Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academ-advaita.com
The Netherlands
8 December 2019
Fifth Season (1)
“Mind”
Understand that wherever you are, you are here for the first time. It is always the first time in life. There is never a second time because your body transforms every moment.
You must be distinctly sure of yourself. Is this happiness here wherever you are or is it again an illusion? You have to be distinctly clear with everything you say or happens to get said through you.
Nobody can say what he wants to say as a separate individual in life. What needs to get said will get said through you, whether you like it or not, by the intelligence in life as an illusion of sound and not by you.
You live here where your feet touch the ground. That is all. You cannot label the space where your feet touch the ground. You are simply a drop in this life. Just like a drop in a river - many drops are there in a river which make up the river.
You too are simply a drop in this life. There are many drops in life. One learns from life. Where you stand you learn from life. Today, if it is raining, what does that tell you?
It tells you that there are certain seasons in life. What do you notice in these seasons? You notice that seasons keep coming by. That is the first point. What else do you observe in the seasons?
You have no control over seasons. That is the second point. What else do you notice? You notice that you can never know exactly, precisely, the moment when each season changes into the next.
You cannot precisely pinpoint when the season will come either. Life is a beautiful season wherein you can come to know your mind as a season. This is because you cannot precisely pinpoint the moment when a thought or feeling will come into your mind.
You cannot say when happiness will come to you, no way. If happiness happens, you will recognise that you are happy only after it happens to you. Similarly, you recognise the season only after the season happens and never before the season happens.
Understand that seasons happen in the world; your mind is a miniature model of the seasons in the world, manifested by consciousness. Everything is in you: air is in you, water is in you, fire as heat is in you, earth is in you and space and time is in you.
The enlightened realise that the human mind is the fifth season in life.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V.S. Shankar 2019
Editor’s Note:
Gradually, understanding evolves and habit dissolves in response to the revelations of the wise.The intelligence in life manifests the living world which all beings, animate and inanimate, inhabit and pass through as they are meant to. There is no choice in this for any being, nor in the form and manner of manifestation. Furthermore, the wise reveal that every human being lives where his feet touch the ground. Mind with thoughts lives elsewhere without awareness of the feet touching the ground. He thinks he lives where and how he chooses. An individual exists only in imagination in an imaginary place until he is gifted with the understanding of the wise. Man, without thoughts, may come to understand as the wise do, if he is meant to.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator’s Note:
On the basis of the seasons that come and go in life without man having the say, Dr. Shankar's article on the essence of the human mind makes it clear that even in our world of thought the warm and cold days come and go as they are supposed to, without us having the rudder in our hands. To surrender to life, to the outer and inner seasons, by understanding them as illusions, makes man weatherproof, that is, you accept your thoughts and feelings as well as the outer weather and the season, whether you like it or not. The human struggle against the storms and tempests, the heat and cold phases, the droughts and the rainy seasons, which has prevailed since time immemorial, continues in the struggle against the negative feelings and emotions in his mind. This struggle has an end for the wise ones who receive the clear understanding of this article, like a bolt of lightning simply hitting a tree if it is meant to be.
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.