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Kathopanishad-Gist
Gist
1. As a human being you have choices, no other living creature has this privilege.
2. The choice is normally between Preya (pleasure only) and Shreya (beneficial too).
To differentiate between them you have to
3. How to identify ourselves? By Body? No, Know your real self (Aatmaa), that is real you.
4. In the long run unstable mind creates problems for physical body.
5. We all are born with our packet of Praan - the balance of our previous
lives. [p 6]
6. To live is to spend Praan, so we should spend minimum Praan by stressing
ourselves minimum. [p 6]
7. Stress is the body's response to any demanding challenge in environment, and
sometimes this stress can create severe illnesses too, if the body cannot
face that challenge. [p 7]
8. Stress is not caused so much by difficult conditions, as by what we think about
those conditions. [p 7]
9. As your mind is conditioned to be angry at a thing, it can be trained to be calm
too at the same thing. [p 7]
10. How to train your mind calm? All the forces are called Sanskaar.
Sanskaar is a conditioned automatic way of thinking and responding to the
events of life. it begins with a conditioned habit in the mind internally and
grows into conditioned behavior externally. [p 7]
11. Our personality is the sum of these Sanskaar. Since we know now what is
Sanskaar and what is stress and illness, we can say that our Sanskaar put
us under stress. [p 7]
12. Since Sanskaar is a process, we can change our personality by changing
our Sanskaar by conditioning our mind in some other way. [p 7]
13. Although this is strenuous, painful and difficult, but it is not
impossible. Why, because the meaning of conditioning is to relate a
thought to a certain action, so that both act automatically and
simultaneously to each other, and this change is about changing the
relationship between a thought and an action. [p 7]
14. Mind is of two types - lower mind (senses, emotions); and higher mind
(that is Buddhi or say intellect). The job of the intellect is to see
clearly. [p 7]
Since
our mind is the reflection of our thoughts only, it sees only what we are,
not what the world is. [p 14]
In
ideal situation the driver of our chariot, our higher mind (Buddhi),
should make the decision, convey it to lower mind, the horses (senses,
emotions etc), to take us on our desired road.
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