Are you depressed, worried, or stressful?

I had all these.

I became a victor by defeating all these.

Do you want to wriggle free of these self-inflicted ailments that torture you?

Come on, do what I did, and you will become healthy, more productive, relaxed, and happy within no time.

Are you ready? Listen to my story.

I am an anatomist exposed to the dissection of the human body and the brain on a daily basis. I was abroad in the year 1987. During that time I was suffering from gastric ulcer, hypertension, diabetes, and anomia (a condition of forgetting names). I was under severe mental stress and I felt that death (of this physical body) was knocking at my door.

I was given two volumes of the Kannada Bhagavad-Gita by a Swami belonging to the Ramakrishna Mission. He had asked me to just keep reading it without struggling to understand the nuances. I did that. I felt, in the beginning that the Bhagavad Gita is ordinary stuff describing a war scenario and motivating an individual to kill others. My mind revolted and asked the question, “How could it be right to kill grandfathers, teachers, brothers and relatives? I even found Arjuna’s argument to be very logical.”

While dissecting a cadaver in the dissection hall, suddenly a thought came to me, “Yes, there is a sense in the statements of Bhagavadgita. I am cutting these organs and they are not weeping, and there is no emotion involved here. Why is it so? It is because the body is dead. What do I mean by the term death? It means loss of sentience of the body. The sentience is like the electricity and this body is like a bulb. The fused bulb is incapable of making use of electricity to glow. I am just cutting this fused bulb/lifeless body mercilessly into pieces because it has no electricity/consciousness.

Suddenly something flashed inside me and said, “Krishna is telling me to withdraw from the mixture of body and electricity to the pure electricity. If I shift my identification from this confusion of body/electricity to the pure life principle electricity by forgetting the functions and modus operandi of this gadget for a while, I will become free.”

Krishna is not concerned about killings, death or destruction, as they belong to the realm of artificial creation of events because of the activation of the body/mind gadget. Bhishma, Drona could not be alive till today if they were not killed. Whether we kill or not, death is certain because it is the principle over which gadgets are designed.

Do we care for the millions of cells that die every minute in our body? Is it not the death of a part of our own body?

We do not mourn because we have shifted our identification from the cellular level to the gross body level. In the same way, if we shift our identification from the gross body level to the consciousness of the body, then the gross body level activities become insignificant.

I shifted my identification from the level of the physical body which is subject to death and birth to that of consciousness which is like the undying electricity principle. Things became very clear and I understood that the misery is here as long as we are connected to the body and thoughts. Sitting in front of a cadaver, I started seeing my body as a cadaver activated by consciousness.

I started rereading the Bhagavad-Gita from this elevated level of thinking. It made a lot of sense.

The Bhagavad-Gita said, “You are grieving for those who shouldn’t be grieved for!” It made perfect sense to me. Here grieving refers to our own thoughts and the physical body. We are grieving for this physical body and thoughts which are not worth grieving for. None of us will be alive after 80 to 90 years from now. Why should I worry and become stressed about this, sure-to-die, impermanent body and the concocted thoughts of the mind, I ruminate?

The Bhagavad-Gita continues, “That which is permanent always exists. The impermanent body, thoughts, and the external world never exist because they are continually dying.”

The permanent is existence itself which is conscious. I shifted my identification from the dynamically activated body and the world to the consciousness, I became free.

I thought, “The cadaver has moved to the fused state of the bulb where it cannot reflect the real “I”, the Existence-Consciousness. The cadaver is unreal as I am cutting it into pieces!”

The most difficult point which I faced was, ‘how can it be so simple?’

I always thought that this is a very difficult concept, however it turned out to be the opposite.

I understood if I were to take many years to realize this truth, I would have never realized it. It had to be instantaneous. I became that within the fraction of a second and there was no looking back. I was already free.

I dropped this world at that moment like I would have dropped a scorpion fallen on my palm. This body which is the hardware may be dealing with the world and thoughts may appear in the mind which is the software to create a ruckus but it is their hell and I have nothing to do with it. I am free. I am a witness. I am a spectator born here to enjoy this world. I enjoy the body/mind interaction with the world; sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, like sweet, bitter, and salty tastes. I happily allow the machinery of the body to continue its activities according to its constituents, its sensing capabilities, its measuring devices, and its built-in pattern.

I have nothing to do with it.

I am a pure observer. I am pure. I am blissful. I have no concern for this instrument. I must have come in contact with many instruments like this, just as new clothes replace old clothes.

I am free from misery because I am liberated from the instruments which generate the misery.

I am consciousness!

– by Dr R N Sreenathan (Director Chinmaya International Foundation)

(This article was written as a reply to query by same title on Quora and has been reproduced here in full.)

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