When we travel regularly along a pothole-filled road, we carefully avoid the potholes, thereby saving ourselves of unnecessary jolts.

By analogy, when the Bhagavad-gita (02.58) urges us to avoid unnecessary contact of our senses with the sense objects, it guides us to avoid mental potholes, the stimuli that jolt us mentally. For example, some billboards along our daily commute may incite lust or greed, thereby disrupting our mental balance. By planning and practice, we can train ourselves to avoid these mental potholes, thereby saving ourselves of unnecessary mental jolts.

Avoiding physical potholes comes naturally to us, but avoiding mental potholes requires conscious training. Why? Because we need to overcome three default attitudes that work against us.

  1. Inattention: Though we usually notice things that cause us physical discomfort, we don’t always notice things that cause us mental discomfort. By taking brief introspective breaks periodically, we can observe our mental state, thus identifying the stimuli that act as mental potholes for us.
  2. Illusion: Physical potholes are obviously unpleasant, but mental potholes seem deceptively pleasant; they titillate us. To see through their deception, we need to remind ourselves that the titillation is only momentary and is followed by a much longer period of agitation.
  3. Impotence: As we usually can’t stop the contemporary culture from blatantly exhibiting provocative images, we may feel powerless. But we aren’t; we can always do something, as we intelligently do when dealing with physical potholes. We usually can’t remove them either; yet we don’t resign ourselves to their jolts – we use our intelligence to avoid them. Similarly, we can use our intelligence and plan how to avoid mental potholes.

By thus training ourselves to protect ourselves from mental jolts, we can make our life-journey smoother.

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 02 Text 58

“One who is able to withdraw his senses from sense objects, as the tortoise draws its limbs within the shell, is firmly fixed in perfect consciousness.”

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