Introduction to Vedas and Vedanta - Part 29

SAMADHANA- MENTAL BALANCE

Samadhana is concentration of mind. Be attentive always on that which you are seeking. 

Your eye is always on that, like the consciousness of a target of a bowman who strikes it with an arrow. Concentration is the consciousness inside, fixing itself with its attention on that which it wants. 

When you want a thing, why should you not be concentrating on it? People say, “I want a thing, but my mind cannot go there”. The reason is that you are not really wanting it. 

You have got a divided psyche, and so half of the mind goes somewhere else, and another fraction of it goes to what you are thinking you want. 

If you really want the thing, the mind must go there; and when the mind is not going there, you are not really wanting it. Thus knowing, concentrate your mind.

  

Sri Sankaracharya defines in 'atma-anatma viveka': 'whenever a mind engaged in sravana - hearing - and the rest wanders to any worldly object or desire, and finding it worthless, returns to the performance of the three exercises - such returning is called samadhana'.

The mind is free from anxiety amid pains. There is indifference amid pleasures. There is stability of mind or mental poise. The aspirant or practitioner lives without attachment. 

He neither likes nor dislikes, he has a great deal of strength of mind and inner peace, he has unruffled supreme peace of mind. 

Some aspirants have peace of mind when they live in seclusion, when there are no distracting elements or factors, they complain of great tossing of mind - viksepa - when they come to a city, when they mix with people, they are completely upset. They cannot do any meditation in a crowded place.

This is a weakness. This is not achievement in samadhana. There is no balance of mind or equanimity in these persons. Only when a student can keep his balance of mind, even in a battlefield when there is a shower of bullets all round, as he does in a solitary cave in the himalayas, can he be really said to be fully established in samadana.

Lord Krishna says in the Gita:

'Perform all actions, o dhananjaya,

dwelling in union with the divine,

renouncing attachments,

and balanced evenly in success and failure.'

This is samadhana. 

Again you will find in the Gita: 

'the disciplined self, moving among the sense objects

with senses freed from attraction and repulsion,

mastered by the self, goeth to peace.'

This is also samadhana.

Love.