Perhaps you know this question: you do yoga, you meditate, you read spiritual texts, and still you ask yourself how you can be spiritual and at the same time live a completely normal, worldly life, with work, family and everything that belongs to it. How does the view of a life full of contrasts turn into a view that sees Divinity in everything?
This is exactly the question Prince Arjuna asks his friend Krishna in the Indian epic Bhagavad Gita. And although the Gita is an Indian epic, it stands beyond religious dogma; you find the same concepts in Western mystic spirituality.
What the Gita is about
Jack Hawley summarises the story beautifully in his book “Essential Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita”: Imagine two lone figures parked in their war chariot in the open field between the armies of good and evil, all-out war about to explode around them. One is the renowned prince Arjuna, the greatest hero of those times. The other is Krishna, Arjuna’s chariot driver and best friend from boyhood, who has not revealed that he is God incarnated. Prince Arjuna suddenly buckles under the burdens and pressures he faces. His eyes fill with tears. “Why am I doing this, Krishna?” he asks. “Life is so cruel, so demanding. I just can’t fight again. Please, please help me understand!” Krishna’s response to his friend’s tearful plea for the meaning of life comprises the Gita’s timeless dialogue.
The worldly and the spiritual path
It is said that following the worldly life is at first easy and becomes more and more difficult over time, whereas following the spiritual path is first difficult and then becomes easier and easier. “Worldly life” here means acting from a level of consciousness driven by a dysfunctional ego: desires, greed and possessiveness. The spiritual mindset, on the other hand, has the benefit of all in mind. One who walks this path lives the values of unconditional love for all beings (prema), service (seva), non-violence (ahimsa) and righteousness (dharma).
My spiritual teacher Sathya Sai Baba describes the path in three stages, as many spiritual schools do: First you only see yourself. Then you see Divinity in all. And finally you merge with Divinity.
The image of the chariot
The Gita gives us a wonderful image for this: the chariot itself. The driver stands for your mind, the chariot for your body, and the horses for your senses. You want a mind that is functional, meaning it steers in the right direction. You want a body that is healthy and acts in this world as the Divinity within you directs it. And you want senses that help you navigate the world instead of being overstimulated all the time, for overstimulated horses simply run wild and bring you nowhere.
The perfect mind is a still mind, which only engages when a task initiated by the Divinity within is to be carried out.
Freedom in every situation
We usually know two kinds of freedom: freedom from something we no longer want, and freedom to something, for example to live the life we wish for. Yoga knows a third one, and it is the most precious: the freedom of choice.
Everything in life can be seen through two different lenses. You can complain about something, seeing it as the negative ego would, or you can choose to see the beauty in everything that happens. Yoga is the practice of coming back to this second view again and again. When something happens, the mind easily goes outward, judges and looks for someone to blame. But if you practise becoming still first and listening within, another perspective is revealed: mistakes become lessons, apparent setbacks turn out to be blessings in disguise, and what we do not understand reveals its meaning over time.
The Gita connects this freedom with dharma, duty. Deciding not to act is also an active choice with consequences. The way of the Gita is: follow your inner voice step by step, use your mind to check whether your choice is ethical, act, and offer the outcome of your action to the Divine. You still act, but the action comes from a different place, from a calm place within, with the intention that the best outcome for everyone involved will occur.
“To be free is your birthright. Genuine freedom is obtained only when delusion is absent, when there is no servitude to the objective world.” (Sathya Sai Baba, from “Dharma Vahini”)
Controlling the mind: a simple practice
How do you reach this still mind in practice? The Gita offers a practice everyone can use immediately: the moment you notice the chatter of your mind, you switch to internally repeating the name of your chosen form of God.
If the term “God” feels strange to you, take the word that feels right for you, perhaps “the Universe”, or a Divine Quality such as Peace or Unconditional Love, and repeat that. Sai Baba says it does not matter which form we choose, because the Divine is formless and at the same time has many forms. But if you choose the name of a form of God, you leave it to the Divine itself which quality is needed right now.
For in the end, we become what we think of.
Stilling the mind: three deeper ways
Stilling the mind takes more practice, and all ways there share one thing: honesty and a loving attitude towards yourself.
Set the goal right. According to the Gita, all attachments and desires give the mind endless reasons to think. The cure is to release the desires step by step and keep only one: the desire for Self-Realisation, the realisation that the Divinity within you is the same in everyone else, and that even separateness is an illusion.
Practise self-inquiry. Through self-inquiry you track down the source of your most persistent thoughts and dissolve it: Investigate your thoughts down to the desire behind them, and see which inner quality can give you what you are searching for in vain in the outside world. Investigate painful past events and look for the learning in them; it is your treasure. Investigate fears of the future and surrender them trustfully to the Divinity within you, for your Higher Self always knows the next step, and it knows it in the present. And investigate false concepts about the world and about yourself: what are you actually comparing yourself against? Take out judgment and guilt; they lead nowhere.
Become the watcher of your thoughts. Know that you are not your thoughts. They are temporary; your essence is not. The mind keeps running and doing its thing, but you are not really interested. In the beginning this works best in meditation; later it becomes second nature. And along the way, the most beautiful question arises by itself: who is the one in you who watches the thoughts? You can read more about this connection within in my article on connecting with your Higher Self.
My book recommendations on the Bhagavad Gita
There are so many great books about the Gita. These three touched my heart most deeply:
- “The Bhagavad Gita: A Walkthrough for Westerners” by Jack Hawley. What makes it special: he weaves commentary and story together, so you read the Gita like a narrative instead of jumping between verse and commentary.
- “Bhagavad Gita or the Divine Song”, with comments from texts by Sathya Sai Baba, edited by Camilla Svensson. If you love the texts of Sai Baba, you will find a heart-opening interpretation of the epic here.
- “Bhagavad Gita” by Alvin Drucker. The author collected talks by Sathya Sai Baba about the Gita in his book.
- “The Supreme Yoga” (Yoga Vasistha), translated by Swami Venkatesananda. A yearlong reader with one page of insight per day: read it in the morning, meditate upon it and carry its teaching through the day. Its images of the many bracelets made from one gold and the waves of the one ocean accompany me to this day.
When the mind still will not become quiet
If you know these practices and your mind still keeps falling into the same thought loops, there is often a pattern underneath, stored in the subconscious, that practice alone cannot reach. This is exactly what I work on in my sessions, for example with Resonance Repatterning. If you like, let us talk.
Book a free Clarity Call: https://tidycal.com/sandragross/claritycall-en
The featured image shows the cover of the book “Bhagavad Gita” with comments from Sathya Sai Baba, collected by Camilla Svensson.
