Use The Mind – In Gita Verse 6.5 One must deliver himself with the help of his mind, and not degrade himself. The mind is the friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.
Krishna is saying that Mind is friend as Servant and enemy as Master.
I have heard an ancient story: A king was very happy with one of his servants. He was so devoted, so totally devoted to the king; he was always ready to sacrifice his life for the king. The king was immensely happy, and many times he has saved the king, risking his own life. He was the king’s bodyguard.
One day the king was feeling so happy with the man, he said, ‘If you desire anything, if you have any desire, just tell me and I will fulfill it. You have done so much for me that I can never show my gratitude, I can never repay you, but today I would like to fulfill any of your wishes whatsoever it is.’
The servant said, ‘You have already given me too much. I am so blessed just by being always with you – I don’t need anything.’
But the king insisted. The more the servant said, ‘There is no need,’ the more the king insisted. Finally the servant said, ‘Then it’s okay. You make me the king for twenty-four hours and you be the guard.’
The king was a little apprehensive, afraid, but he was a man of his word and he had to fulfill the desire. So for twenty-four hours he became the guard and the guard became the king. And do you know what the guard did? The first thing that he did, he ordered the king to be killed, sentenced to death!
The king said, ‘What are you doing?’
He said, ‘You keep quiet! You are simply the guard and nothing more. It is my wish and now I am the king!’
The king was killed, and the servant became the king forever.
Servants have their own devious ways to become masters.
The mind is one of the most beautiful, the most complex, the most evolved mechanisms. It has served you well, it serves you well. Because of its services you have repeated the same story in your life, everybody has repeated the same story: you have made the mind the master and now the master treats you just like a servant. This is the problem, not that the mind has to be thrown out.
And that’s what meditation is all about: the art of moving away from the mind, being above the mind, becoming transcendental to the mind, knowing that ‘I am not the mind.’ That does not mean that you have to throw out the mind. Knowing that ‘I am not the mind’ makes you again the master. You can use the mind. Right now, your mind is not within your hands. You are not a good charioteer.
Mind has not to be rejected at all; if you reject it, it will remain. Rejection means repression. Anything rejected never leaves you; it simply moves from the conscious to the unconscious, from the lighted part of your being to the dark layers where you cannot face it. You become oblivious of it, but it is there, more alive than ever. It is better to face the enemy than to keep the enemy at your back; that is far more dangerous.
Mind is a beautiful mechanism, one of the miracles of existence. We have not been able yet to make anything comparable to the human mind. Even the most sophisticated computers are nothing compared to it. A single human mind can contain all the libraries of the world; its capacities are almost unbounded. But it is a machine, it is not you. To get identified with it is wrong, to make it your master is wrong, to be guided by it is wrong. But to be the master and the guide is perfectly right. The mind as a servant is of tremendous value, so don’t reject it. To reject it will impoverish you, it will not enrich you.
Krishna is not against the mind; he is in favor of transcending it. And if you reject you cannot transcend. Use it as a stepping-stone. It all depends on you: you can make it a hindrance if you start thinking that the mind has to be rejected, denied, destroyed; or you can make it a stepping-stone if you accept it, if you try to understand it. In the very effort of understanding it, transcendence happens. You go beyond it, you become a witness.
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