To Treat The Mind As An Enemy Can Be Uncomfortable To Treat It As A Friend Can Be Fatal Treat It

Transcript

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suppose we had a friend who is prone to wild mood swings when in a good mood they act as our best friends when in a bad mood they act as our worst enemy suppose further they their mood is difficult to discern based on their externals then we need to be we would need to be extremely cautious to understand their mood and behave accordingly Gita Wisdom explains that we all live with such moody inner partner that is our mind the mind when it is in a good mood can help us think clearly and act productively but when it is in a bad mood it can make us act irritably it can make our thinking fuzzy muddled it can make our actions unproductive even counterproductive self-destructive why is the mind subjected to such mood swings because internally it contains many materialistic impressions many attachments to worldly things and these attachments may be so multi-layered that we ourselves may not be aware of what it is that we are attached to based on how attached we are to certain things if those things change if we feel that something we are attached to is going to be lost then our mind may go wildly angry and conversely when something we are attached to starts happening we start getting it the mind can go into a jubilant mood of course our mind has many impressions many attachments and thus its mood swings may be difficult to correlate with specific external events nonetheless it is the greater the material attachments the impurities in the mind the greater will be the mood swings so how do we deal with such a mind because the mind is inside us and we can’t get rid of it we have to live with it but to live constantly to live treating it like an enemy can be uncomfortable and exhausting our position will become like that of a guard of a soldier who is constantly on guard on a volatile boundary with a hostile neighbor staying constantly on guard can be uncomfortable and exhausting but the alternative is far worse if we are off guard if we start treating our mind like a friend our mind may mislead us and it may make us do things that destroy ourselves pointing to this bipolar behavior of the mind, the Bhagavad Gita states that it can be both our friend and our enemy and we need to proactively act, proactively understand it and behave in a way that by which we are elevated not degraded 6.5 in the Gita says 6.5 6.5 6.5 6.5 6.5 so the best way to treat the mind is with caution and devotion caution means just as the security guards at an airport frisk everyone similarly we need to be mindful to evaluate the mind’s current driving desires and we don’t have to constantly treat the minds with suspicion the guards don’t treat every passenger with suspicion they are courteous but they are also cautious and ultimately more important than how we treat the mind is what we treat the mind with that means we consider the mind’s mood swings to be like a disease which is caused by its materialistic attachments and the cure for that is spiritualizing those attachments if you practice bhakti yoga and connect with Krishna and get our mind to experience Krishna then it will experience how satisfying absorption in Krishna is and it will slowly give up attachment to worldly things and become attached to Krishna and that is how our inner enemy will become our inner friend thank you