A Clear Mind

Transcript

I’d like to talk to you today about having a pure or clear mind.

I was reading the yoga sutras the other day after so many years of not reading it.

And I wonder about this particular thread, the 33rd thread in the first chapter.

One translation goes like this “By cultivating friendliness towards happiness and compassion towards misery, gladness towards virtue and indifference towards vice, the mind becomes pure.”

Now I should note that I’m not a yoga expert but I have practiced a lot of yoga meditation and restraint mantra and breathing techniques. I don’t claim to be an expert so maybe take what I say with a grain of salt.

But this verse, this translation particularly is interesting when it pairs up these virtues with these traditions.

By cultivating friendliness towards happiness, so it doesn’t actually say cultivate happiness directly which is interesting. Sometimes I say part of the way to achieve happiness, the second step is to develop an environment that is conducive to happiness.

That’s an important step and according to Patañjali you create the environment within yourself where happiness is welcome.

Compassion towards misery, so it’s not compassion towards other people who are miserable. It could also be compassion towards your own misery. I know many times when we do feel sadness, compassion and misery we’re quite cruel to ourselves.

We say “why should I be so unhappy, I have so many things.”

We put pressure on ourselves to try to force ourselves to be happy and of course it doesn’t work.

In the first point cultivating friendliness towards happiness. Being cruel to ourselves is not friendliness towards happiness.

Can we be compassionate to ourselves to our own emotions when we do feel unhappy?

Well the spoiler is yes, we can, we absolutely can I assure you. I know that from my own experience.

Gladness towards virtue is interesting. Sometimes we get excited when we see stimulating things like music, movies and pornography, all kinds of sensory delights which are kind of cool.

What if we got excited, grateful and delighted when we saw something like a man waiting patiently.

Or someone showing joy or affection towards a love one without trying to control them.

When you do those things for yourself and others, when you exercise virtues can you be delighted just to experience them. Just to do those things. To embody those virtues even if just for a moment.
Again yes you absolutely can I’ll tell you from my own experience.

You can be delighted to see virtue.

The next part says indifference towards vice. Actually I looked that part up, the word in sanskirt is upeksha and you look at the Wikipedia article on upeksha it say upeksha does not mean indifference. A different translation is equanimity or equal mindedness.

So I was wondering about that because of course some people won’t necessarily take a holy attitude but they might take a holier than thou attitude.

So it’s like judging other people for their vices or judging themselves for their vices. Instead we can be even minded about it if we do see a vice we don’t have to be perturbed by it. WE don’t have to be bothered by it, we don’t have to judge ourselves. We can just continue on.

That’s an interesting way to translate that even though some people say it’s technically not correct.

It’s interesting because what if you just said “Oh yes, there is vice and it doesn’t bother me at all.”

The reason people say that indifference isn’t the correct translation is because indifference can be like “Oh, I don’t care, I’m not bothered. I’m not going to do this or that like bordering on apathy. That’s an important that it’s not apathy but even mindedness.

Now, try to imagine what a person would be like if they had these 4 qualities. Friendliness towards happiness, compassion towards misery of others and themselves. Gladness or delight towards virtue and equanimity towards vice.

I was saying that person wold be approximating a sect and yet to look at all of these qualities individually there’s none of them which is without our grasp.

We are perfectly capable of attaining these and what a wonderful world it would be if we took a little time to cultivate those traits and develop a pure or clear mind.

Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for putting the work and letting go of those parts of yourself that no longer serve you. Moving towards a greater version of yourself and clearing your mind.

Have a great day and I’ll talk to you soon.