1

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Option to record it. Is the audio clear now? Okay, good. So we are discussing about mental health.
And we’ll talk about some insights from the Ramayan. So I’ll take this in three broad parts today. First, I’ll talk about what is the mind and what does mental health mean? And this we will draw primarily from the Bhagavad Gita.
In the second part, we’ll talk about how mental health can go down and how it can be brought up. And here we’ll discuss to some extent the role of internal factors and external factors. And then we’ll discuss some examples from the Mahabharat Ramayan of various characters, which we will continue in tomorrow’s session also.
So broadly speaking, what do we mean by mental health? We can understand it by simply comparing it to physical health. So essentially, the body is a tool. And the tool enables us to function.
Say, for example, I am doing some gestures. Let me say there are three things. Now, I may say three things.
And if instead my five fingers go up or four fingers go up, then I say, OK, have I got some kind of issue? Maybe my motor nervous system is not in my control. So a tool is meant to function in a particular way. And if the tool doesn’t function in that way, that is where it’s the indication that there’s something wrong with the hand.
So if I get up from bed in the morning and I stand on my feet, then suddenly I feel vertigo. Standing is normal. Why am I not able to stand? So essentially, a tool has a purpose.
And if that purpose is not being done, then we say the tool has a purpose. The purpose is not being done. We say the tool is not functioning properly.
And it is malfunctioning. And that malfunction is what we consider as a health issue. So another way to understand mental health, physical health, could be that, say, if I’m sitting right now, I’m talking with you and say somebody is behind me and they tap me on the back because they want to talk with me and they tap me on my shoulder and if I scream, then what happened? Actually, I have some sprains over there.
I have some sprains over here. Okay, I understand that. So one way we understand mental health is, we could say, disproportionate response.
Disproportionate. That means, say, the small stimulus, huge response. Just a gentle tap and there’s a scream.
Sometimes some parts of the body may become dead. And my skin over here has become desensitised. Somebody may even slap me and I feel nothing.
Practically nothing. So basically, if there’s a disproportionate response, that is also a sign of health being wrong, health being poor, health being damaged, compromised. So now if we consider that as a perspective, then the body as a tool, we know what it does.
We speak with it. We walk with it. We talk with it.
We pick up things. So we digest food. We more or less understand the functioning of the body.
Now, what is the function of the mind? What is it a tool for? The mind is at the basic level, it’s a tool for perception. We perceive and then after perception, we process. Processing whatever is coming.
And then after that, there is pursuit. We do certain things. So if I see a snake right now crawling on this place where I’m sitting and then, hey, it’s a snake.
I need to perceive it. And then of course, a snake can be dangerous. In pursuit, what do I do? I move away from the snake.
I get a stick or I do something. So broadly speaking, the concept of the self that is given in the Bhagavad Gita is that there is a soul, there is the mind, and there is the body. Our existence has these three dimensions.
And in this three level dimension, for us, we take in information from the senses. We have five senses, five knowledge acquiring senses. And from these, we take in information.
And then, so this is perception. The perception happens to each of the senses and that is integrated into the mind. And then we act through our knowledge to our working senses, Karmendriyas.
And that is also initiated or at least that is channelled through the mind. So this is pursuit. We decide to go towards some things.
We decide to go away from some things. That’s the pursuit that we do. So now in this perception or in the pursuit, if something goes wrong, then that is what we consider as a lack of mental health.
So when the tool doesn’t function properly, say, for example, we are talking with someone and just speak some normal word, some feedback, when you spoke like that, people could have got offended by it. Who do you think you are to tell me like this? You think you’re my boss? You think you’re my master? Mind your own business. Get lost.
What’s wrong with you? I was just speaking something gentle for your benefit. Why are you getting so worked up? I’m already worked up. You get lost.
Such a person, gentle feedback is given and a huge temper comes up. So then this is disproportionate. There’s a huge outburst of anger.
So we may say such a person has some anger issues and sometimes the anger issue may lead people to violence. Or let’s suppose somebody has a tendency to get depressed. Now, what happens in depression? Basically, something goes wrong in their life.
Now, in one sense, in everybody’s life, things go wrong sometime or the other, just the way life is. But when things go wrong, different people respond in different ways. So if somebody has a disproportionate response, so we all may experience loss in our life.
Loss could be that we apply for a job and we don’t get the job. We give an interview and we fail in that interview. You know, we try to work in a relationship.
The relationship doesn’t work. There’s loss. Now that loss, how do we process it? That loss is an event.
But what is the experience that we have inside? So the experience could be I have lost. This is a reasonable objective interpretation. Somebody could say I am lost.
My life is lost. I don’t know what to do. Where am I supposed to go? I put all my eggs in this basket and now the basket is crushed.
What do I do? I’m lost. But then that is a much more disorienting interpretation. But the worst would be I am a loser.
Whatever I do, nothing is working. Nothing will ever work. There’s something intrinsically wrong with me.
I am ruined. Sometimes some students may fail an exam and they may try to end their life. Life is far bigger than an exam.
Whether you succeed or fail, it matters. It doesn’t matter so much that you have to end your life because of that. Sometimes some relationship ends and people get so heartbroken.
Sometimes people become suicidal when the relationship doesn’t work. The relationship may be important, but it’s not as important as one’s life. So the idea is don’t take this so seriously.
Small stimulus, I would say it’s not a small stimulus. Okay, like losing a job, losing a… going poorly in exam, having a relationship and these are not small things. But still, they are not so big that one has to end one’s life.
So relatively small reaction, relatively huge response. So this is basically a characteristic of lack of mental health. When the tool is such that the tool, the mind is a tool for perception, and it is not perceiving to this problem.
Then what happens is something is small, it becomes very big. So we take a contemporary example, somebody else, an alcoholic. Now, if they are suffering from alcoholism, then what may happen is that for them, that they may see a bottle of alcohol.
And that is what fills their mind completely. They can’t think of anything else at all. There will be an important business meeting and they’re talking with their boss.
And their boss body changes into the shape of a bottle of alcohol in their mind. When can I drink? So it is Sarva Dharmaan Parityajya Maya Vekam Sharanam Vrajah. So the person just becomes scared, gets caught.
Now, to some observer, it might be humorous. It might be comic for that person. It might be tragic.
The thing is that when we are perceiving, when we are processing, when we are pursuing, at that time, a small thing becomes big or a big thing becomes small. That kind of distortion is an indication of mental health problems. Now, at a very great extreme, what happens is something is non-existent and that becomes supremely existent for someone.
Somebody says, I hear some voices and I hear a voice telling me, do this, do this, do this, do this. There’s nobody there around them. There’s nobody speaking that voice.
They are hearing that voice and not only they are hearing that voice, that voice becomes the most important voice for them. And they forget everything else. So when something like this starts happening, it becomes a serious problem.
So mental health problems in principle are the tool of the mind malfunctioning. And the tool of the mind malfunctioning means that stimulus and response, they don’t remain proportionate. And that sense of proportion is very important.
So now, to what extent are mental health problems controllable for us? To what extent they are not controllable? It’s difficult to know. Say, if I have a cough right now. Now, how do I know that this cough is just because of something in my throat and go away after some time? Or do I need to go to a doctor? The doctor may say, okay, you know, you try some simple, do some wicks or doctor says you have to take a heavy dose of antibiotics.
So sometimes the doctor may say, actually, you got a respiratory tract infection. You might have to do a surgery to clear your throat. Now, do you need a surgery for a cough? Say, not really.
Sometimes that cough may be indicative of something more serious. So it is health and disease. They are not black and white.
This is the state of health. This is the state of disease. We may say like that.
But in between, it’s a spectrum. A spectrum means sometimes there’s a minor disease. So some people for every sneeze, they want to take an antibiotic.
They want to take a medicine, pumping their body with chemicals. That’s not very healthy. Some people go to the other extreme and they’ve got some lethal diseases in their body.
And they say, cancer is killing their body from within. And they say, I’m not going to take any medicines. Medicines are poison.
Medicines are poison, but there is already poison. Medicines may be some kind of poison, but it’s a poison that removes some poison. So the point is, health and disease are like a spectrum.
And similarly, mental health problems, they can be a spectrum. And sometimes just lifestyle management. Okay.
Don’t eat. If I’m having cough, drink hot water and don’t take a curd or other food that will increase the problem. And that way we’ll be free.
Sometimes somebody will need a serious medication. So we are not going to talk about the cases where there is a medication required. And we are going to focus on the spectrum and how the misperception that is symptomatic of mental health problems, how it arises due to some routine checks not being done and then how it can aggravate.
So we can, we’ll try to discuss how these routine checks we can have in our lives by which we can prevent the mind’s problems from becoming worse. So essentially, one pastime and tomorrow I’ll talk about one pastime. And while talking about that particular pastime, we’ll also discuss a few other things, which will illustrate some principles.
And I’ll also leave some time for question answers. So let’s consider the pastime of Kaikai and Mantra. Now, here what happened was the incident, the stimulus was Ram was going to be coronated versus the Prince Regent and after that, the next king.
And the reaction to that, that eventually came from Kaikai was Ram should be exiled to the forest for 14 years and Bharat should be made the Prince Regent and the king. Disproportionate, devastating, not just disproportionate, but disproportionate to the point of being devastating. Akshay Kumar’s heart broken.
Not only did his heart break metaphorically, but eventually it broke literally. He couldn’t maintain his life. It was a devastating thing.
So what exactly went wrong? Small stimulus. Is it a small thing? As I said, the word small is a relative word. Small, it may not be small in absolute sense, but in the contextual sense, was it so big that she had to break her family apart? She had to let herself become a widow.
She had to create agony in the entire kingdom. Apparently, she thought she had to. So what happens is like if we take, I said mental health can be a spectrum.
And when at an extreme level of the spectrum and the person is hearing voices when there is no one speaking, the person is seeing phantoms when there is nobody there. So that is something which we all are like, you know, this person is becoming insane. This person maybe has to be hospitalised or whatever.
They will take her to an institution. So now that is an extreme. But sometimes when we see how people make decisions at that time, we may feel as if actually they are behaving in a way that doesn’t make sense to us.
Are you seeing something? It’s almost as if they are seeing something which we can’t see and which doesn’t exist. So for her, what did she see? She saw that there is a whole conspiracy against me. And everybody is a part of the conspiracy.
And everybody who tries to oppose my plan, who criticises me, who even tries to challenge my plan, that person is all in the conspiracy. All of them are against me. And that way, she basically gets caught in her own mental reality that she had created.
And ideally speaking, when our perception is going on properly, then what happens is our perception of reality. So there is our mental reality, or you could say our mind’s perception of reality. No, for every one of us, there is some overlap and some mismatch between what is the physical reality and what is the mental reality.
So nobody can say that they have a clear and complete grasp of physical reality. But there could be a greater alignment and there could be a lesser alignment. So for some people, the mental and physical reality may be more and more aligned.
And for some people, the mental reality and the physical reality, there may be completely no alignment at all. So this is the state which we call technically as insanity. Sometimes you normalise, have you gone mad? You lost your mind? Are you insane? And we use these words.
What do you mean? What do we actually mean? You are thinking in a way that is completely disconnected from reality. So nowadays, when we talk about mental health problems, say 50 years ago, 100 years ago, we would talk about insanity and the solution was a person has to be institutionalised. Now the word mental health has become, our understanding is much more nuanced.
And say we talk about stress, about depression, we talk about anxiety, we talk about these are mental health problems. The addiction is also some extra mental health problem. There are behavioural, physiological aspects to it.
But broadly speaking, what is happening, whenever there is any mental health problem, there’s anxiety. In life, there are always problems that are there. Always, we all have to grapple with uncertainty.
None of us knows what the future is going to bring. So to some extent, anxiety is natural. Sometimes people ask, why is it that so many people are getting depressed nowadays? Actually, that may well be the wrong question to ask.
Because when life is so depressing, when we hear of so many things going wrong in so many parts of the world, the question is, why is everyone not depressed? Not that why are so many people depressed? Why are so many other people not depressed? That is actually the special thing. That is the miracle. That the mind has so many reasons to actually get anxious, to get stressed, to get depressed.
And the way the mind functions, at least to some degree. So the human spirit, the soul, the soul is a part of God. And because it is a part of God, it has great resilience.
And that’s how, in spite of so many issues, the human spirit rises and tries to make itself felt, tries to look for something positive, look for something meaningful and tries to function. So what we want to do is that the human spirit, the soul, the spiritual side of us, we want it to manifest more and more. So there is resilience at our core, but around the soul is the mind.
And the mind as a tool may or may not function properly. So now in Kaikeyi’s situation, what exactly happened with her? What happened was that she started thinking there’s a whole conspiracy against her. And for her, how did she get this idea? It was Mantara.
It was Mantara who, we could say, poisoned her mind. Now, it is not that Mantara alone poisoned her mind. It was, there was some tension between her and her co-queen, Kaushalya.
So what happened was that Kaushalya started, Kaikeyi started feeling that Kaushalya wants to take away the respect, the prestige, the privilege that I have. She was the younger queen. She was more beautiful.
So Lakshat favoured her. And it was not that Kaushalya was not beautiful, but she was not that young. So Kaushalya would have been the senior most queen.
She should have got the maximum attention and affection and position. But Kaikeyi had got that. And Kaikeyi felt that Kaushalya wants to take it away from me.
And now, once, this is what, there was some tension among the two of them, but that tension was fuelled and fanned by Mantara. So here, what it is, is that our mind is vulnerable to certain ways of looking at things. And there are people who are out to exploit that.
So some people may be prone to anxiety. And some people around us may get a perverse pleasure in increasing the anxiety within us. And if that happens, then being with them will aggravate us.
You just went wrong with this person’s life, and that person, that went wrong, and that person’s life, and that person went wrong, and that person’s life. You see, what all can go wrong in the world? You hear that, and you already have some anxiety issues, and you just get completely overwhelmed. Say, if somebody has anger issues, then what happens is, somebody comes and deliberately provokes them, incites them, inflames them.
And that person just can’t get over it. That person gets overwhelmed completely. That is seriously problematic.
So one of the things is, we’ll talk about taking care of our mental health at multiple levels. But the first thing is, if we know we have some weaknesses, we have some vulnerabilities, then we have to be careful that we don’t expose ourselves to people who will exploit our vulnerabilities. If we do that, then our reactions will become even more disproportionate.
So Duryodhana already had some envy towards the Kauravas, sorry, towards the Pandavas. And then, he could have taken any service when the Rajshri Yajna was being performed. Somehow, he ended up taking the service of receiving the gifts.
And that inflamed him. And then after that, the ceremony got over, everyone left. But he stayed on.
He had absolutely no reason to stay on. He said, I want to see the Maya Sabha. He was there to see.
He had already seen all the guests when they had come. The guests had been shown around the Maya Sabha. But he stayed on.
And then as he stayed on, he saw more and more of their wealth and opulence. And the more his envy started increasing. And then for him, his envy was not fuelled by Shakuni.
His envy was fuelled by his own choices. If somebody has a particular issue, somebody has alcoholism as an issue, we will talk about, when we talk about mental health, we talk about external measures, internal measures. But external level, if something is going to provoke us, we need to keep ourselves safe by having some boundaries, by minimising our exposure to those things.
If somebody is an alcoholic and that person says, you know, I will open a bar and I will deal in the business of selling alcohol, then there’ll be no bar for them to drink in the bar. They have to be in the bar all the time. If somebody says, I’ll become a bartender and soon they will need a tender and that tender will have to bar them from going to a bar.
So the idea is, both from physical objects, as well as from people who trigger our vulnerabilities, we need to protect ourselves. And if we don’t, then we are bound to be caught. Our inner vulnerabilities will be exploited by the externals.
And then we will end up acting in ways that we regret later. So just like if we know, you know, I am prone to cold. So even a little drop in the temperature causes me to start coughing, suddenly it will be chills, causes me health issues.
Then we are careful. Either we don’t go out in the cold or we make sure that we have sufficient warm clothes so that we can protect ourselves when we go out in the cold. So I’ll talk about various principles.
First principle is protection. We need to protect ourselves from the vulnerabilities that we know we have. The opposite of protection would be exposure.
When we expose ourselves unnecessarily or recklessly, we create trouble for ourselves. So now protection itself can come from two different ways. If I am here and my mind is here and say another person is here.
So basically, for most of us, we look at people through our mind. So that means that my mind has certain conceptions. And as long as those conceptions are there in my mind, I will look at everyone through that.
So for example, if in the past somebody who is a sweet talker, the word sweet talker doesn’t simply mean somebody who speaks sweetly, but it is somebody who speaks sweetly and deceptively. If say I have been fooled by a sweet talker in the past, that person got me to invest money in some place and I lost the money or that person got me to do something and then they betrayed me. So if that is the case, then what happened is that my mind is wounded because of that.
My mind is suspicious because of that. And after that, if anybody speaks sweetly with me, immediately my mind starts thinking, what does this person want from me? Why are they being so nice to me? Could be that person is a genuinely nice person and they’re just being polite because that’s their nature. But what happens is we look at everyone through the filter of our mind.
And this is exactly what happened to Manthara. Everybody who tried to dissuade her, Dashrath begged her, if you want Bharat to be the king, that’s fine, but please don’t send Ram away. He begged her from three different perspectives.
He said, for instance, what has Ram ever done to you? Ram is completely innocent. He has respected you just like he respects his mother. How can you punish him for when he’s flawless? Second, he says, is that we are a part of the royal family.
You know, what face will we show to our citizens? What face will we show to the world when we send our own son away for no fault? We banish him. The third, he says, is that I will not be able to live without Ram. What happens is, every parent’s aspiration is to protect their child from whatever danger or trouble comes in.
And the parent cannot do anything to protect the child. Say, if the child is sick and the parents cannot get money for the medicine, they’ll do anything somehow to get some money to take care of the child. So parents cannot even bear if they cannot help to protect their child.
What to speak if the parents become the cause of the child’s pain? Every example, we see our child sitting in the path of a car or something. No, we will jump in ourselves and we will push our child away. And even if we are going to get injured, we’ll let that injury come.
But imagine if we are driving the car and our car runs over our child. Parent won’t be able to live with that. Dashrath Maharaj felt as if he was the person who was going to run a truck over Ram.
How can I be the cause of sending Ram into the forest? Unfortunately, because her mind was filled with suspicion, she saw all of Dashrath Maharaj’s pleading simply as his being partial to Kaushalya and his wanting to favour Ram. So it was a situation for her. Even Vashishtha Rishi spoke to her.
Sumantra spoke to her. She was not ready to listen to anyone. Ram was in exile.
Even after Dashrath Maharaj died, she did not relent. She was shocked. I protected my son’s interests.
She didn’t relent. Her heart did not soften. But finally for her, what happened was that when Bharat came, it was Bharat was a person whom she trusted to some extent at least.
Like I said, for most people, we look at them through the filter of our mind. We look at them through our mind. But if there are some people whom we trust, then we look at our mind through them.
So it was when Lakshman spoke to her. Sorry, not Lakshman, Bharat spoke to her. And Bharat had like a quadruple shock.
You know, we have shock, shock square, shock cube, and shock raised to the power of four. So what was the shock? Shock was simply the events. Bharat, he had just gone for a casual visit to a relative.
And when he came back, two devastating events. His brother was exiled and his father was dead. And as if the events were not bad enough, what shocked him even more was the cause.
It was his own mother who had been the cause of all this. And what shocked him even further was the motive. She spoke about all the events in such a way.
Oh, Bharat, now the kingdom awaits you. You are the unchallenged ruler. The whole kingdom awaits you for his being his protector.
And then he realised she had done all this for him. Like say, if a child comes back from school and says, Oh, mommy, I come first in class. Wonderful.
How did you do it? I hacked into my teacher’s computer and I got the paper beforehand. I prepared all the answers and I came first in my class. And the child says it very happily and proudly.
Now people think not only what kind of child are you, what kind of person are you, but also what kind of person do you think I am that I will be pleased by this? So Bharat was aghast to think that his mother had thought that he would be pleased by it. And what shocked him even more was that the public perception that everybody was thinking that he was a part of this conspiracy, that maybe he was the person who had set his mother up to do all this for him. It was just unbearable for him.
By that time, he really chastised his mother and he said, You cannot be my mother. My mother would never break our family apart like this. You must be the goddess of destruction, Mahakali, incarnated into our family to destroy our family and its whole roots.
He said, I disown you as my mother. And he spoke such words. She was shaken that her conceptions were, she was jolted out of her complacency.
So what happened was, because of him, she looked at her mind through him. Till now, she was looking at everyone through her mind. Because fortunately, she had at least one person who she trusted.
She thought everybody else is my enemy. I’m doing this for Bharat. Bharat will understand me.
But when Bharat chastised her, that is when she came out of her stupor. And then she realised, my God, what have I done? How could I have done something like this? What kind of person am I? She was so utterly remorseful. She herself begged Bharat, please take me with you when you go to Ram.
And she begged Ram, please come back. Of course, it was too late by that time. But the point here I’m making is that one way to prevent our mental health problems from getting escalated, that we all are vulnerable to misperception, to distorted perception, to exaggerated reactions.
So one thing that is protection. Protection comes by keeping a distance from the things that provoke us. But protection also comes by having close relationships.
That we need to have at least one person in our life whom we are so close that we look at our mind through that person. Almost everyone else, we will look at them through our mind. But okay, this person is saying like this, my mind is saying like this.
Now, which one of these makes sense? So, in general, people who have poor relationships, it is almost universal that people who are in poor relationships, they tend to have more mental health problems. Now, this doesn’t mean that people who are introvert will have poor relationships. People who are introvert, they are actually comfortable being alone.
They get strength being alone. I’m talking about where people, they just have constant suspicion and distrust towards others. They’ve never invested in relationships.
They’ve not formed a deep bond with someone. Then they will suffer. Because when the mind starts exaggerating and distorting their perceptions, then they will have no one to tell them, to give them an alternative version.
The mind is giving us a particular interpretation of events. As I said, there’s the actual reality and there’s the mind’s perception of reality. These two may have a small overlap, a large overlap or a complete disconnect.
So now, when our mind is telling us this is how things are, are they really like that? Maybe they are, maybe they are not. We need at least someone who gives us some alternative perspective. And then maybe people who give us an alternative perspective.
But if we don’t trust them, if we’re not invested in the relationship, then we will look at all of them through the filter of our mind. And we will never be able to correct ourselves or rather check our mind from ruining our lives. With the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, Abhyas and Vairagya.
The two keys for dealing with the mind, mind management. So this word Abhyas and Vairagya can be understood in many different ways. But one way to understand is boundaries and bonds.
That we need to keep boundaries so that we are protected from the things that will provoke our mind and agitate us further. We need to keep boundaries. We need to have that Vairagya.
Oh, this person was my close friend. But no, this person gossips and just agitates my mind and makes me do terrible things. I don’t want to blame that person because ultimately I did the terrible thing.
But that person is a trigger. We need to keep the boundary from that. And we need to form bonds with those whom we can take guidance from.
Those who are trustworthy, those who are our well-wishers. That’s why if we have the spiritual master, the spiritual master’s representatives, our spiritual guides, our well-wishers. So close relationships, that is the Abhyas.
Abhyasa is practise, diligence. Developing those kind of bonds does not happen overnight. It takes time, it takes effort.
So to the extent we do these two things, we’ll find that it will become easier for us to avoid the extremes due to our mental health issues. Everybody can have mental health challenges. We always suffer from anxiety.
We always suffer from depression. We all suffer from stress. But when we suffer from these, do we overreact? That overreaction can be minimised if we have formed proper boundaries and if we have formed proper bonds.
I’ll summarise. I discussed three main points today. I talked about first the concept of mental health.
Our topic was mental health based on the Ramayana. So the first point I discussed was that the mind is a tool. The tool for perception, for perceiving, for processing, for pursuing.
And if the tool malfunctions, essentially, small stimulus, huge response. Or vice versa, large stimulus, tiny response. So when this happens, this is when we are, something is going wrong with the mental health.
So what happens is there is our perception of reality and there’s an actual reality. So when there’s a total mismatch between the two of them, that is what we call as insanity. That is an extreme case of mental health problems.
But for most people, there is a spectrum. And the lesser the alignment between the mind’s perception of reality, the actual reality, the greater is the mental health challenge. So we discussed about the example of Kaikeyi and Duryodhana, that how there was some suspicion that was there.
There’s some questionable action. Okay, why is the coronation happening? Why is it happening so hastily? Why is it happening in the absence of Bharat? It’s a valid question. But she would have gone and asked Ashrath and asked for a clarification.
But there was instead a reprehensible action. Reprehensible is a momentable action. Because she got candour.
So what happens is we need Vairagya. We need to create boundaries. Boundaries from people and places that exploit our weaknesses.
For her, it is Mantara that exploited her weakness. For Duryodhana, it was just being in the vicinity where he saw Pandavas prosperity and that fuelled his envy. And then we discussed with this Vairagya what we need is Abhyas.
We need to create bonds. So Kaikeyi came to her senses when finally she met Bharat. And she was normally looking at everyone.
You want to say like Vashishtha. She was looking at him through the filter of her mind. But Bharat was one person.
She was ready to look at her mind through Bharat’s filter. And that’s when she came out of her senses. So we need to have trusting relationships by which we have an alternative narrative.
Our mind is giving us a particular version of what has happened and why somebody has done like this and what we should be doing. But maybe that is not the full reality. To the extent we can cultivate, we can protect ourselves from association that inflames our mind.
And we have invested in bonds and relationships that help us to see things differently from the narrative the mind is giving us. To that extent, we can avoid the extremes of mental health problems. Thank you very much.
Are there any questions or comments? Yes, I see some hands raised. I prefer if you could just type and have oral questions also. But since we have less time.
Yes. Thank you very much for this wonderful analysis. So you said that we should keep a distance from the places and objects which can trigger our which can aggravate our mental health.
Being a spiritualist also like we have heard that we should not. We should not run from situations. We should face them.
If we run from such situations, then what happens that we will become gradually weak. So how to understand this? Like are we running from that situation? Or like it is said that ultimately we have to face our fears. Why we are running from situation? Why should not we face? But when we go and face this situation, we get frustrated and depressed.
So how to correlate all this? See, there are two different things completely over here. One is that there are certain situations which are unavoidable in life. And those unavoidable situations, we all need to learn to face.
Say, for example, if somebody had driven in a car and they met with an accident and their mind is traumatised. Oh, you know, if I go in the car, I’ll meet with an accident again. And they say that I’ll never get into a car or I’ll never drive on the road.
That may not be very healthy. That, you know, that may make a person dysfunctional. So there are necessary functions in our life which we have to do.
And if certain mind samskaras are blocking us from doing those, then we don’t need to face this. But those are different from, say, does a person, if a person is a recovering alcoholic, the person is a recovering drug addict, does that person necessarily just to prove that I have overcome drug addiction or alcoholism, does that person have to go to a bar and stay untempted? No. So there are avoidable dangers where it can be avoided.
We should avoid them. That’s just intelligence. Yadah Samhara Techaayam Purvohanganiv Sarvashara.
Krishna says that just as a tortoise withdraws its wings, we should also withdraw our wings. So where there are unnecessary provocations, unnecessary temptations, say, for example, we know a person gossips. You know, a person speaks badly about us, speaks badly about those whom we love or we respect.
And we can’t change that person. It’s not fear as caution. So that’s one thing.
Now, in the second situation also where you’re talking about where there are some fears we need to face. But there are two stages. I was going to talk more about this tomorrow, but I’ll just mention this that say if my hand is fractured, the first stage, the doctor will tell you to put a sling or put a cast.
Don’t move your hand. And after that, the same doctor will tell you to slowly start moving your hand. So when there is some kind of trauma or some kind of weakness that is there, say somebody has been bitten by a dog, they are completely scared about seeing the sight of a dog.
And yes, for some time, initially, avoidance will be necessary. It’s like initially, keep the hand motionless. But eventually, there needs to be regulated exposure.
Regulate it. Okay, can you go over 10 feet from a dog? I’m afraid of getting into a car. Can you just go over one feet next to the car? Can you sit in the car? Don’t drive.
Okay. Can you just go on a completely, there’s a completely empty road over here. Can you go on that? Nobody’s coming over here.
It’s a desert. Okay, let’s go there. I can’t bear if somebody jumps on the road or something happens.
So gradual exposure comes. So there are necessary activities in our life. And for those, we need to regulate and have some like a regular exposure.
But there are many unnecessary temptations or agitations. We don’t have to expose ourselves to them. So those are two different situations.
Yes, Parampara Manishama Devi Nathaji. Hare Krishna, Prabhuji. Thank you so much for a wonderful class, Prabhuji.
Prabhuji, my question is a person through whom we need to see our mind has their own mind with their experiences. Does the person is seeing my mind with their mind filters? Their minds filter, right? Then how to avoid any unnecessary biases while being helped by the person? Yeah, we can’t. So nobody’s perfect.
So we don’t have to uncritically accept that other person’s world. But at least we consider just as we have our conditions, we have our own particular limitations. They also have their experiences.
They have their perspectives. Even if they are advanced devotees, still everybody is a finite living being. Nobody is God except God.
So nobody is omniscient. So in that sense, I’m not saying that we have to accept uncritically the other person’s perspective. But at least we have an alternative.
Yeah, this is also one way of looking at it. That person spoke like this about me. That person must be evil.
That person must want to destroy me. And therefore, I will have to destroy them before they destroy me. The other person might say, maybe not.
They heard something about me. Maybe they have something going on in their life. It’s sort of, I don’t know what it is.
So I’m only saying getting an alternative to the way our mind is. That doesn’t mean uncritically accepting their perspective. So there’s a question here by Deepika Suresh.
The first term is Abhyas. Second is Vairagyam. Abhyas refers to creating, doing the practise by which we create bonds.
And setting up boundaries is Vairagyam. So till what stage can we try to resolve the issue ourselves? And when should we take a step to approach other trustworthy associates? So it depends on two things. One is the extent of the disproportionate reaction and the frequency.
The extent is making us dysfunctional. The frequency is making us dysfunctional. Then, say, as soon as we see someone, immediately we are filled with anger.
And we are interacting with that person regularly. It’s better when we talk with the third person who also knows that person. But this is what I’m thinking about this person.
Is this person like this? Or is this something more? So severity or infrequency? Those two things need to be considered. So distortion, Shuddha Vigraha Varanko is saying, distortion is a mental health issue. Can distraction also be a mental health issue? Well, yes.
Distraction also basically means that what we are trying to do, that becomes less important than wherever our mind is wandering. So I’m reading out the questions. I said that.
So our distortion can also be a mental health issue, because it’s just that it’s a distraction. Because what is happening is we are not seeing what we are going to see, but our attention is getting caught by something else. Do we need to distinguish between the two? The important thing is to deal with it.
So distraction is where we are unable to focus on what is right in front of us. Distortion means we take a small thing and make it very big. What can we do if we are in a relationship where the other person’s mannerisms disturb us, but we cannot distance ourselves from that relationship? Well, distance can be done in many different ways.
It doesn’t have to be a physical distance. It doesn’t have to be even more of an emotional distance. It can be more like a, if you use the word, expectational distance, that sometimes we understand some person like this and say, I can’t expect something like this from this person.
So if we moderate our expectations, say, for example, if I need someone to talk with, and some people are just not talkers. If we have a problem, they will actually fix the problem or they’ll tell us how to fix the problem. But we need someone to talk with, to talk issues through that.
If we know that this person is not of that nature, then we accept that, maybe this person cannot fulfil this need of mine. That’s why if we have a community and we have a network of relationships, then we can know who can help us deal with it in a proper way. So we’ll take two more questions.
There’s a question about overthinking, which I’ll take tomorrow. But that’s a big subject. And I would like to elaborate on it tomorrow.
Now, how to identify a person with whom we can bond or trust? It’s an incremental process that we share something, something small. And we see how is the response of the person, understand that the person help and support or that the person suddenly tell everyone about it and then just uses our vulnerability to abuse us or attack us or exploit us. So it’s small incremental steps that we can, when we generally look at a person and we talk with them, what happens? Generally, I say, we want like-minded association.
So like-minded has three broad aspects to it. When we say like-minded, that we understand their mind. When they speak something, oh, this makes sense.
This is something which clicks with me. Then they understand our mind. So we get the opportunity to talk with them and they don’t immediately judge us and say, you’re just overthinking.
You’re being sentimental. You’re just being too judgemental. They don’t just label and dismiss us.
They understand our mind. And then third is, they help us understand our mind. That, okay, you’re thinking like this.
To this point, what you’re thinking is right. But have you considered this? This is something where you’re missing. So it’s not easy to find a person who will meet all three criteria.
But if you can find even one person like that, that’s a great blessing. So in this way, we all can protect ourselves from the problems that may come when we have no one to turn to with respect to our mind. So what if we are in a fantasy world which is depressing or entertaining? And how do we protect ourselves from sweet-talking people? When somebody talks sweetly, so generally I have a particular perspective of a person.
But we talk with others, try to get their perspective of that person also. And sometimes acknowledging that maybe we are not a very good judge of people, the people’s character. So if we have multiple perspectives, that’s helpful.
And then we don’t have to take a huge leap of faith. Like small steps we take and we see, okay, this person talks so sweetly. But do they walk their talk? I feel like if you want to swim or take a bath in a river, then we don’t just jump immediately into it.
We put our toe into it or put our finger into it. And then we put a little more part of our body. And gradually we immerse ourselves in the water.
So like that, take incremental steps. So about a fantasy world, in general, we have to find out things in our real world which are interesting, engaging, meaningful. And that’s how the fantasy world we can counter that.
I’ll talk about this more tomorrow when we talk about overthinking. Thank you very much for your attention and participation. There are a few other questions but they’re not directly related to the session.
Tomorrow if you get time, we’ll talk about those also. Thank you.