Suppose someone starts playing with a poisonous snake, treating it like a pet or a toy. They would be courting danger. Even if they had charmed and tamed the snake, if they associated with someone who could drive the snake wild and mad, then again, they would be in danger.
Our mind is like a poisonous snake, for it can at any moment inject into us self-destructive desires and feelings. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (06.06) declares that the uncontrolled mind can be our worst enemy.
How do we play games with our mind? We often forget or neglect the reality that the mind is dangerous, and we nonchalantly pander to its whims, thinking that they are harmless. And suddenly, we will find ourselves badly bitten, as those innocuous-seeming whims metastasize into deadly self-defeating drives. To prevent such danger, we need to remember the mind’s potential malevolence and deal with it alertly.
How do others play games with our mind? Even if we have succeeded in reasonably restraining our mind, some people around us may know our weaknesses and deliberately exploit them. For example, if they know that we have deep-rooted fear of abandonment and loneliness, they may plant doubts in our mind about our loved ones. And we will spend hours and years agonizing over suspicions that may have no basis in fact. If we don’t want to be tormented thus, we need to keep at a respectful distance such people who play games with our mind.
An effective way to keep both our mind and its manipulators at a distance is to stay purposefully engaged in the loving service of the all-powerful supreme, Krishna. Such service invokes his pure presence in our heart, thereby driving afar all ungodly influences, internal and external.
Think it over:
- Why is playing games with our mind dangerous?
- How can people play games with our mind?
- How can we stop playing games with our mind and its manipulators?
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