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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more