Musings on the Mind

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A quiet mind is a happy mind. But the fleeting happiness that I experience every now and then does not mean that my mind is quiet. It just means that I am experiencing a fleeting glimpse of bliss, that will soon be replaced by the hum drum of everyday existence. However, a mind that is truly quiet, is a source of infinite and abiding bliss.

It is truly fascinating to observe this mind. And the biggest paradox is, when I start observing the mind, like a shy child, it slinks away and curls up into a quiet corner. And when that happens, the bliss becomes infinite. Just think, wave after wave of ceaseless thoughts is what constitutes the mind. And all these thoughts are purely based on experiences of my past or the expectations of the future. To rephrase, the mind always moves in the space that I create for it, ie -it roams about in the realms of past or in the unexplored kingdoms of the future.

My minds chews on a family outing that happened when I was 12, or it invokes anger at an insult hurled at me some 5 years back by a colleague. It thinks about my first crush, my best friend, the movie I watched yesterday, the book I read ten years back, the lecture I attended last week. And seamlessly and effortlessly, the mind also thinks about how to insult that colleague if at all I see him in the future, it plans for a movie outing with the friends, it panics over what to wear for a party that is scheduled 2 weeks from now, etc etc. Based on my fears and insecurities, it creates hypothetical scenarios and makes me worry about that scenario becoming a reality in the future. For example, what if I am diagnosed with cancer? What if my loved ones die? What will happen to me in old age? And the fascinating thing is, it all happens in a fraction of a second. To make matters even more complicated, if I brood on a particular thought, it automatically affects my mood too.

There are times when the mind truly becomes quiet...When I am completely involved in something that I am doing, when I become very attentive to this present moment. When I focus only on the present, automatically the space in which my mind can roam about gets curtailed, because neither am I brooding about the past nor am I anxious about the future. I am just focused in this one moment. The more attentive I become, the more aware I am of what I am doing, the quieter my mind gets. And with quietude, peace descends.

Note: What I have written above is merely my observation, triggered by the infinite wisdom of the Vedanta and the kindness of Acharyas of Chinmaya Mission.

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