Peace of Mind, a Reflection of the Self

PEACEFUL MAN

Is the common approach towards perceived Peace of Mind correct?

What drives man to achieve, is his hunger for happiness and peace of mind. Man mistakenly equates his lust for happiness to attain peace of mind over the long run. He ignorantly directs all his wants towards attaining satisfaction and contentment.

07-SATTVA DRAWS HAPPINESS

He wants to attain self-sufficiency through wealth. He wants to insure security through friends and relatives and through indulgence. Man engages in acts of self-indulgence through titillation of his senses and as a result, gets habituated to performing these acts, which may be  explicitly immoral.

The questions are, will he attain Peace of mind or will it simply add to his agitation? It is an open and shut question and I guess the readers will have a fair idea of what the seeker of such “Peace of Mind” will end up with.

Is it wrong to look for happiness, joy, satisfaction and Peace of Mind?

No, is the obvious answer. However, what makes these pursuits futile and even dangerous, is that man is ill-equipped, in his current condition to recognize the means to get there. He is, strangely, searching for the right things at all the wrong places.

Why do the wise implicate man’s endeavors? It is vital to understand the premise of this view, before the mystery can stand unraveled. The goal is Peace of Mind, but the path and means are taking him in the opposite direction.

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Mind Creates Experience

The mind is that single tool, the single-most human-appliance through which experience of the world becomes possible. A jaundiced man sees everything around him in hues of yellow.

MIND CREATES EXPERIENCE

Does this mean that the world is painted yellow? The answer is that in his diseased condition, everything shall appear the way, because the appliance namely eyes and brain project it so.

It becomes necessary to look at the condition deeply and fix the problem, if he were to experience the world as it appears to other normal people. The condition of jaundice, if treated, shall do the trick. This is the fix.

Similarly, when an average mind sees and understands the world, he looks at the world through the inherent distortions of the mind. When he sees rich people, he sees them moving around in expensive cars, donning classy apparel. Everything that is reflected by his senses, understood by his mind, becomes his view.

Maya Means Illusion

But alas, the mind makes him believe magically that everyone blessed with wealth, is happy or has peace of mind. Everyone who is indulging in the senses, going to parties and enjoying with friends, is joyful. Everyone who can relish palatable foods is content and at peace.

This view is based on the projections of the mind. It is based out of the mind’s inability to decipher truth from fiction. It is inherent in the mind to jump to such conclusions. In the Vedic Parlance this very view is called “Maya” which literally means that which is not or that experience which is not true, to say the least.

MAYA DEVI

Man lives by opinions, usually. Most of his opinions form, as a part of the “habit of forming opinions”. This is the natural way, the mind is, at the outset. One reason why there is too much confusion in the world is because of this very nature of the mind. If there were no opinions, there would never be shades of gray in the world.

The Lack of “Peace of Mind” is an inherent quality of Maya Devi.

When Maya surrounds us, there can never be peace of mind. This is a hack. There would then be no need to disbelieve or even believe, for that matter. Things would have been perfect. However, for a man of realization, there can be no opinions; since he has a developed inner vision. He has the blessing to “SEE”. This seeing is not based on “what he feels” or “gut feelings”. There are no biases in his “seeing”.

This seeing may also not be a “fact”. Seeing here, refers to “Truth”; it refers to things “as they are”. Now we shall switch gears towards attaining genuine peace of mind by pursuing what is genuinely true and separating it from facts which are a mere projection of the mind and perceived by the senses. It is important to differentiate between “fact” and “truth” here.

These are not synonymous, although they apparently mean the same thing. A fact, maybe an event that has occurred in space and time. However, a fact may not always be true. A fact is something, that the senses convey to the mind and the mind interprets it, the way it got programmed, since time immemorial, since many past lifetimes.

A fact, even may mean a million things, to millions of people. Facts are to be understood as “opinions” on what may have transpired and nothing more. The more minds that perceive, the more coloration to the facts and mind you all reflect the immensity of Maya Devi nothing else.

Science Behind Agitation

For example, A man bids goodbye to his wife at the door, as he leaves for work. The wife waits at the door and sees her husband walk a few hundred paces towards his car. Meanwhile, at that distance, the wife sees another “beautiful woman” who stops by “her” husband and starts chatting with him, with a smile on her face.

SAYING BYE PEACE OF MIND

Now it is up to the woman at the door to draw her conclusions, talk about this to the man, after he returns from work and so on. Now, one can imagine whether the wife who is standing at a distance has Peace of Mind or not. Let us assume that the man reveals something that may cause some disturbance in the wife’s mind.

Her mind then works overtime as it whirls and spins around through myriads of assumptions and opinions. Now what is the Truth? Truth is something that one cannot discover, when the mind is hyper-active, sullied and when disturbed. Only when the mind is free of distortions, free, pure, can it be able to relate to Truth.

Only then, shall it reflect “Truth” without interpreting the mind. Mind can only interpret and cannot see. Peace of mind is essentially a by-product of such a Truth state of being. So now, we can now imagine how many people of this world have peace of mind and to what degree.

WHAT IS TRUTH

“Seeing” is a faculty of pure consciousness, the pure conscience. The mind cannot grasp it. “Opinions” and “facts” have no connection with Truth. Even perception, however pure it may be, cannot come close to Truth. Only a heart purified through spiritual practice and Grace, can reflect truth.

7/8 Questions from Sanatana Dharma

The scores generated in this Quiz may or may not be absolute. There may be right or wrong answers to each Question. A percentage towards 100 indicates that you are more aligned to the overall subject matter.

What people call living, is mere aimless rambling on the sands of lies. To discover the by-product of Truth namely peace of mind, we must first discover the source of Truth and that is the Self. This springs from the fundamental question “Who Am I?”

Who Am I?

The moment we are born; situations force us to identify, label, and relate.

Our closest, older relatives teach the child to identify with things and people with statements like “I am your father”, ” I am your mother”, “I am your uncle’; also with statements like “This is yours”, “This is mine”, “This is his” and a host of other identifiers.

This is when the possibilities of consciousness demarcate boundaries. No doubt, these labels are good and help us interact with the world better and carry out our much-needed transactions, but then a deeper problem gets introduced at the outset.

SELF

The habit of identifying and classifying, plants the sense of “I” deeply within the core of our being. This “I” as many mystics and seers put it, cripples us and perhaps alienates us from our infinite nature. The false notion of “I” which is built over the cycle of millions of lifetimes is so colossal that we diffuse into puny egoistic creatures.

When the ego is Powerful, the Self remains clouded, submerged in sullied ignorance. Such a state of consciousness is incapable of experiencing Peace of Mind. Most times, people talk about Peace of mind but it only remains a matter of theory although the Self knows its meaning. 

But the mind can never experience it until purification takes place and connects with the Self. But the mind can never experience it, until it is purified and connects with the Self.

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Reality of Individuals

The Vedic sciences have proclaimed that the human being is an “infinite possibility”. Yet we experience ourselves as tiny, limited, and transactional. All that we are capable of, is a simple, materialistic, and transactional possibility and nothing more.

The Vedic sciences declare that we have infinite glory within us. What we experience in life though, is quite the opposite. The infinite has joy, satisfaction, contentment, and glory in it. We are its possessors, its heir apparent, as the perfect sciences proclaim. Then why is it we are neither able to see or experience it?

WAKEFUL-MAN

The solution to this exists in the statements made above. It is this false sense of “I” which limits our experience of a perfect world. We live in a perfect world, and yet we are beset with limitations and problems. If we were to get rid of this falsely created clout of “I” and “mine”, things would have been ideal.

If some process knocks away this clout wall, we would have infinity staring right into us. When this happens Peace of mind shall automatically set in and shall be unconditional, irrespective of our familial position, position in society, independent of our job, business or financial status. In that state alone, we experience genuine peace of mind.

We need to know that Peace of Mind can never be temporary. It is a permanent state, that once attained, we can never lose it, even when our body is completely attacked with a life-threatening disease.

Wonders of Awareness and Attention

All possibilities would simply open up just as an old dilapidated wall makes way for a deluge. Attention is something that is a feature of the infinite that remains with us even as we have raised a high wall of “I” around us. If this power of attention were not there, there was to be no question of being alive.

This attention is indeed the light of awareness that stays with us all the time, even in sleep. This is not to be confused about the sense of false “I” created in us because of identification and labeling. The means to bring down this wall of “I” is quite simple although the process to pull this out is not clear.

If we are to shift attention, to infinity, to supreme consciousness, to God, to that force that animates this world, our problem should disappear to the proportion to which we fix our attention on that feature of the infinite.

If we are to practice shifting focus on the infinite and draw it into our lives with perfect sincerity, it is just a matter of time when this wall of “I” shall come crumbling down, giving us direct access to the possibilities of the divine, of the infinite. That shall then give us the biggest by-product that nature can offer, Eternal Peace of Mind.