A forest in the wild is full of beauty. There are high mountains, gurgling rivers filled with life-giving waters, fresh green grass and sheltering trees. At the same time, the forest is full of menace, with ferocious beasts roaming free, hunting for prey. In the same way, the body forest contains good and bad, our positive qualities as well as our negative ones.
In Genesis, God asked Man to rule over the wilds of the earth, the birds in the air and the fish in the water. Essentially, we have to rule over this body forest with our minds. The mind, however, tends to be like a monkey, and needs to be trained carefully.
The body is a beautiful thing, much like the bamboo flute that the cowherd Krishna carries. When we look at the bamboo flute, there are a total of seven holes, the fingers can play upon six holes and the seventh hole remains close to the lips of Krishna. God has given us this flute - this spine with six holes, the centers of money, sex, food, emotion, religion and spirituality. All these are needed, but they should be skillfully played upon. All centers are useful and should be closed and opened with moderation. Krishna is blowing the breath into the human body through the seventh hole. Each human life is a Bhagavad Gita. Read it, sing it, enjoy this life and make it beautiful. Each tune is different and each is hauntingly beautiful, but only when all seven centers of this human flute are in harmony, does the divine song of God emerge, the one song that leads us to absolute bliss. All other tunes are merely entertaining, little melodies which seem all pervading, but which when re-examined turn out to be nothing but fragments, beautiful, melodious, captivating, yet unfinished and incomplete. Shankaracharya in Vivekachoodamani, gives examples from nature, where certain species meet their death due to extreme attachment to one or the other of the five senses. The deer is fascinated by melodious sound and has no awareness of the danger it is in when the deer hunter uses music to make it his target. We, like the deer that become entranced by the hunter’s song, are captured by these fragments, “all sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most of us are extremely attached to our bodies. The body's pleasure, the body's pain, the body's comfort or discomfort, hunger, thirst, sexual fulfillment, these are the driving factors in our lives. Our work, play, our emotions and our intellects are spent catering to the needs of this human body. Although we focus so intensely on the body's physical needs, most of us are unaware of the body's potential and don’t know how to use it.
The City of Many Doors In the Vedas, the human body is described as a city of many doors. We live in this city of doors for a short period of time. We need to gain the maximum benefit from this human birth. The body is the temple of God, in which the soul resides temporarily.
There are nine doors in the body. These are the two eyes, two nostrils, two ears and the mouth. Seven of the nine doors are present in the face. The other two are the genital organ and the anus. We have five organs of perception. These are the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin, which are responsible for sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. We also have five organs of action: mouth, hands, feet, genital organ and anus, which give us the capacity to speak, work, walk, procreate and excrete waste.
The elements in the body vibrate in two ways and have two functions. Space is active in the ears to hear and in the throat to talk. The air is active in the skin to touch and in the hands for work. Fire is active in the eyes to see and the feet to walk. Water is active in the mouth to taste and the genitals for procreation. Earth is active in the nose to smell and in the anus for excretion. When these organs of perception and action come in contact with external objects, we perceive the opposites of heat and cold, unhappiness and happiness, pleasure and pain. Since the human body is so prone to disease and degeneration, it is imperative that we take good care of the gross body. Although most people are aware of this need, eating healthy food and exercising to keep in shape, they ignore the other two bodies completely.
The Monkey Mind
“The mind is the cause of bondage and liberation, joy and pain. When the mind is attached to sense objects it is in bondage and when the mind is free from them, you are free.”” Vishnu-purana (6-7-28)
The human body is the playground of the mind. The mind can go in either direction, upwards or downwards. The mind experiences the world with the help of the five elements and the ten senses. Most of our lives, we are too busy drowning out the silent splendor within with the thousand desires, agonies and doubts of the monkey mind, which is always restless. Perhaps in the womb, we still saw it and bathed in its glorious light, but the moment we are born, the mind takes over, frantic, full of urges, a slave to the senses, it craves pleasure and comfort from outer sources, beginning with milk, warmth, love from the mother and we begin the never-ending journey toward an ever elusive happiness. The love and comfort we crave draws us along a path of pain and pleasure, happiness and unhappiness, torment and fulfillment, the path of opposites, which for every scant drop of fleeting satisfaction, drowns us in an ocean of misery and longing.
Inner Battle – The Struggle for Perfection
The human race has always been engaged in battles to conquer more and more material wealth. But the real battle is not outside, it’s a constant inner struggle. “Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For the struggle is not against flesh and blood” (The Holy Bible, Ephesians 10-18).
The Hindu scriptures describe many battles taking place constantly within. Among all the mythological battles, two battles are very prominent and inspiring, symbolizing human evolution through the subjugation of the lower propensities. One is the Ramayana and the other is the Mahabharata.
Both these battles signify the need to kill the demonic nature within and awaken our spiritual energy. In the Ramayana, Rama wants to get back Sita (peace) by conquering the Ravana with ten heads (ten sense organs). Ravana, the demon with ten heads who kidnapped Sita, is not outside. He is within us as the ten sense organs, each represented by Ravana’s ten heads, each equally powerful. They have kidnapped our inner peace by making our mind run after sense objects.
In the battle of Mahabharata, the hundred Kauravas represent the negative qualities in us like passion, restlessness, anger, ego and jealousy, and the continuous flow of thoughts in ten directions through the ten sense organs. The Pandavas represent the rare good qualities we possess. This constant battle goes on in each of us between our positive and negative qualities. Sometimes good qualities are suppressed and negative qualities rule over, and sometimes, positive qualities are victorious.
When life is full of love there is no anger and no ego, when the mind is fully occupied with positive thoughts, there is no door for the negative thoughts to come, when one is busy, there is no time for idle thoughts. An idle mind is a devil's workshop. Anything we do comes in the form of a thought first. The seed state is the thought, the sprout state is the work, and the manifested state is the tree or the fruit. So every human mind can be a divine kingdom or a place of the devil. The choice is ours. We can make our life beautiful or full of negative things. If we really want our own spiritual growth, we should be careful. Each of us has immense divinity within and that should be explored through meditation. There is no other way. If we do not cleanse our minds we cannot progress.