We need inner accounting before we can have inner accountability Gita 06.05

Transcript

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we need inner accounting before we can have inner accountability suppose there is a social welfare organization that is constantly short of money and that asks us to support them as a regular patron we would naturally want to know how our money would be spent you would want there to be some accountability but we found out that they had not even an accounting system worth a name we would be alarmed and appalled strangely however we rarely have a similar reaction to our own lack of accounting system what does that mean? just as money is a valuable resource our own consciousness is a valuable resource and if our consciousness is used constructively then we can do lot of worthwhile things in our life but we often don’t even have much of a track of where our consciousness is getting invested or getting dissipated our vices often consume our consciousness for example envy, resentment, lust anger all these can consume our consciousness and we may not even realize how much of our thought energy and emotional energy is getting dissipated thus sometimes we may realize that I don’t want to I don’t want to feel so I don’t want to be so irritable don’t want to feel so angry all the time but such a vague vague wish to improve is not going to help if we are serious about managing for dealing with our anger issues we need to have some tracking or accounting system everyday we observe what are the situations when we erupted with anger speaking loudly or harshly what are the times when we felt a surge of anger within us but we restrained ourselves what are the stimuli that triggered such surges within us what were the resources that we used to restrain those surges when we thus keep an account of our emotions then gradually we can mentor those emotions and we can learn to better manage our anger similarly with respect to any other force that consumes our consciousness but we might find ourselves just being irritable and snappy but unless we and we may not want to be like that but we can’t just change ourselves unless we start by noting so the Bhagavad Gita urges us to monitor our consciousness when it says in 626 and more fundamentally it also urges us to become an observer of ourselves when it says that we need to elevate ourselves with ourselves and not degrade ourselves with ourselves so this means that we need to use have some time for introspection do something like journaling by which we will note where our emotions and our consciousness are being spent and then we can gradually learn where it is where it can be better invested and where and how its dissipation can be avoided