Talk On Vivek Chudamani

Author(s): Chinmayanand Swami
Publisher: Chinmay Publications Trust

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Vedanta, here Sankara enters into a discussion of the six great qualities which are unavoidable in the constitution of a mind and intellect which are making a pilgrimage to their complete fulfilment in Gyāna. These are not to be understood, as are ordinarily taken them to mean, as mere qualifications to frighten away the unqualified. I have already emphasized the idea that the discussion of the “necessary qualifications" in Vedanta is more for a self-adjustment and analysis than for a tyranny upon the seekers.
A close study of the six qualifications, as described by Sankara here, would help to remove many of our pet misunderstandings which we at present entertain regarding these instructions.
Among the six qualifications, the most important is (Sama) the 'calmness' of mind which, as it were, descends upon it when the mind has come to rest upon its meditations, without its natural agitations created by its constant and continuous desires for attaining or gaining certain senseobjects. When the mind is thus taken away from the senseobjects, it cannot be relieved of all its sense-thoughts at once.
It is the character of the mind to entertain thoughts and if it has nothing else to think of, it should necessarily entertain the thoughts of some other object of the outer world. Therefore, in all the Yogas there is a prescription in one way or the other to soak the mind with a greater idea, more noble and divine than the sense objects. Unless we thus train the mind to revel itself in a subtler and diviner field, it invariably cannot get itself redeemed from the field of its ordinary pursuits. In Bhakti, the devotee employs his mind constantly in the meditation of his beloved Lord and therefore, the mind becomes automatically drawn away from its ordinary pursuits after the sense-objects.
In the path of knowledge, therefore, the mind is to be, in the early stages, given an alternative field for its exercises and, therefore, Sankara says here that a mind basking in the contemplation of the idea of an All-pervading Consciousness or Awareness, Brahman, alone is the mind that can successfully detach itself form the sense objects.