A shill is someone who enthusiastically pretends to buy something from a shop so as to allure others to also buy. Our mind is sometimes shrill and sometimes a shill. Here’s how. 

When the mind is shrill, we sense something within us sharply goading, yelling, pushing us to do something. A shrilling mind is difficult to resist, but at least it’s easy to notice, provided we are aware of the basic dynamics of our inner world. Once we recognize that the inner impelling voice is our mind, we can find appropriate measures to evaluate and regulate it. 

However, the mind is often tougher to resist when it is difficult to notice, as when it acts subtly by becoming a shill. To understand how the mind works as a shill, we need to appreciate a basic truth about how we function: all things are done twice, first by our mind, then by us. That is, we think about doing something and we create mental avatars of ourselves which does those things in our inner world. And once we uncritically accept what those avatars are doing, we start doing them ourselves. Thus, for example, when we spend hours surfing the net randomly, it’s our mind that first surfs the net in our imagination and then we surf the net. 

By being shrill or by being a shill, the mind acts as our enemy, as the Bhagavad-gita (06.06) cautions. By knowing how dangerous our mind can be, we can take more seriously the twin disciplines of inner observation and inner purification. Inner observation is stimulated by scriptural study, and inner purification is stimulated by connecting with the all-pure supreme spiritual reality, Krishna. Once we become situated in our spiritual identity through observation and purification, then we can more effectively get the mind to chill, both when it is shrill and when a shill.

 

Think it over:

  • How is our mind shrill?
  • How is our mind a shill?
  • How can we discipline our mind?

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