Arjuna:
Tell me of the man who lives in wisdom,
Ever aware of the Self, O Krishna;
How does he talk, how sit, how move about?
Sri Krishna:
He lives in wisdom
Who sees himself in all and all in him,
Whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed
Every selfish desire and sense-craving
Tormenting the heart. Not agitated
By grief nor hankering after pleasure,
He lives free from lust and fear and anger
Fettered no more by selfish attachments,
He is not elated by good fortune
Nor depressed by bad. Such is the seer.
Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs
The sage can draw in his senses at will.
An aspirant abstains from sense-pleasures,
But he still craves for them. These cravings all
Disappear when he sees the Lord of Love.
For even of one who treads the path
The stormy senses can sweep off the mind.
But he lives in wisdom who subdues them,
And keeps his mind ever absorbed in me.
When you keep thinking about sense-objects,
Attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire,
The lust of possession which, when thwarted,
Burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment
And robs you of the power to learn from past mistakes
Lost is the discriminative faculty,
And your life is utter waste.
But when you move amidst the world of sense
From both attachment and aversion freed,
There comes the peace in which all sorrows end,
And you live in the wisdom of the Self.
The disunited mind is far from wise;
How can it meditate? How be at peace?
When you know no peace, how can you know joy?
When you let your mind follow the Siren call
Of the senses, they carry away
Your better judgment as a cyclone drives a boat
Off the charted course to its doom.
Use your mighty arms to free the senses
From attachment and aversion alike,
And live in the full wisdom of the Self.
Such a sage awakes to light in the night
Of all creatures. Wherein they are awake
Is the night of ignorance to the sage.
As the rivers flow into the ocean
But cannot make the vast ocean o'erflow,
So flow the magic streams of the sense-world
Into the sea of peace that is the sage.
He is forever free who has broken out
Of the ego-cage of I and mine
To be united with the Lord of Love.
This is the supreme state. Attain thou this
And pass from death to immortality.
The Gita Chapter 2 Verse 54-72
In the podcast I listened to today from Michael A. Singer I walked away with a very familiar take away: We need to transcend fear for Love. He relayed the following ( which I paraphrased to a slight degree).
Spirituality is all about dealing with the unpredictability of life, not about protecting yourself from it.
Every single day be a greater person [without attachment to the person] than you were the day before.
Use the daily mantra: "I want to handle reality."
You cannot love fully and openly if you are afraid of getting hurt. We need to trade fear for love. Ask yoursef, "Do I want love or do I want fear?"
Most of us spend our life attempting to protect ourselves from a fear we refuse to look at. That should not be the motive of our time here.
The motive of your life is to express yourself, ...be creative...
That, of course, is the basis of ACIM and was such a part of my own motivation for decades now...that I wrote a book years ago entitled: Beyond Fear there is Love. It was not well written. I tried to cover too much in it, from too many different angles, for it to be publishable. It was a great self-learning tool for me though...a platform on which I could put all the new concepts I was learning down...like some great concept map. After I tidy up the two little books I wrote last year on helping children to write...and send them out ...I would like to go back to that book and give it another go. I also want to go back to my novels. I do not want to be atached to the outcome of any of these projects...I just want to fall into that wonderful creative zone where there is no "me", just the joy of being alive and expressing this thing in me that comes out in my writing. I want to do my best but I do not want to care about how 'this best expression' turns out, you know, about what happens after they are written/revised?
I am reminded of another verse in that same chapter of the Gita. Verse 49- 50.
Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do. When consciousness is unified, however, all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill. Therefore, devote yourself to the disciplines of yoga, for yoga is skill in action.
Anyway, thought I would share that.
All is well.
Eknath Easwaran ( 2007) The Bhagavad Gita ( Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality). Kindle Edition
Michael A. Singer (November, 2024) The Journey from Fear to Freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0T4Jf5K7fw&list=PLyOuAoSmZkKoESr2acNWwhznusbBkKXsT&index=2
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