Taming the mind
By Naresh

SAINTS and sages have described the world as a house of colours and the man as a sufferer of miseries. Nanak says the whole world lives in pain. Have you ever tried to find out how many of the sufferings that you undergo are self-created? You yourself are the cause of many a suffering.

Take a hypothetical situation. During a period of misfortune, your greatest distress is that a particular friend has not come forward to help you. Think for a while. Have you not, on your own, assured yourself of the expected help? Did your friend, ever promise any help if you were in trouble? You reached the conclusion on your own and assured yourself that in case of a misfortune, your friend would offer you Rs 10 lakh as help. Instead he offered just Rs 10,000. In a fit of anger, you rejected his offer and took his treachery to heart. Give a cool thought and find out if your friend really is to blame. Had he ever promised to pay the amount you were, expecting him to give? He actually never offered to pay even the amount which he was offering. The fact of the matter is that you never discussed the subject with him. You arbitrarily decided his role in a particular situation.

Your distress, in this case, is understandable but what is the real cause of distress — your friend’s behaviour or your own wrong expectations? Maybe you had wrongly assessed his paying capacity. Again, it is quite possible that at that particular time your friend’s paying capacity was not even Rs 1000. He might have borrowed money to help you out. But you had set a particular benchmark for him and when he did not measure up to it, you were convinced of his betrayal.

The root cause of your distress was not your friend but your own expectations. He, on the other hand, may have deserved to be praised.

Similar is the situation with regard to relationship in and outside your family. A husband, normally, is sure that if ever he falls sick, his wife will not leave him alone even for a minute. He hopes to be lovingly looked afer during his illness. In expecting all this from his wife, he forgets that she has to perform many household chores and look after the children. In addition, she may not want to disturb her husband by going into his room again and again. But the husband feels that his wife is neglecting him and he gets very disturbed. Do the expections of such a husband know any limit? Is it practical or possible for a housewife to abandon all her duties and keep sitting by her husband’s side the whole day?

A wise man, therefore, determines the limits of his expectations. If the expectations are low, then the tensions and emotional setbacks as less.

Let us take another hypothetical situation. You knew it very well that a certain friend of yours would not loan more than Rs 1000 if you were even in a financial crisis. The crisis set in and you called in your friend for help. He gave you Rs 10,000. Your happiness knew no bounds. You thought that your calculations about your friend were absolutely wrong for he could sacrifice anything under the sun for you. See, how happy it made you. Now consider whether the basis of this happiness is your friend’s gesture or your own expectation. In the earlier hypothesis, you were hurt because your expectation was too high. Here, you are overwhelmed because your expectation was low.

You must fix some limit for your expectations. This will save you from disappointments. Painful feelings grow in your inner-most self. If you sow the seeds of pain in your heart, you will reap a crop of tensions. You must, therefore, sow the seeds of joy, so that you can reap a crop of happiness.

Selfishness also boosts human problems. Suppose, you don’t have an offspring and because of this you remain under constant distress. Or say, your son is a worthless person and that causes you great mental strain. What are your expectations from your children?This much, that when you grow old, they will take care of you? Just this, that when your body decays, they will provide you with food and shelter? But, are you sure that you will remain alive till you grow old? Are you sure that your children will remain alive till you grow old? Does it ever cross your mind that you may have to arrange for the funeral of your son and spend the rest of your life bringing up his orphaned children? No, you don’t think on these lines because you see everything through rose-coloured spectacles. You have developed a habit of enjoying the spring and are not bothered about the unavoidable autumn.

The fact the matter is that you bring up your children with love and affection in the hope of being rewarded with care and attention in old age. Your hope is belied when, like all other parents, you too become a burden on your son. His house becomes too small to accommodate you. You spend the whole day cursing your son as well as your stars.

Do you ever try to find out the real cause of your trouble? In fact, you have yourself invited this situation. You have forgotten that once upon a time your father had also fallen from the headship of the family to become an ordinary, rather additional member. Whenever he overstepped his down-graded position through a piece of advice, you retorted, "Papa! things have changed with the time." How quickly you forgot all that! Your regret at your son’s behaviour notwithstanding, the fact is that such is the order of the day. Every person, after he has played his innings, becomes irrelevant.