Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academ-advaita.com
The Netherlands
16 December 2019
Fifth Season (5)
“Mind”
You live your life, your friends, your wives, your husbands, when you understand life and mind in depth. That is exactly what life and mind are and it cannot be other than it is.
Your movements, your job, your wife, your husband, your kids, everything is a season which keeps on moving. You cannot dictate terms as to how they should be, just as you cannot dictate terms to any season as to how it should be in life.
You flow with the season; you flow with life. Life is changing means that the seasons of thoughts and words are changing in you and they cannot be other than they are. Now, if life is changing in such a way, where does happiness come in?
There can be so many thoughts in your head depending on how the air is at that particular moment in your mind. Thoughts are air. When all this happens in us, which makes up our life-pattern, where does happiness come in and what is the illusion of happiness?
When you say, I am happy now, are you really happy or is something else happening to you? Namely, that you just say you are happy and you have not understood it because, if you are happy, you must have observed that it does not stay. It goes away.
It simply goes away. What is the mechanism then? If it is happiness, why does it not stay? If we are the doers, we can make happiness stay. But it does not stay and we cannot make it stay.
Happiness changes and is replaced by other feelings. You cannot prevent the change. You cannot prevent other feelings which replace happiness. You cannot choose the feelings that replace happiness.
Are we confronting happiness or are we experiencing something else whose mechanism we are unable to understand? That is self-inquiry which will leave you to live life.
Happiness does not stay because no season stays. The weather in any season changes and is not the same. Similarly, happiness does not stay because happiness is the weather in the mind.
You accept and live the weather which is present in any season in life. Similarly, accept the weather which is present in any moment in the mind. If you accept the weather in the mind as it is, happiness will be present and will not go away.
The enlightened understand that the mind is what it is in any moment and cannot be other than what the mind is in any moment.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V.S. Shankar 2019
Editor’s Note:
We humans are frequently complaining about the weather or extolling the weather. It has become a national pastime or hobby and it also provides an opportunity for communicating with others. We do not want the weather as it is, nor do we want the weather as it is to go away. Those who watch daily bulletins know that news about the behaviour of the weather is announced over and over again in a day-night. In their compassion for the happiness of mankind, the wise are revealing their understanding of life and mind. Deep reflection on the words that are gifted here is deeply rewarding.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator‘s Note:
We seek happiness again and again in our everyday lives, sometimes we find it, but we are unable to preserve it. What we do not like prevents us from feeling happy. If something bothers us, we are not happy. If we are happy, we fear that we might soon lose our happiness. This is the conditioning of the mind. This search for happiness prevents us from being happy, according to the wise. But how can we be happy if we give up the search for it? Man is not the doer to begin or end his search, for he does not make the moment when happiness or unhappiness happens to him in the mind. However, when we understand what is described here in this article by Dr. Shankar, that the alternation of happiness and unhappiness is as inevitable as the weather change outside, then contentment arises, which represents true, unchanging happiness. That the weather in the mind is not separate from the weather in nature seems at first sight to be a metaphor. However, on closer reading and reflection, it becomes clear that the five elements in nature that make up the weather are also at work in humans. Therefore, it is indeed to be understood literally. Dr. Shankar puts it in a nutshell: "Thoughts are air." - What a revelation!
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.