Having made pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat the same, engage yourself in battle for the sake of battle; thus you shall not incur sin.
—Bhagavad Gita 2.38
Pleasure and pain are not real. These are just notions of the mind. Without this realization the mind is always busy running after something that it thinks would be pleasurable or running away from things it finds painful. With the mind running here and there we won’t be able to perform any meaningful work. Besides, our understanding gets clouded, we lose our priorities and all immoral acts proceed from the ignorance of the fact that pleasure and pain exist only in the mind, not in the thing outside.
So when you rise above pleasure and pain, you won’t do anything inappropriate or sinful. There is no question of acting out of selfishness. No harming someone else just for the sake of gaining pleasure or losing pain because you know pleasure and pain don’t exist outside. When selfishness gets out of the way, all work you do would be for the greater good of the world. And the mind remains calm, there is no pleasure to run after, there is no pain to run away from, the mind is always focused on the work on hand. A calm and focused mind just does what needs to be done irrespective of chances of success or failure. Such a mind that works for work’s sake always turns out high quality work.
But can this level-headed-ness in success and failure be practical? Well, we should just try as much as we can, try for trial’s sake! If you want a practical example you should get to know MS Dhoni, who has this ‘ability to remain level-headed, at the height of success or depths of failure’. MSD is the current captain of the Indian cricket team and one of the most successful captains in Indian cricket.
I believe its about Focus.
Recently i was partially successful with an experiment, which i would share here.
I use to have debates with my friends in Social Networking sites.
Whenever i use to prove others views are wrong and my views were right, i felt better ( PLEASURE ).
Whenever someone damages my views and proves me to be wrong, i developed a hatred on them and myself ( PAIN ).
I wanted to overcome this.
So, i tried focusing on UNDERSTANDING.
Later then , in any debate , My focus was to Understand .
When someone opposes my views, i tried my best to understand their perspectives. If am unable to understand , then i questioned them to understand what they meant.
By this means , i was untouched by the Victory and Loss at the Debates…
There was always GAIN ( KNOWLEDGE – UNDERSTANDING ).
However i’m yet to discover what to focus on life to be untouched by pleasure and pain.
Hope to discover it soon together
Cheerz
–
Satish
That’s right Satish… that’s the right perspective when you debate or argue with somebody, to move towards a better understanding. Whenever there is disagreement between two people, that means one or both of them don’t have correct understanding, or maybe they both have correct understanding, but they don’t understand each other (like the blind men and elephant). So instead of trying to prove the other person to be wrong, there should be honest conversation aimed towards clearing up the misunderstandings.
I know it’s extremely difficult to remain completely unaffected by pain and pleasure. I hope the coming verses of Gita will help us in this regard. Cheers.
Hi Srini & Satish,
To quote ‘You are not the body & the body is not yours’, whenever in the argument when we still consider ourselves as the body or the I(Ego) remains, we experience the pleasure or pain in different circumstances.
When the ego vanishes and when you look at things from the ‘third party’ perspective you are untouched by the outcome. You see you can always sail the boat on the water, but not with water in the boat.
Look forward for more verses.
Yes, exactly… when we look at things from the third party perspective we are untouched by the outcome. But as long as the body remains, there is at least a little bit of the ego. The important thing is not to be controlled by the fantasies of the ego. As they say, the mind is a lousy master but a wonderful servant.
Thanks for sharing your views Raghav!