Skip to main content

Balanced mind and heart



The heart has always ruled the human world. Otherwise religions would not have survived so long. Religions and their gods are some of the most powerful and widely used entities for taming the human heart. Gods long to reside in the heart.

If gods actually resided in our hearts, our world would have been a paradise. We know that it is dangerous to let god(s) enter our hearts. So we keep them in churches, temples, and other such places, and lock them up too except at times specified by us. We decide when to let gods into our lives. We decide when gods should stay shut up in a tabernacle or a sanctum sanctorum.  

If we actually take god into our hearts, we would have to request Him (or Her, if you prefer) to avert His eyes a thousand times a day. A lot of things that our hearts make us do are not what God would approve of. A lot of our actions are driven by greed, jealousy, hatred, and so on.

We even go to the extent of justifying those actions which have such wicked roots. We use even religion to justify them. Culture, nationalism, race, etc are other elegant justifications.

And we create a lot of evils all around us. We slaughter people for the greater glory of our god.

The world can be a much happier place. It doesn’t have to be such a brutal place at all. We need to recalibrate our hearts. And our brains too.


Our behaviour is driven by our awareness as well as our feelings about the world. If we change our awareness and our feelings, our behaviour changes. Right ideas and attitudes generate appropriate emotions. Appropriate emotions create harmony within our personality. Inner harmony leads to harmony with others.

It is quite as simple as that. In other words, we need to make some alterations in our hearts and brains. In our awareness and our emotions.   

This is what most thinkers like Socrates and Lao Tzu said. This is what our modern psychologists teach us.

Compared to the previous times, our own times make it more difficult to follow these teachings. We know we live in a terribly unjust world where the wicked flourish and the virtuous perish. How do we choose virtue then?

The truth is that it is difficult to live a virtuous life nowadays. We live in a time when heroism has no place at all. No place. That’s worse than heroes being persecuted. Even persecution would have rendered heroism strangely meaningful. But when heroism is just made to vanish, what happens?

The old masters are still relevant. We need to tame our hearts with right thinking, which in turn will generate right feelings, which will generate harmony within and without. We need to do this in spite of our present-day leaders and teachers! Our happiness lies within us, in spite of our present-day leaders and teachers. 

PS. Prompted by Indispire Edition 328: How can you evolve yourself into a person with a well balanced and stable mind and heart. #lifemind

Comments

  1. Amit PattnaikJune 6, 2020 at 11:45 AM

    As always, wonderful and hits the mark :)
    In the words of Soren Kierkegaard, "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 6, 2020 at 12:13 PM

      Kierkegaard was a precursor to Existentialism which is what drives me even today.

      Delete
    2. Pradeep NairJune 7, 2020 at 6:07 PM

      I don't know how to view the present day world.
      Sometimes I think even the past was like the present, only we weren't around to see it.
      Just like everything will fall unless it's supported, in the world the predominant tendency is to fall and disintegrate. There has to be a constant effort to prop up the good and make this stand.
      The predominant theme is always the negative; the positives are the minority; and the beauty is that this world runs because of that minority and not the majority.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalJune 7, 2020 at 7:13 PM

      You're right to a large extent. The present is not very unlike the past. There were brutal people in the past too. The evil wasn't much less then. We tend to romanticise the past. Ancient heritage is just a myth.

      But this absolute negation of heroism is something new, I think. It's not that there are no heroes, but heroes are made to vanish. They are imprisoned, or just done away with. And the people don't bother!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...
22 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...
10 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more