The Tree of Life - 3.5 : Swami Krishnananda

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03/03/2020.
Discourse 3: Severing the Root of this Tree of Life - 5.

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1.

#When we think of detachment, we generally conceive of physically moving out of our house, going a few thousand miles away, and then it is detachment. This is the crudest form of the notion of non-attachment in the field of spiritual life.

##But our bondage does not consist in our physical location in any place. It is not the house that binds us. It is not the land on which we are seated that is our problem. Nothing visible to the eyes as a physical content can be regarded as a bondage. The bondage is a kind of experience that is injected into our consciousness.

###Our happiness and sorrow are a type of consciousness, a feeling, an operation of the psyche in some way, and if the mind is to work in a different way, we will have a different kind of experience. So we are concerned with experience rather than with objects.

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2.

*Therefore, if the experience does not change even after isolation of the body from its physical atmosphere, that would not be counted as detachment, or non-attachment. What the mind is thinking is the touchstone of success in the practice of non-attachment. You may be having a house in Switzerland but you are physically seated in the Himalayas.

#Will you call this detachment?

*You may say, “Yes, why not, because my house is in Switzerland and I am not there. I am here.”

#But what is the mind thinking?

#Is the mind conscious that it has a property?

"That would be a subtle silken thread connecting the consciousness with its object, which can slowly become stronger, strengthening itself into an obstacle in the direction of the mind towards the spiritual goal of life."
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3.

*Bondage consists in a type of movement of the mind.

**We can create bondage within our mind even inside our room because the mind is not inside the room.

###It is not even inside the body. It is an ethereal, unintelligible, all-pervading medium, and that is why it cannot be controlled, even as we cannot control the wind.

#How can we control a tempest or a cyclone or a tornado?

##Likewise is the hardship involved in the control of the mind. The mind is connected to everything everywhere, and to detach the mind from objects would be to withdraw it from everything.

To be continued .....

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