Bhagavad Gita Chapter 06
- Chapter 06
- Chapter 06, Text 02
- Chapter 06, Text 05
- You can change your mind, but don’t let your mind change you
- To save you from you, couple the real self with the Supreme Self
- Don’t fall for the mind’s “no time” trick
- When a salesperson knocks at the inner door…
- Is it human nature to want to transcend human nature?
- The mind not only befools but also betrays us
- Focus not on the thoughts which are unworthy of us; focus on the thoughts for which we are unworthy
- The assumption of responsibility in our inner life begins with challenging our assumption about our inner life
- Work on mind control enthusiastically while Krishna works on mind conversion expertly
- The mind may be like a hog in a confectionary, but we don’t have to be
- Weaken your weaknesses - don't let your weaknesses weaken you
- The mind herds us and hurts us and hurts others through us
- We are in the driver’s seat – but are we?
- Don’t just hear the mind – mind what you hear
- Absent-minded means not that the mind is absent, but that our control on it is absent
- The mind is a universe – not everything in it is relevant
- If Krishna is not our goal, we hit self-goals
- Use breaks to break the mind’s spell on you
- Unconscious decisions are usually unhealthy decisions
- Don’t just talk about yourself – talk to yourself
- Build roads, not roadblocks
- The mind is like a dog that barks but can’t bite – unless we let it
- Don’t give the mind monopoly over your inner conversation
- The mind often acts mindlessly – mind it
- The mind should do our work, not make us do its work
- The mind may be confused, but we don’t have to let it confuse us
- The mind makes us serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious
- The instrumental self is not the self – it is the instrument to the self
- Tolerance towards the mind’s intolerance imprisons us in impotence
- Tap the mind’s power – don’t be trapped by the mind’s power
- Move from mindlessness to mindfulness by minding the mind
- The mind’s triggering may be uncontrollable, but our triggering can be controllable
- Stop expecting the mind to give up trying to make us give up
- When we keep liking whatever our mind likes, we end up not liking ourselves
- If we don’t marginalize the mind, it will marginalize us
- See the mind as a predator, not a protector
- The mind makes the easy seem difficult and the difficult seem impossible
- Our inner screen is lined with lying links – be leery
- The mind treats us badly, yet we trust it madly
- The faster our autocorrect, the faster we can be incorrect
- We are our greatest hope – and our greatest horror
- To be thoughtful, attribute every thought first to the mind
- Respect the dark within you, to keep it within you
- Use introspection as a confession by the self to the self
- Watch yourself as if you are someone you don't know – self-observation opens the door to self-transformation
- For changing yourself, focus on comprehending yourself, not on criticizing yourself
- Everything is not in the mind, but everything comes through the mind
- No one has a right to mistreat you, not even you
- The media is mostly the mind multiplied, magnified & magnetized
- Mind your mind to know when it is in order, when on the border and when out of order
- The stronger the hold of problems on our mind, the weaker becomes our hold on ourselves
- Even if others don't take us seriously, still we can take ourselves seriously
- Treating the mind as an enemy can be uncomfortable, treating it as a friend can be fatal — treat it as a patient
- We need inner accounting before we can have inner accountability
- How to deal with the mind’s craziness
- How to deal with the crazy mind?
- How inner bridges and inner barricades can empower us
- Why do small things irritate us so much?
- How to monitor and mentor ourselves?
- How to get away from the mind when it troubles us?
- How our mind can be a double agent
- Chapter 06, Text 06
- Take the mind’s promises with a bucketful of salt
- The mind can impel, but not compel
- The mind is predictably dangerous and dangerously unpredictable
- When the mind throws sand into our eyes
- The mind is not just a liar but also a traitor
- When the mind tempts us to play the victim game, stop playing
- Throw light on the daylight robbery that doesn’t come to light
- The mind makes us a stranger to ourselves
- The mind is a tormentor, not a mentor
- When the mind cries wolf, know that the mind is the worst wolf
- The mind needs not what it heeds and heeds not what it needs
- The defect of dallying with the mind is that it makes the dallier a defector
- Don’t be exhausted by the mind – be exhausted with the mind
- The mind makes the exhausting seem exciting and the exciting seem exhausting
- Don’t give the mind power of attorney – and don’t let it grab it either
- The mind is illusion’s internal advertising agent
- If we don’t recognize the mind, it will make us unrecognizable to ourselves
- Don’t let the mind make you fight more battles than you need to
- See through the mind’s troika of denial, misdirection and self-victimization
- The mind seduces us into doing wrong – and then scolds us for doing wrong
- Our lack of confidence doesn’t choke us as much as our overconfidence in our hypercritical mind
- Devotion makes the mind’s power our power
- The mind will smother if we don’t see it as the other
- The mind’s spells make our life a waking nightmare
- The mind may show us a horror movie, but we don’t have to watch it
- Even in paradise, the mind will say, “Yes, but …”
- Train yourself to hack the inner hacker
- Don’t let the mind control the activities meant to control the mind
- The first me is practically never the best me
- As soon as we stop working constructively, our mind starts working destructively
- The mind is not inherently our enemy - it is circumstantially our enemy
- The mind is a masterly telemarketer – don't pick up the phone
- Our forced errors don’t justify our unforced errors
- The mind deafens us not just to Krishna, but also to the body
- The mind tends to do what we don’t intend to do
- When fighting temptation, focus just on surviving the present battle, not on winning the whole war
- If we repeatedly let our mind take us to hell, eventually it won't let us come back
- Even if the mind is not shrill, it is still a shill
- Our mind is constantly hiding – and is constantly ready to give us a hiding
- Stop playing games with your mind - and with those who play games with your mind
- The mind makes us fight wars that aren't winnable and wars where victory is not even definable
- When the mind insinuates, it is often more insidious than when it incites
- The mind makes the uncomfortable seem unbearable and then makes us do the unconscionable
- The mind demands that others leave us alone and then complains they don’t care for us
- The more we watch the mind’s movie, the more we make our life a horror movie
- How the mind and intelligence work — and how to make them work for us
- How we might defeat ourselves in our inner war
- Our choice: push up or be pulled down?
- How we become both villains and victims …
- Chapter 06, Text 07
- Those who mistake the route to be the root stay uprooted
- We have to lose our mind to gain our soul
- Don’t just fight the mind – fight to get the mind to fight for you
- How uncritical we are about our mind is incredible
- The internal contains both the infernal and the eternal
- Things fall in place if we keep the mind in place
- When the mind engages, it encages; when Krishna engages, he elevates
- Focus on life, not on the mind’s commentary about life
- When we make God our friend, we become our own friend
- As long as we don’t mine under the mind, the mind will undermine us
- Who is defining our identity: our mind or our Lord?
- From applause to absorption
- Chapter 06, Text 08
- Study makes us steady and sturdy
- To see stone and gold equally, see beyond stone and gold to Krishna
- Go beyond the stocking of information to the flowing of service
- Let research reinforce, not replace, search
- To acquire equal vision externally, cultivate spiritual satisfaction internally – by remembering Krishna devotionally
- Information puffs us up; application builds us up
- We can’t lose weight just by reading books on how to lose weight
- Scriptural memorization is meant not for adulation, but for assimilation and application
- Analyzing a spiritual text without applying it is like examining food without eating it
- Chapter 06, Text 09
- Chapter 06, Text 10
- Solitude requires distancing ourselves not just from the world but also from the mind
- Social isolation can be an opportunity to realize how we all are spiritually connected
- Chapter 06, Text 11
- Chapter 06, Text 12
- Chapter 06, Text 13
- Don’t lobotomize ashtanga-yoga to ekanga-yoga
- Asanas cannot free us from vasanas
- To get out of the mind, go above it to the soul or go below it to the body
- Chapter 06, Text 14
- Krishna is not just the object of meditation but also its objective
- Spiritual growth comes by improving our mental model, not our physical posture
- Chapter 06, Text 15
- Chapter 06, Text 16
- The purpose of bodily regulation is not physical deprivation but spiritual connection
- The destructibility of the body is not a license for its wanton destruction
- The art of living is to balance the self we are eternally with the self we are presently
- Our material needs are like painkillers – necessary but not sufficient
- If we don’t sleep at the right time, we will sleep at the wrong time
- If we eat waste, it shows in our waist
- Chapter 06, Text 17
- Plans may not work, but planning works
- Spirituality is not about abandoning but about reclaiming
- Seek balance through dynamic determination, not frozen formula
- Regulation is the road to realization
- Being conscious of the body is not bodily consciousness, being conscious only of the body is
- To regulate your eating, listen to your body, not to your mind
- Better to be crazy in being busy than to be just crazy, better still is to be busy without being crazy
- To live life fully, leave life regularly – take breaks before life breaks you
- Chapter 06, Text 18
- Is the body a playground for passion or a temple for devotion?
- Illusion means that the content of our experience blinds us to its context
- Be not self-conscious; be conscious of the self
- Chapter 06, Text 20
- To access the Absolute Truth, reject the absolute rejection of absolute truths
- The supposition of subjectivity is sabotaged by the subjectivity of the supposition
- Our conviction that happiness is our right is right
- Expansion of consciousness opens the self to the self
- When the mind functions primarily as a mirror instead of as a window, we gain self-realization
- We are not just potentially spiritual; we are essentially spiritual
- Satisfaction comes by knowing ourselves, not by making ourselves known
- Chapter 06, Text 21
- Chapter 06, Text 22
- Seek the one achievement that misery cannot reach
- Attaining an unalienable wealth
- Krishna-thoughts are soothing, satisfying, strengthening, sublimating
- Live beyond life’s tornadoes and torpedoes
- Stability and maturity that takes us beyond adversity
- We may be broke but we don’t have to be broken
- Do not ensure heart breaks; insure against heart breaks
- The available becomes valuable when it becomes accessible
- Material progress centers on having what we want; spiritual progress, on wanting what we have
- Devotion helps us discover the richness of life
- Spirituality enables us to stand tall without standing on others
- Infuse charity with compassion, not calculation
- When no gain relieves pain, seek the gain beyond pain
- Purification means to change our emotional center
- Spirituality reveals that our destiny is bigger than the biggest adversity
- What is our greatest treasure is often not what we treasure the greatest
- There is more to us than what faces us
- How are material achievement and spiritual achievement different?
- Chapter 06, Text 24
- Are we placing in the treasury that which belongs to the dustbin?
- Let’s guard our consciousness the way we guard our homes
- Freedom resides not in the right to experience whatever we like, but in the liking for the right experience
- Leave temptation - and don’t leave a forwarding address
- Don’t relax the treatment just because the symptoms have disappeared
- Scriptural regulation is productive, not restrictive
- Heart work is hard work
- Chapter 06, Text 25
- Glue the mind to meditation, not mediation
- Determination comes from the conviction that the prize is greater than the price
- Disbelieve the mind’s disastrous misdiagnosis
- Those who take a strong stand internally stand strong externally
- To become devotionally responsive, become intellectually responsible
- Let the intelligence’s discrimination lead through the mind's delusion to the heart’s devotion
- Muster determination to master distraction
- Decrease the perception of effort and increase the anticipation of reward by intellectual conviction
- When the mind makes the irrational seem rational, catch it in its irrationality
- Expand your horizons in vision, but concentrate them in implementation
- Absorption is a function of not just attraction but also determination
- Let scripture lead beyond the head’s complexity to the heart’s simplicity
- Don’t let the mind play truant in the school of bhakti
- To forget that one is forgetful is to become a fool
- See the mind not as too strong for us to resist, but as too weak to resist the world’s toys
- See the effort in focusing the mind as an exercise, not an exertion
- The key to training ourselves, and trusting ourselves, is small steps, carried out
- Small victories are not big victories, but they are stepping stones to big victories
- Focus on the mind’s track record, not on its sound track
- When the mind shows us all that we don’t have, the intelligence needs to show us all that we do have
- Intelligence means to know which thoughts are to be pinned and which to be binned
- Virtue that is more talked than walked is not necessarily infertile, it may just be infantile
- When the mind says our victories are too small to count, cross-question it – What other way is there to big victories
- For inner change, momentum matters more than movement
- The essence of discipline is to make our intelligence faster than our mind
- How accountability can save us from humiliation
- The simple way to do something wonderful
- Chapter 06, Text 26
- Change of values is more significant than change of desires
- The mind may stray away; let it not stay away
- Parent the childish mind by being vigilant and diligent
- Let’s not renew what we need to remove
- Conscientiously correct the mind’s incorrect auto-correct
- The mind is a taskmaster, not a task manager
- Even if we can’t be consistent in our devotion, we can still be resilient
- Reposition the mind as the object of observation instead of its subject
- We can’t replace the mind, but we can re-place it
- If we let the mind fill in the blanks, it will overwrite the sentence
- Check the train before you check into it
- Protesting that the mind is wandering is progress over wandering with the mind
- Focus on the mind before focusing on its focus
- Observe your mental neighborhood just as you would observe your physical neighborhood
- When your mental expressway gets overcrowded, direct your thought traffic with your intelligence
- Nothing distracts us as much as we ourselves
- Don’t just restrain the mind – retrain it
- Children will be childish, but parents don’t have to be childish
- The mind is a slow learner – learn to help it learn
- Strong security means that unusual activity triggers immediate inquiry
- Set it and forget it approach won’t work because the mind will reset it
- Control the mind before it controls you
- Unsolicited distraction may be unavoidable, but intentional inattention isn't
- We may be distracted, but we don’t have to be disheartened
- When the mind is fast, the intelligence needs to be faster
- If we don’t ask "What am I doing?" we will end up asking "What have I done?"
- The mind is like a window that unpredictably changes into a TV
- Letting the mind run free is the quickest path to exhaustion
- Going off-course is not the problem; staying off-course is
- If we don’t double-check the mind, it will double-cross us
- During our idle time, the mind works overtime
- The essence of commitment is recommitment
- The mind is not afraid to interrupt us, don't be afraid to interrupt it
- The more we become conscious of where our consciousness is, the more we can tap the power of our consciousness
- Things that are worth doing, are worth doing well — and worth doing badly too
- If your mind says you are a quitter …
- Meditation is not a rehearsal
- Why minor distractions aren’t minor?
- Are we giving too much time to our mind?
- Chapter 06, Text 27
- We need a break – from the mind
- The mind that is clean is serene
- When the mind accepts the impure to be impure, we become pure
- When the mind becomes peaceful, we become joyful
- To beat problems, first beat the problematic mind down to size
- Distraction is draining; concentration is energizing
- In meditation, the way to relaxation is through concentration
- The mind is a maddening chatterbox – silence it by absorption
- Spirituality stills the mind and fills the soul
- Don't go behind the mind, go beyond the mind
- Contemplation on Krishna provides purification, elevation and satisfaction
- Purification puts the mind in the silent mode
- Beyond feel-good spirituality — and beyond feel-bad spirituality
- Why all forms of concentration are not equal …
- Chapter 06, Text 28
- The new life outside begins with the new life inside
- The purpose of discipline is not to torture ourselves, but to transcend ourselves
- Don’t imagine good feelings – realize that there’s so much to feel good about
- Don’t analyze the trash – just trash it
- Some people use yoga to stretch their bodies; others, to stretch the truth
- How spiritual experiences affect our spiritual journey
- Chapter 06, Text 30
- Reality is more fascinating than what we have been allowed to believe
- Devotion implies meditation independent of location
- We may be far away from Krishna, but Krishna is always close to us
- Maya is not just illusion in perception – it is essentially illusion in conception
- Bhakti makes expanded awareness our enduring awareness
- To change the way you feel, change the way you think
- The Absolute's oneness is not in non-differentiation, but in non-disconnection
- Take mindfulness to its fullness by becoming mindful of the fullest reality
- Krishna is just one thought away from us – always
- Meditation can shut things up and out — and can do more
- When the distance between us and God seems unscalable ...
- Chapter 06, Text 32
- Retreat within to treat without
- Let’s learn to laugh with others, not laugh at others
- Cultivate compassion for the complete being of all living beings
- See the sufferings of the attached with compassion, not condescension
- Philosophy should expand our human sensitivity, not shrink it
- Don’t just renounce the material for the spiritual – bring the spiritual to the material
- Caring means sharing
- Absorption of consciousness in Krishna brings about expansion of consciousness through Krishna
- The spiritual vision of all living beings is both saddening and gladdening
- The highest spiritual vision culminates in compassion, not inaction
- Compassion needs to be felt as affection, not as condescension
- To see ourselves as spiritual is good, to see others as spiritual is better, to see everyone as spiritual is best
- Our pain is meant to be harvested, not wasted
- Spiritual vision sees people not as philosophical categories, but as conscious beings
- Boring people find people boring
- Condescension looks down at others while laughing at them; compassion lifts others up while laughing with them
- Are all people really equal – how?
- Has our technology become too strong for our morality? (The porn problem)
- How can we know when we are gossiping?
- Chapter 06, Text 33
- Chapter 06, Text 34
- The mind’s misdirection is not just mild but also wild
- The mind is naughty and haughty
- The mind makes us unthinkingly do the unthinkable
- Don’t let the stray lead you astray
- Don’t let the mind put your thoughts out of sync with your actions
- In mind management, find the balance between laxity and stringency through maturity
- The mind is a specialist in forgetfulness
- Within moments, the mind can change awesome to awful
- Treat the mind like a child – don’t let the mind treat you like a child
- The mind doesn’t know what it wants – and is ready to fight against the world to get it
- The mind stops us not just from achieving our dreams, but also from pursuing them
- The mind is restless, reasonless, ruthless, relentless
- The lesser the structure in our life, the greater the rupture the mind can cause in our life
- The wild mind will make us homeless at home
- Watch the mind, or the mind will catch you
- The mind makes us spin like dirty laundry and leaves us dirtier
- What the mind makes us do would be comic if its consequences were not so tragic
- If we get into the mind’s discourse, we go down a disastrous course
- To take the task of training the mind seriously, stop taking everything it says seriously
- Technologically connected, mentally disconnected
- How to get the mind to go along with us?
- How our mind misdirects our energies
- On parenting the mind
- Chapter 06, Text 35
- Bind the blind mind
- The mind can defeat us in a battle, but we alone can defeat ourselves in the war
- The mind may replay, but we don’t have to play
- Don’t give guidance alone – give confidence too
- Your mind is the only mind you have – train it
- Before you put others in their place, put yourself in their place
- People need to feel understood before they become ready to understand
- Know when to be hard with yourself and when gentle
- To inspire improvement, offer encouragement, not judgment
- Matter matters, and so does manner
- The truth may be bitter, but it doesn’t have to be told bitterly
- The mind’s complaining about a problem is often a bigger problem than the problem itself
- Chapter 06, Text 36
- Conquer Provocative Mind with Evocative Mantra
- Our days of cowering to the mind are over
- Change of inclination requires not just resolution but also reconstruction
- The mind is like a bully who has terrorized us for long – it’s time to stand up
- A rigid structure may not work for us, but without a structure, we may not work
- Chapter 06, Text 38
- Chapter 06, Text 40
- On decreasing our emotional distance from the truth
- Worry more about inconsequential intentions than about unintended consequences
- Avoiding some risks keeps us alive, taking some risks brings us alive
- Chapter 06, Text 43
- Chapter 06, Text 44
- Stop running away from Krishna – run down the mind instead
- We can’t avoid being haunted, but we can choose who haunts us
- The yogi’s transcendence of scripture is not due to defiance or ignorance or negligence but due to scripture’s irrelevance
- Spiritual happiness never goes away – it just pushes us on the way
- Chapter 06, Text 45
- Bhakti is not a part of life; life is a part of bhakti
- Consciousness is recoverable, but time isn’t
- To achieve transformation, see devotion more as intention than as emotion
- Piety when boosted by purity paves the way to spirituality
- Chapter 06, Text 47
- Bhakti transforms our solitary struggle with the mind into a cooperative conquest
- Devotion expands meditation to include emotion and action
- Meditation is defined by not just the mode of thinking, but also the object of thought
- The Gita raises our consciousness from jagat to jiva to Jagadisha
- Meditation on space spaces us out
- The best way to watch the mind is by having something better to watch
- Text 11