Annihilating The Mind
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times
Imagination runs wild……High and low….. Ebb and flow…. Happy this moment and sad the next moment… filled with regrets one moment…. in bliss the next moment…. Angry at the moment…. peaceful next moment….. so on and on…… A complicated swarm of thoughts arise and swell and subdue-Thought Jam, commonly referred to as THE MIND. Mind is a boundless collection of thoughts, feelings, etc. What it tries to be one moment is not the same the next moment…leaps from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, perhaps even faster than the speed of light?
Mind is unique and individualistic. No two minds think alike or have similar habits. No two bodies are alike. The role of the body is to breathe and carry on its physiological activities to sustain the life. The body has no role in what the mind does. The individuality of each mind is governed by every individual’s habit and vasanas over several births, which in turn influence the thoughts. The crowded thoughts pull us in different directions and often the result is lack of clarity and conflicting thoughts. It can be likened to be a maze or a muddy lake. Specifically, the mind takes in some qualities more easily than others-like tamo gunas-procrastination, idling, laziness, etc. The mind clings on to them like Velcro. The mind finds it hard to acquire satvik gunas like consistent praying with faith, thinking good all the time, etc. The nature of the mind as such is to tempt the senses, create momentary fulfilment of the senses, and then create a guilt for those actions, force us into repentance and seek forgiveness and then take it through the same whirlpool again. Mind torments man with its multi-faceted nature.
Like a muddy lake in which the bottom of the lake is not visible, or a disturbed lake where the bottom of the lake is not visible, a mind full of varieties of thoughts remains in an unsettled state. Settling the mind is to annihilate the mind. Eliminate the food for thoughts and the mind will settle. One way is to try to understand the nature of the mind-inquire into the mind as the first step and give it the right thoughts to channelize it. Give the mind the food of gossip, it gets habituated to that. Give the mind the thought of the Almighty, it is hard to get it habituated to that. Inquiry into the mind is achieved though dhyana(meditation) and repetitive chants of certain mantras that steady the mind and channelize it towards self-realization. Similar to how we need to understand people to establish relationships with them, we need to inquire into the nature of the mind first and give it sattvik thoughts to dwell upon and thereby annihilate the mind.
This article is based on the HIS VOICE Series “Annihilating the mind” by HH Maharanyam Shri Shri Muralidhara Swamiji.
