Chapter 5

       

       Winning immortality

      🌻 Day 39 🌻

Basically Nachiketa has been instructed two things. One is put in your self-effort. You need self-effort so that you don’t become a slave to your senses, you become the master of your senses. Will self-effort alone work? Yama said, “No, it is only grace that works.”

Since everyone is a combination of body and mind, matter and energy, the tangible and the intangible, the manifest and the unmanifest, you need two sets of rules to

follow. One set of rules for the body, the tangible, the limited. It works only with effort. Then another set of rules to handle the mind, the abstract, the unmanifest. That works through effortlessness. Often we confuse ourselves and do the reverse. In the mind we put effort and for the body, we say, “Let it be, whatever happens.” You have to exercise; it’s an effort. Only when you exercise do you built strength in the body. And you have to relax too. When you relax, you find strength in the mind. You don’t find mental strength by working our mind out. Mental strength or intelligence grows not by effort but by deep contemplation, relaxation. In the same way you have to do physical workout and only then body becomes strong. Just by eating and being a couch potato, you are not going to be strong. This discrimination is essential.  

Nechiketa was asked to look into this factor. If your senses are wild and untamed like horses, you will be ruined. You should tame the horses. You should have a say over your body. The way to train the mind and the consciousness is through meditation, breathing, and pranayama. And how would you

strengthen the intellect? He said, “Come on, wake up.” Waking up is also effortless. It just needs that call. When you are in deep sleep, do people have to take a stick and wake you up? Beat you up to wake you up? They just call your name. This is effortless effort. When you have to draw someone’s attention, how do you do it? You know children do it so well at home. They come and throw tantrums around you. If you are reading a newspaper and they have important things to show to you. How do you draw attention? Is it difficult? Hey, come on now, wake up!

See, you are sitting here and you mind is all over the place.

“Hey, come on wake up.”

How much time does it take you to come back. Just like that, “Wake up!” The Self is that way. You simply have to shake your head and get out of that cycle of the thought process. When you are awake, that is called Bodh mantra, just pure awareness. Bodh means that there is knowingness, awareness. Not knowledge,

knowingness is a quality of the Self. Wisdom is just the knowingness.