VI: 36

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 6, Verse 36

"When the mind is not in harmony,
This Yoga is indeed difficult to master;
But if you keep striving earnestly,
In the right way,
You will realize it."

Swami Satchidananda:

It's difficult, surely, but it is possible. That's the beauty of it. What's the use of doing anything that's really easy? Anybody can do it. There is distinction when you do something that others can't do easily. It is possible to achieve anything if you practice at it continuously. Always keep you aim high to gain mastery over the restless mind.

If you meditate ten minutes a day and then just leave the mind to go on its seemingly merry way for the rest of the day, it's a little bit like holding a rudder steady for ten minutes and then letting go of it. The wind then tosses the boat every which way. You'll never reach the other shore that way. Be constantly vigilant. Always hold the wheel and watch the compass. If you make a mistake or get caught by a gust of wind, get back on course tout de suite.

Jesus:

Let your loins be girded and keep your lamps burning, and be like those who wait for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they may open the door at once when he knocks.

Eckhart Tolle:  The waiting that Jesus speaks of is not the usual bored and restless waiting that denies the present moment. It is not a waiting in which your attention is focused on some point in the future, while the present moment is perceived as an undesirable obstacle that is preventing you from having what you want.

There is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. In this state, all of your attention is in the present moment. There is none left for daydreaming, remembering or anticipating. There is no tension in it, nor any fear. There's only alert presence. In this state, the "you" that has a past and future is hardly there anymore, and yet nothing of value is lost. You are still essentially yourself. In fact, you are more fully yourself than you ever were before, or rather it is only now that you are truly yourself.

The servant knows not at what hour the master will come, so he stays awake, alert, poised and still, lest he miss his master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (to stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the now) and don't get to the feast (liberation). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (to stay conscious).

The writers of the Gospels did not understand the meaning of these parables, so distortions crept in right from the beginning. These are not parables about the end of the world. They are pointing towards the transcendence of the egoic mind and the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.

 

Alan Watts:

 

Recognizing the trap in which it finds itself, the mind surrenders that “straining after the good” which constitutes the ego.  All at once there descends upon it, quite spontaneously, a profound and completely uncontrived stillness, a quietude that is enveloping like a heavy snowfall or a windless afternoon in the mountains, where silence makes itself known in the undisturbed hum of insects in the grass.

 

In this stillness, there is no sense of passivity, of submitting to necessity, for there is no longer any difference between the mind and its experience.  All acts, your own and others’, seem to be happening freely from a single source.  Life keeps moving on, and yet remains profoundly rooted in the present, seeking no result, for the present has spread out from its constriction in an elusive pin-point of strained consciousness to an all-embracing eternity. 

 

Feelings both positive and negative come and go without turmoil.  They pass trackless like birds in the sky. 

 

From this standpoint, intelligence is not a separate, ordering faculty of the mind, but a characteristic of the whole organism-environment relationship.  Between organism and environment, Yang and Yin, is the balancing relationship called Tao.  It is intelligent, not because it has an ego, but because it has li, organic pattern.  The spontaneous flow of feelings, rising and falling in their moods, is an essential part of this balancing process.

 

As good sailors gives themselves to the motion of a ship and do not fight it with their stomach muscles, people in tune with Tao give themselves to the motion of their moods. 

 

The universality of the unique event and the eternity of the moment come to be seen only as the straining of the mind is released and the present event, whatever it may be, is regarded without the slightest attempt to get anything from it.