Staycation | Marcus Aurelius, Bhagavad-gita and the Peace Within
4/14/202656 min
You can pack your bags, book the flight, and still bring every anxious thought with you. Emperor Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations that escaping to the country, the beach, or the mountains is idiotic. The peace you're looking for is already available, anytime, by going within. The Bhagavad Gita's fifth chapter speaks of how the self-realized person enjoys unlimited happiness not because their circumstances changed, but because their direction did. Raghunath and Kaustubha explore that teaching through the Govardhan Lila, where Indra — king of the heavens — had every external blessing and was still miserable. His problem wasn't his circ...
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First 90 secondsKostuba Das· Host0:00
Those whose minds are established in sameness and equanimity have already conquered the conditions of birth and death. It's not saying you just achieve some salvation by the grace of some god or something like that, right? But it's saying that happens through understanding yourself better and understanding your environment better, right? So those whose minds are established in sameness and equanimity have already conquered the conditions of birth and death. They are flawless like Brahman, and thus they're already situated in Brahman. Brahman realization is what people can appreciate, [chuckles] you know, more than- Yeah ... Bhagavan at the beginning, right? But then it goes on to say, "A person who neither rejoices upon achieving something pleasant nor laments upon obtaining something unpleasant," right, they're even-minded despite the externals, "who is self-intelligent, unbewildered, and who knows the science of God is already situated in transcendence. Such a liberated person is not attracted to material sense pleasure, but is always in trance, enjoying the pleasure within. In this way, the self-realized person enjoys unlimited happiness, for he concentrates on the Supreme." So now we're talking about where does my happiness come from, right? Is it, do I need to take a vacation? Do I need to get in an airplane and fly to some beach somewhere and find that my mind went with me, you know, even though I did, I did.
Pranapriya· Panelist1:24
Sometimes.
Kostuba Das· Host1:26
[laughs] Not saying that that's a necessarily wrong