The Mind's Servant

In the Ramayana story, Queen Kaikeyi yields to the selfish wiles of her maid and as a consequence, her lord King Dasaratha lost his life. Rama who she regarded as her very life-breath was exiled into the forest, and Bharatha her son, disowned her for the very same act! She drew on herself the condemnation from all the people in the Kingdom of Ayodhya. The story is an allegory. Dasaratha is the human body with the five senses of perception and the five senses of action - the ten chariots or Dasha-ratha. He wedded the Queen, the Mind, and the mind yielded to the servant and caused the downfall. This clearly teaches us the legitimate role of the mind as the master of one’s senses. If the master serves the servants, then, he or she loses their self-respect and falls in the esteem of all.

Baba (thought for the day)

To listen, think it over and absorb works like an allegory. In seeing it in our own life we find characters in the light of ‘insights’ and that is Baba. It does symbolize ideas and concepts, they get repeated and by that and it is growing in us.

Only we don’t invent literary characters, but our own life and the people we met in our life and our ‘insights’ and that ‘insight’ as it is Baba, it is the main role and the other complex ideas and concepts turn around that key idea, it gets easily digestible and tangible to the reader or listener, therefore, we tell listen, think it over and absorb.

The listening is just the beginning to get finally to the inner understanding being able to absorb the meaning in Baba’s words.

It is also a form of conveying the meaning differently than just in reading and forgetting it again and thinking, we know it already. If we are able to absorb it means we get into it and begin to see it in different situations in our mind.

 Allegory is a rhetorical device in which characters or events in a literary, visual, or musical art form represent or symbolize ideas and concepts. Allegory has been used widely throughout the histories of all forms of art; a major reason for this is its immense power to illustrate complex ideas and concepts in ways that are easily digestible and tangible to its viewers, readers, or listeners. An allegory conveys its hidden message through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, and/or events. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

(Wiki)

We all have heard of the Ramayana and that the queen was listening to her maid and it had awful consequences in the life of the family.

I could see it in the example mother, she listened to her mind, and it is like a bad maid. That maid reminded her constantly of the role-play  she was performing in her life and that resulted in a feeling of pride.

Dasharatha, with the approval of a royal assembly, selected Rama to be crowned King, Kaikeyi was delighted and as happy as she would have been had it been her own son, Bharata's, coronation. However, Manthara, worried that Kaikeyi would lose her status as Chief Queen at Court if Rama ascended the throne (making Kausalya the Queen Mother) decided to instigate trouble. She fueled Kaikeyi's dormant jealousy and envy of Kausalya, reminded her that her son's coronation would give Kausalya her former status as the most important of Dasaratha's Queens and would cut Bharata out of the royal lineage forever. Finally, Kaikeyi's ardent desire motivated her to demand the two boons granted to her years earlier by Dasaratha and to further remind him of his promise to Ashwapati that the son born of her (Kaikeyi's) womb should succeed Dasaratha as King of Kosala. In order to ensure that Rama would be no threat to her son, Kaikeyi further demanded the exile of Rama from Ayodhya for 14 long years, reasoning that this length of time would be enough for Bharata to consolidate his position as King of Kosala.

If I see that in my own life or in the role of my mother, her maid was not a human being, but her mind telling her that she did all that work and she deserved better and it resulted in pride.

It felt like blinding to her and she was not able to see things in an objective manner, always referring to what she had done, thinking that is was blameless and beyond doubt, that nobody could do what she had done, what resulted in attachment. She was not able to share our problems, because she was seeing everything in her point of view. As she saw herself as the good example, she always answered, you should not, knowing it better.

The king died heartbroken after he had send Rama, his most beloved son, into exile and the son of Kaikeyi Bharata refused to be the King of Kosala and disowned his mother.   

Baba explains that Darsaratha is the body with the five senses and the five senses of action, the queen was the mind and the mind was influenced by her servant and caused the downfall.

That is a good example for my mother, because he said in the insight, if a mother falls, all children fall with her.

So it is good to apply that story and to see it in my own life. First after Baba said that if a mother falls, all children fall with her in the insight. At that time just after her passing away I had no idea what it meant and we get only aware of it if we think it over.

Here it is easier to understand it, because it is related to an allegory and there is no doubt in my mind what caused the downfall and how to understand it.

If the master serves the servants, then, he or she loses their self-respect and falls in the esteem of all.

The master is the higher self, the servant is the mind.

If the higher self serves the mind, the self-respect gets lost and the esteem falls. But we have to understand it right. In the life of my mother she thought the opposite, it was Tamas, upside down, it makes out of a vice a virtue and sees the virtue as a vice.

She thought that her self-respect was due to her hard work and effort and what she had done in the past, self-sacrifice and that resulted in pride and attachment. That was the servant and not the heart. But to us it felt like she was right. She was hard working and she wanted to be respected for it.

And she always was convinced or convinced herself of her value and that we could never do that. She was hard working that was right and we did admire her for it, just the pride was not okay. As she expected a result for it, she was not able to let go and expected it to be seen in the environment and the neighborhood and that was not real, that was an illusion.

If she would just have lived it as her duty without expecting a result, she would have been humble and she would have tried to do her best in whatever came from the outside. As she expected a result, she was not able to take what came from the outside, because she expected it to be different and that was attachment.

She thought it had to be a certain way and rewarded by the others. That the others didn’t see what she did, but what had been done long ago before by the father that was not the same. She didn’t make that difference, she just worked hard and more and was running convinced she could make it okay, that was her role. She was expecting with hard work to heal what he did wrong, compensating and it resulted in co-dependence, she made a duty out of his faults and she wanted to save him and expected people to respect her for that. It was the mind. There was no room for anything else but that.  

That was co-dependence, making a duty out of his weakness.

While he went on just working, he never said much, she went on in his back constantly identified with her role, like an actress acting out her part to everybody expecting to be respected for it. And as it didn’t come back as she thought it should, she began to blame us for it and to constantly intricate about it, seeing it in her light as hard working and outstanding and getting the approval from everybody she was talking to and putting herself up in her self-esteem and lowered the others down because we didn’t give her what she wanted, we were never able to do what she had done and we could never reach her and we were never good enough.

That was going on for years like that and with time I was that tired of listening to it, I got tired when she began to talk about it. But it was all in vain to make her able to see it. It was not possible, no use to tell her that it was not okay and that I don’t want to listen and that she should stop, it didn’t change her mind state.

That was the higher self serving the servant, the mind. Her role was in focus and not her heart and therefore, it was perverted and upside down and all value got lost.

The surest sign of awareness of one’s Divine Nature is the recognition of the bond of kinship with other beings. This bond has now snapped, and as a result, life has been rendered meaningless. The evil spirits of greed and pride, of envy and hatred, are executing their demonic dance in the hearts of man.

She used the others to make herself esteem grow, but it was not the bond of kinship with other beings, it had snapped and as a result of it the feeling of life had been rendered meaningless.

 In her case it was the evil spirit of pride executing the demonic dance in her heart.

Man means mind and she listened to the mind, the servant and not the heart, the higher self. So the higher self was the servant of the mind.

If the master serves the servants, then, he or she loses their self-respect and falls in the esteem of all.

She was constantly thinking about her role, but it was attachment and pride and that was why the result is not as it should be and she falls in the esteem of all.

I was surprised when Baba said in the insight after her death, if a mother falls all children fall with her. Her constant talking about it made that we believed it.

Everybody saw that she was running around and working hard, but it also didn’t make sense and it was sick, she was in her mind focused only on that. There was no room for anything else but that.

And after all I got aware that the problem was in her mind and she acted it out with the father and we didn’t see her controlling role in the background, because she was supposed to be the mother. Before she passed away she said to me that I should take care that the family gets along. Putting that in question, I wanted to know why she said it and the reaction of the others, but it was that violent, it was soon obvious that something was wrong about it.

It was the mind thinking that she was able to control …, the reaction coming back had to do with pride and caused such a violent emotional outburst on the side of the anger of the younger brother, that it felt real troubled. In that idea that I should take care was also the illusion that she was able to control it or in control of it and that was offending to the others and most of all it seems to that younger brother. Anyhow, she was not able to control, more she tried to control worse it got.  

In thinking over Baba’s words we are able to see here in details what has happened in the past in the mother’s mind getting the insights together and it gets more real and less upside down.  

And my ex in women cloths standing in the ‘insight’ in the dream in the ruin, the woman is a sign that he listened to the mind and his self served the mind. The mind is the woman, the higher self is the man, there was no self-control and no focus on self-realization.

They have become low-minded people, dedicating their lives to meaningless pursuits.

All what he could get in garage-sales that was his meaningless pursuit to walk around with a Lacoste jacket telling people that he got it for a dollar.

So that is low-minded, a waste of time and energy in a useless pursuit and the real aim of life self-realization that was the house and of that house was only a ruin left. That is not a good place to be. Whatever the experience, it tells us definitely that it is not the right place to be. We don’t want to live in the ruin of our own life.

In that allegory Dasaratha is the body and the senses and the queen is the mind and she listens to a bad servant and that is a disaster to the family.

We have to listen to his words and see the allegory in our own life and the ‘insight’ or Baba in our dream reflects our own reality, he is enlightening or awaking us from the inside as he is the man in our dream to awake us.