Vedanta Rocks -13 > Switch off the outside world to find your undisturbed core

Part 13 of 46

Tam akratuh pashyati…
Katha Upanishad 1-2-20
“The undisturbed one arrives at a state of grace effortlessly.”

If you can wake up one fine morning and be naturally silent and still, with no itch, no thought, no frustration, no disturbance, no panic -where you naturally think nothing, do nothing -you have become the akratuh, the undisturbed one. It means you have really truly arrived in this life. In terms of spirit you can count yourself among
a handful of life’s lucky billionaires. You have found an unshakable peace within. Outside you will sense a storm brewing in everyone else’s mind but your own. They will resent your calm, your placid poise. Let them. You have spent a lifetime in sympathetic vibration where you reduced your poise to street-level noise just to be one with the world. It is time to say goodbye.

Five minutes of renunciation is all you need to kick start an irreversible chain reaction that will eventually liberate you. Let the world go jump for five minutes. Take no calls, either on your cellphone or in your head. The latter isn’t easy. The calls in your head will keep ringing, and you will have to struggle to find the switch that turns it off. You will have to pull out the sticky strings that bind you to the world. It’s a tricky gluey web, and all of us are stuck on it. Don’t pull too hard, or a mental spider will bind you some more. That’s the way the mind works. It deceived you into the web, and now you need to deceive it to get out.

Your warped self image was the primary deception. The mind pulled your image into the marketplace to draw you into the web. It gave the world power to alter your image, and the moment you accepted that, you became stuck to it. At first it gave you an illusion of happiness and mirth, for what could be better than to be wanted and respected?

But deep inside all the laughter you could sense a residue of pain. It was the stress of constantly striving to keep up that silly image of yourself to the rest of the world.

So now you deceive the mind to try and get out. Just five minutes, you plead. I will return to the web in five minutes and bind myself in. Keep at it and one day the mind will show you where the off button is located. You will spend perhaps one minute in serenity before the web snakes out and pulls you inside.

Once you taste this freedom you will wrestle with your own mind and negotiate terms. A stiff price will eventually be paid. You will have to renounce your self image before you walk free to a new world of unlimited freedom and creativity. You will become the akratuh, the undisturbed one. It is a price worth paying.

It is your life after all -you’ve been seeing the same old boring you -now see someone totally different.

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( Source: Mani Shankar/ Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad 5th April 2009 )