Controlling The Senses
Hey there, everyone, I hope everyone’s doing good, and I have been well too. Yes, as you would already know that I wasn’t pretty much active with my blogs this month, have been really busy with my work, which is writing again, and didn’t really have the strength to write again, but that’s just a bad excuse for keeping up to my expectations, and I take full responsibility for that.
So, getting on to today’s topic which is controlling the sense organs, now do not get rattled already, I am not going to be asking you to stop eating, or indulging in any forms of entertainment, but I am going to be talking about why it is important to control our senses. Actually, I will be relying on Shree Krishna’s advice, as he did mention in the Bhagavad Gita and strive to take you guys for a tour.
So, in one of the Verses in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita Shree Krishna does ask Arjuna, who was depressed, and said that he didn’t want to fight the war, to keep calm and act, and as a warrior, Arjuna’s responsibility was to fight the war and save his family from the immense dishonour which his cousin brothers had subjected them to.
Arjuna couldn’t decide what was to be done, and he was experiencing immense guilt. This was when Arjuna besides giving him life lessons on a lot of things taught him to be tolerant of all the pleasant and unpleasant things happening in the world. Talking about the same lines he continues to say that most of us tend to be very happy when pleasant things happen to us, and depressed when things do not go our way.
Stretching this point, the Lord says that the contact between the senses and sense objects give rise to pleasure and pain and they come and go like the summer and winter seasons, we have to learn to tolerate them without any difficulty. If you think about it from a neutral perspective you will see that this concept has been actually defined by the early Greek philosophers too, and they called a philosophy called “Stoicism” — where a person treats both pleasure and pain as equal.
Even the Yoga philosophy talks of controlling the senses, now, of course, we are all householders and maybe we would not be able to lead a life as hermits, but what we can do is try from our end to make things better. If things go our way, we must be able to handle them with ease and care, and if they don’t then we must not be sad.
We have to remember and understand that controlling the mind is of utmost importance, and it is only when we control our minds can we control our senses. Who knows, maybe in this life itself we can live a life where we can transcend our sufferings?
