My Lord! Verily, the mind is fickle and turbulent, obstinate and strong, yea extremely
difficult as the wind to control.
Lord Shri Krishna replied: Doubtless, O Mighty One, the mind is fickle and exceedingly
difficult to restrain, but, O Son of Kunti, with practice and renunciation it can be done.
It is not possible to attain Self-Realisation if a man does not know how to control himself;
but for him who, striving by proper means, learns such control, it is possible.
Arjuna asked: He who fails to control himself, whose mind falls from spiritual
contemplation, who attains not perfection but retains his faith, what of him, my Lord?
Having failed in both, my Lord, is he without hope, like a riven cloud having no support,
lost on the spiritual road?
My Lord! Thou art worthy to solve this doubt once and for all; save Thyself there is no one
competent to do so.
Lord Shri Krishna replied: My beloved child! There is no destruction for him, either in this
world or in the next. No evil fate awaits him who treads the path of righteousness.
Having reached the worlds where the righteous dwell, and having remained there for
many years, he who has slipped from the path of spirituality will be born again in the
family of the pure, benevolent and prosperous.
Or, he may be born in the family of the wise sages, though a birth like this is, indeed, very
difficult to obtain.
Then the experience acquired in his former life will revive, and with its help he will strive
for perfection more eagerly than before.
Unconsciously he will return to the practices of his old life; so that he who tries to realise
spiritual consciousness is certainly superior to one who only talks of it.
Then after many lives, the student of spirituality, who earnestly strives, and whose sins
are absolved, attains perfection and reaches the Supreme.
The wise man is superior to the ascetic and to the scholar and to the man of action;
therefore be thou a wise man, O Arjuna!
I look upon him as the best of mystics who, full of faith, worshippeth Me and abideth in
Me.”
Thus, in the Holy Book the Bhagavad Gita, one of the Upanishads, in the Science of the Supreme
Spirit, in the Art of Self-Knowledge, in the colloquy between the Divine Lord Shri Krishna and the
Prince Arjuna, stands the sixth chapter entitled: Self-Control.
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