'Tis The Season To Examine Ourselves
Gitajayanti 2020
Thousands of people across the globe celebrated December 25, 2020, not only as Christmas Day but also as Gita Jayanti.
Coincidentally, this year December 25th marked the birth of not only Jesus Christ, but also the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient scripture from India.
The Bhagavad Gita, originally a chapter from the Mahabharata, the longest epic in human history, records the conversation between a warrior, Arjun, fallen in the middle of the battlefield facing an existential crisis, and his charioteer and deity, Lord Krishna.
The conversation goes beyond specific religious sentiments and dives into psychological insight, the power of human strife and the seeking for true happiness in life.
But at the core, the distraught warrior’s inner struggle is essentially the same crisis we all face, and the charioteer provides the guiding light for us all to shed the layers of our mind.
The Crisis We All Face
“My husband is in the kitchen and slams a drawer shut after taking out a spoon. The slamming of the drawer within a split second makes my stomach queasy and I begin to feel anxious. A moment later, my husband comes to talk to me and I can’t even hear what he is saying to me as I start to space out. He then calls my name multiple times until I snap out of it. Every time he calls my name, I feel more and more suffocated like he is choking me with his bare hands. He asks me if I want to go on a walk with him and I respond with a brief and aggressive ‘no, stop asking me that everyday.’ I feel like everything is a threat. My hands are trembling and my heart is pounding out of my chest and I feel a light sweat in my lower back. Every noise I hear feels like it is going to make my head explode. I want to cry but I can’t. I want to say sorry to my husband but I can’t seem to open my mouth. I feel trapped, frozen.”
In this example, the slamming of the drawer actually triggered chronic trauma the woman experienced all throughout childhood. Usually if a drawer was being slammed in the kitchen it was after her parents fought. Not just argued, but fought violently. These conflicts between her parents seemed like the end of her world at the time. The slamming drawer was a signal for divorce, a destruction of her family as she knew it, and a lack of safety.
On top of all that, sometimes those fights between her parents would ensue because of something related to the children. So not only would those fights be a signal for danger but also of extreme guilt. Was she the one to blame for her parents’ horrible relationship? She carried that anxiety and guilt with her the rest of her life. These memories and associations were stamped deep within the core of her subconscious mind.
This can seem like an extreme example but there is a universal truth to this. We may not be suffering like someone who has had a lifetime of traumatic stress but even something as simple as assuming what another person is thinking resembles the same phenomenon. Let’s take another example which may be more relatable.
“After seeing a picture of a celebrity in a magazine, I got a new haircut with a totally different style than my usual. The following day, I go to a family gathering. As soon as I enter the house, my brother is the first person I encounter. Naturally, his first glance goes up to my hair and then he comes closer to embrace me for a hug. In that brief moment from when he looked at my hair to when he approached me for a hug, I felt a pit in my stomach. I just knew he thought I looked like an idiot. As we ended our embrace, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘fresh cut man.’ And there it was, he confirmed my suspicion! He does think it looks stupid! I then spent the rest of that day having a miserable and pathetic conversation with myself (silently in my head) of all the times my brother has proven to me that he thinks I’m worse than him. In this example, there was no trauma. Nothing extraordinary, just life.”
If we look at the psychological underpinnings of both examples, we can see that there is something that is happening externally which has no particular quality to it and then a whole other process happening internally that is coloring the perceived experience. Our minds determine the quality of every experience we have in life. Whether it be our dreams or our waking reality; our minds color each experience as positive or negative, miserable or joyful.
The concept of “perception is reality” alludes to the fact that there is an objective reality that our individual perceptions don’t let us perceive. My brother never said that he thought my hair looked horrible. Instead I created that reality through my own perception of the situation. Perception is the ability to see, hear, or be aware of something. But what is the quality of my perception? What is the quality of my perception dictated by? We can understand the quality of our perception at a deeper level if we observe our dreams.
When we wake up from a dream it seems apparently obvious to us that what we experienced in the dream world was not real. We don’t think about it too much. We just kind of know it wasn’t real. This implies that there is a level of elevated awareness when we wake up that intuitively makes our waking experience “more real” than our dream experience. But why do we make that assumption? Why is our waking experience “more real” than our dream? For some reason, the frustration we feel when driving in bumper to bumper traffic is real and the frustration we feel in a dream is “just a dream.” Why? “Because it’s just a dream man, it's not real.” That actually doesn’t answer the question.
Society has an intuition and common understanding that our dreams are an amalgamation of our unfulfilled desires, fears, and memories that reveal themselves during sleep. When we wake up from a bad dream, we can easily console ourselves by saying that the dream wasn’t real and just an expression of our deeper rooted fear. So in a sense, our dreams are being projected from our subconscious minds onto the screen of our perception or reality.
The interesting part is that during the dream, we don’t know that we are dreaming, We are victims to our own experience. It is only when we wake up that we know that we were dreaming. What’s to say that our waking day-to-day experience isn’t similar to a dream? And that we just haven’t “woken up” yet. And so we haven’t realized that it is just another type of dream?
In each moment of when I am awake, I feel I am being carried by my thoughts the same way we are just being carried by our thoughts in dreams. My thoughts control the quality of my moment to moment experience. In the same way as a dream, my thoughts even in my waking reality are a projection from my subconscious mind. My subconscious mind is filled with past memories (which I have determined as good/bad, beneficial/harmful, happy/sad) which is serving as the film that will be run through the projector.
The actual images on the film are specific forms those memories and their respective experiential associations take in the form of thoughts. This reel of thoughts which are colored by my past experiences is endlessly being passed through the projector which then colors my present moment. Which implies, that every moment I am awake I am a victim to my past experiences the same way as I am in a dream. Is there a way to wake up from this dream too?
Is there a way out of the prison of our minds? Can we break the shackles of endless association with our limited thoughts? The Bhagavad Gita is shaking us desperately to get us to rise from our never-ending slumber. On Gita Jayanti, I am proud and hopeful to say that the Bhagavad Gita presents the blueprint of the prison of our minds with profound detail. After ages of being trapped, the plan for humanity’s jail break is calling out to us. The map is now with us, it is now just a matter of following it out.