Ashtavakra Sprouts

This weekend was an eye-opener, as I understood a little bit about the nature of the mind, one of the Ashtavakra Gita seeds sprouted. 🙂

I realized that the mind has a very magnetic nature. It magnetizes every moment into a positive or a negative one. As soon as we set some expectations and conditions on our happiness (be it levels of comfort, satisfaction, success, self-validation needs due to a heavily fluctuating ego), it starts forming a happy or  un-happy opinion for each moment.

Being an Engineer, I constantly expect hard problems to solve. I was unsatisfied on friday due to missing my potential on this particularly demanding work-day. Writing the IELTS English test the next day, I was surprised to notice how much harder it was to simply sit through it. My mind kept sulking at wasting its time. I was happy neither with a hard problem, nor with an easy one.

We cannot control nor choose the situations thrown at us. And, due to our ‘ custom lenses’ of perception to these events, our mind happily takes our emotions on these free-for-all roller-coaster rides every day.

Isn’t it exhausting?

Sri Sri talks about this in the Ashtavakra Gita Series. Apparently, the key to stop this tendency is not to fight or control it, it is to simply transform our curiosity into wonder that this phenomenon is happening. It is the very nature of the mind to behave this way.  When you find yourself in a roller coaster, look back at the last time such a situation happened and see that you are still alive and healthy today. Nothing changed. The mind is simply burning you from living and acting fully in the present moment, making the task even more hard and exhaustive to complete. So, simply wonder that the mind’s monkey nature has kicked in and observe its effects on you. Try it out. You will see you are untouched by these events. Smile at the mind’s nature, don’t fight it.

I am too tired of being a football in this game. I rather be the spectator of all this fun.