Three ways to avoid being misdirected by our mind – Suppose we are walking toward a destination and some passerby suggests we go somewhere else. Just because of their suggestion, we won’t change course. 

Yet that’s what we often do in our inner world where the suggester is our own mind. Suppose we plan to study the Bhagavad-gita for an hour, yet a few minutes later our mind suggests that we check our Facebook updates and soon that hour is lost in social media. Alerting us to the mind’s capacity to misdirect, the Gita urges us to avoid being degraded by our mind (06.05).

How can we protect ourselves from such misdirection? Here are three ways: 

Articulate: For misdirecting us, the mind deactivates our intelligence. To protect ourselves, we need to reactivate our intelligence. When we seek appropriate and coherent words for what we are doing — “I am about to read the next Facebook post” — that effort in articulating stimulates our intelligence. 

Attribute: Once we have articulated a thought, we can then use our Gita-guided intelligence to attribute that thought to our mind. Thus, instead of saying, “I am about to read the next Facebook post,” we can say, “My mind is saying that I should read the next Facebook post.” By attributing our thoughts to our mind, we can create a vital inner distance between it and us, thereby making it easier for us to treat it as a person different from ourselves.

Analyze: We evaluate the mind’s ideas on merit, as we might the ideas of a passerby. By such evaluation, we will recognize the worthlessness of most of its ideas and reject them. And whenever its ideas do have merit, we will change course, judiciously. 

One-sentence summary:

To avoid being misdirected by our mind, learn to articulate our thoughts, attribute them to our mind and analyze them as if they were suggested by someone else. 

Think it over:

  • How does articulating help in breaking our mind’s spell?
  • How does attributing help in protecting us from our mind’s misdirection?
  • How does analyzing help us make good decisions?

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06.05: One must deliver himself with the help of his mind, and not degrade himself. The mind is the friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.

Three ways to avoid being misdirected by our mind

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