Jagad Guru Chris Butler - Siddhaswarupananda - Practical Wisdom

The mind can never sit idle. It will either create a hell out of heaven or a heaven out of hell. It is like drift-wood floating on the ebb and flow of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. As good Homer sometimes nods, it ever commits wrong in cleaving to that which seems to be evil and abhorring that which seems to be good, and vice versa. Every mind has its own way of looking at things; so what one mind establishes, the other destroys, nay the same mind rejects today what it accepted yesterday, as every life is a series of surprises or experiences. The things one now regards as fixed, shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruits, from one's experience and fall. The wind shall blow them, none knows whither, the landscape, the figures, Calcutta, London, New York, the Royal Throne, the Presidential Chair are facts as fugitive as any institution past or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is the society and so the world. Intimately alluring and attractive was a man to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now you have found his shores, found it a pond and you care not if you never see it again. The proverb goes, - "Today king, tomorrow nothing." There are two minds; one, the spiritual mind or the mind of the soul or jiva, the other, the material mind which has willing, feeling and perception of the material world. The spiritual mind can neither attach itself to, nor detach itself from, the objects of this kingdom of meat and drink nor is it liable to any change or modification in this world of the senses. The tongue may stab the material mind and strike into it a cureless wound, whereas no stab can wound and kill the spiritual mind. An iron ball and the fire are two distinctly different things; but when the former is kept - in an intimate touch with the latter, the former plays the role of the latter by radiating heat and light and burning other things, so the material mind, though in reality purely a matter and devoid of life and its attendant energy, having been closely in touch with the spiritual mind from eternity, exhibits its borrowed activity, like an elephant run amuck, uncontrolled by the driver, through the ten organs of action and sense in the shape of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, philanthropy and self-enjoyment, benevolence and miserliness etc. There is no waking, dreaming or sleeping in the spiritual mind, whereas the physical one wakes, sleeps and dreams; it creates, preserves and destroys and "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." In doing so it sometimes busies itself with the fleeting, frivolous and despicable enjoyments of the world, sometimes it abstains from these things and chooses at will an imaginary god as the object of meditation and worshipful adoration, considers itself a meditator and plunges itself in solitary meditation or worships an idol of wood, clay or metal as a workable god, as a means of attaining (1) Salokya (the existence in the plane of God), (2) Samipya (proximity to God), (3) Sarupya (likeness to God), (4) Sarsti (equal glory of God), and (5) Sayujya (absorption in God or annihilation). It thus turns itself an idolater as a meditator or as an idol-worshipper. Like a dwarf uplifting his hands to catch at the moon it sometimes tries to taste the succulent pastimes of the Supreme Lord in His blissful abode with its passionate senses, identifying the perverted reflection with the real object. The mind, while giving the bridle to its passions and desires and being itself fully subject to affliction, grief and distress, considers itself free from these things and extends its helping hand to an equally suffering mind. Its knowledge of good and bad, happiness and misery, donor and the recipient, law and disorder regarding things other than the Supreme Lord is nothing but a series of blunders and is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire or like swimming between Scylla and Charybdis. Its utterance, however sweet and sound, its meditation, however deep, long and undis- turbed, though apparently true have no reality and are ever subject to change and destruction. Sometimes it imitates the activities of the spiritual mind and picks its own pocket. An abnormal heat in the body caused by keeping a clove of garlic under the armpit or exposing the body to the scorching sun, and the heat caused by fever, though similar in perception, are not the same thing, the former is artificial, empiric and inductive, while the latter is natural, spontaneous and deductive; the activity of the germ working within, bursts forth in the shape of feverish heat, headache etc. When the spiritual mind sets about his dormant devotional activities and his inherent love of God begins to blossom forth at the touch of the eternal, superior ecstatic Energy incarnate as his deliverer, tremor (Kampa), tears (Asru), stupefaction (Stambha), perspiration (Sveda), horripilation (Pulaka ), pallor (Vaivarnya), humility (Dainya), throbbing, (Vepathu), exultation (Harsha) etc. appear on the body as spiritual changes (Satvika vikara). Sometimes changes of this nature and appearance are noticed on the bodies of emotional persons whose minds are so supple and susceptible as to easily produce those peculiar signs at the clangour of the drum and the cymbal, sweet music or the like. These are mere effects of the cause; and the effects disappear as soon as the cause is withdrawn, as the fever-looking heat disappears from the body as soon as it is withdrawn from the burning rays or the garlic is removed from the arm-pit. As the pendulum oscillates between two extremes, so the mind oscillates between enjoyment and abstinence. When it gets tired with the meat and drink of this world, the busy strife of the dinning city, the griefs and woes of sweet home, the guilty mind seems to awake and exhibits a life of retirement, non attachment or reclusion, oftentimes, vainly directing its energies to annihilate the imperishable and indestructible devotional energy of the spiritual mind, to reduce it to nothing so that it can never feel, will or perceive it may never come across the fleeting, changeable, and afflicting things of pleasure and pain. Sometimes one male mind feels the want of a female mind, and thus a male body gets united with a female body through the bond of wedlock. No sooner is this want fulfilled than fresh wants of wealth and home and hearth arise. When it rolls in wealth and the sweet smile of wife and children cheers it, alas, the grim reaper whose name is death, reaps, with his keen sickle the bearded grain and the flowers that grow between at a breath! Then it realises that it was drinking poison from a cup of gold. Thus it happens that the spiritual mind feels that it is fallen in an ocean whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears, and that it is within the jaws of lusts and anger like so many sharks and crocodiles swimming therein, enchained with ardent longings, totally unfriended and shelterless. He shakes off the torpor and realises that the material mind had so long been vainly playing with the fleshy forms known as the wife, the son etc. and fleeting joys like so many unsteady limpid drops of water on a lotus-leaf. Had satiation been in strength Myro and Ophellius would have been happy; had it been in wealth Croesus would have been happy; neither lies it in power nor in all these things together, for Nero, Sardanapalus and Agamemnon sighed and wept and tore their hair and were the slaves of circumstances and the dupes of appearances. The spiritual mind realises that he is living like a double-caged bird which identifies its own living self with the material cages, that the cages he is living in are ever subject to change and decay and though they look fresh and alive they are nothing but dust and will crumble into dust. The subtle cage of the material mind is within the gross cage of the physical body. The material mind is dancing like a jackdaw with the borrowed plumes of a peacock. He reflects, What relish can there be in this decaying body, made up of the five decomposable elements and full of putrescence and impurity? Shall we not mind for a moment that this perishable and ever-changing body is liable to wrath, ambition, illusion, fear, grief, envy, hatred, separation from those we hold most dear and association with those we hate? What relish can there be for material enjoyments when we are exposed to hunger, thirst, disease, decrepitude, emaciation, growth, decline and death. The universe is tending to decay, grass, trees, animals, spring up and die. Mighty men are gone leaving their joys and glories. Beings still greater than these have passed away vast oceans have dried - mountains have been thrown down, the polar star displaced, the cords that bind the planets rent asunder, the whole earth deluged with flood in such a world what relish can there be for fleeting enjoyments? Living in such a world are we not like frogs jumping in a well? To get rid of the deception of this false and treacherous seeming friend, we should be sincerely suppliant before the Supreme Lord and water our couch with tears; He will receive our prayers, have mercy on us and out of His naturally loving kindness, appear before us as the preceptor, with all the proficiency in the scriptures and fully free from the hankerings of the senses, to rid us from the clutch of the wicked mind, which has flame all around and death within, to cut asunder all its knots and hitches and to dispel all our darkness of the heart as an elephant runs away from the darkest recesses of the jungle at the approach of the lion and the veil of darkness is withdrawn from the surface of the earth at the advent of Aurora. Then the mind will brood over its guilty woes like a scorpion girt by fire.