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The necessity to think before we act arises on account of certain consequences that are expected to follow from the act. This is the logic of the mind which, by a process of internal argument known only to itself, visualises what follows and what ought to follow from a given set of circumstances. The capacity of the mind to reach out beyond itself is something worth considering. Every conclusion that is drawn from known premises is actually a reaching in respect of a realm that is not the venue that one is occupying at present. One cannot reach out to the future, as everyone is living in the present. But the presence of such a thing as a future, and even the nature of that future possibility, becomes a content of the present consideration due to the present being hiddenly present even in a future possibility, perhaps pointing out at the same time that there is no past, present and future. There is a continuity, because in order that we may be aware that there is such a thing called the past, it has to become a content of the present consciousness. Even so is the case with the future. That which is not yet, and is yet to be, can be known as such only when it has somehow got accommodated into the present consciousness.

The idea of a particular prevalent condition and the nature of the steps that we have to take in the direction of a future possibility—all these things take us into the depths of our own minds. There is a thing called mind, which is understood in many a way. Philosophy or whatever it be—a vision of life or anything that we can think of, deduction or induction—anything in any manner whatsoever appears to be an activity of the mind which is, which has been and which perhaps will ever be a very intriguing concept, a notion, a visualisation. Unless we have some idea of the way in which our minds operate, it would be difficult for us to come to any sensible and reliable conclusion in regard to what the mind perceives or concludes as a verifiable fact. The justification of conclusions drawn by mental cognitions can be there only on a verification of the process of mental activity, the activity going on within our own selves.

Often people have felt that all our experiences are limited to the operations of our minds, and even the whole world as an object of experience should be regarded as entirely coloured by the spectacles that we put on in the form of mental operations. This consideration has lead people to such an extent that many have not hesitated to conclude that the world is merely a subjective form of appreciation. If all things in the world, whatever they be, are known to be there by a mind that acts, and they are known to be there in the manner of the activity of the mind, there is some point in the conclusion that all experience is subjective. The objectivity of the fact of an experience, though it has to be granted for certain other reasons, has also to get accommodated to the vision of the mind cast into the mould of its own inner constitutions. Our experiences are of the same shape and character as is the shape and character of our minds.

We have different kinds of minds, each one of us, as is well known, and therefore we all have different kinds of experiences of the world. Not only different kinds of experiences, philosophically speaking, but even in our daily life we have different kinds of appreciation of values. Each one lives in a totally independent world, as it were, to such an extent that the pleasures and pains of others do not materially affect the existence of a particular person. Even someone may die; that event of death does not materially affect or modify the life of an individual in any manner whatsoever. Such is the connection of the mind with the body.

The historical controversies over the nature of things, call it the point of view of the doctrine of materialism or socialism, or any other point of view, has to be first of all described in the pattern of the operation of the mind itself. The vision of life is a mental vision, and we find a parallel consideration of this nature in one of the chapters of the great work known as the Panchadasi, written by the venerated sage Vidyaranya, in which he distinguishes between facts as they are, or as they might be, and facts as they appear to the minds of people.

For certain reasons we have to accept that there is something like a world outside—but the world that is really there outside is not the content of our daily experience. Our daily duties, anxieties and activities are a sort of abstraction from the world that perhaps really is there outside, abstraction enough to be accommodated into the working of the mind in its own patterns. Loves and hates, which dominate all experience, cannot be regarded as being present in the objects outside in themselves. The land, the house, the material wealth which are supposed to evoke reactions in the mind in the form of likes and dislikes, do not and cannot be expected to have these qualities in themselves. We do not know if the land loves anybody, the house has affection for any person, or material possessions have any sense of value as we seem to be attributing to them. A lovable object, or an object that is despicable from any point of view, is an adumbration of that particular issue or object from a unilateral appreciation by the mind of the individual or groups of individuals, else it would be difficult for us to believe that gold or silver, grains or land or wealth or house have in themselves any such quality that can be regarded as happy or unhappy.

These qualities which contribute to the happiness or unhappiness of people, these being life itself in its entirety, these characteristics which are conditioning all human experience, are not to be found in the world. In the language of the sage Vidyaranya there is a distinction between Ishvarasrishti and jivasrishti. Ishvarasrishti is the name that he gives to the world of actual objective perception, and jivasrishti is the reaction set up by the perceiving individuals in respect of the truly existent objective world. A human being is just the same as any other human being anatomically, physiologically and biologically, but a person is different to different persons by way of psychological relation. It is my relation, it is my friend, my enemy, someone related to me or someone unconnected with me, and so on and so forth; this is also the case with material possessions.

The experiences of life have been considered to be psychological in their nature, and it is futile to wrangle over the true nature of things, going on arguing whether the world is material in its nature, social in its nature, economic in its nature, or whatever it be. These arguments seem to be out of point inasmuch as they hinge entirely, in the end, on the manner in which human minds operate. There is no such thing as an economic condition for animals in the forest, and many of the things that human nature considers as ultimately meaningful do not seem to have meaning for subhuman species, though they also are living beings and perhaps they have the same hunger and thirst and instinct of survival. The mind can create a heaven or an earth or a hell in one moment, at a single stroke of its internal action. Suddenly we will find ourselves in heaven if the mind works in one manner, or we will find ourselves in hell, though it would appear that the physical world we call Ishvarasrishthi has not changed whatsoever. A shock of joy or a shock of sorrow, which is purely a mental appreciation of values, can change the entire world of experience in an individual to such an extent that even hunger, thirst and sleep are affected. Even life can end by excessive mental activity either in the form of inconceivable joy or inconceivable grief. Such is the power of the mind.

But where is this mind? The history of psychology has attempted to locate the mind somewhere, and we people who have studied so many spiritual texts, scriptures, philosophies and psychological tomes have our own idea of what the mind is. But mostly we are primitive in our concepts, whatever be our education or study—primitive in the sense that we cannot help the feeling that the mind is some sort of thing inside our body. It is inside the body, though we cannot argue out this opinion in a satisfactory manner. Instinctively we are made to feel that there is something moving inside the body, like a ball of mercury or some sort of flexible and fluid element, quickly adjusting its position from one part of the body to another part of the body. This is how we feel—childlike in respect of the mind’s operations.

If the mind is all life, all our experiences are mental, our life and death seem to be entirely conditioned by how the mind works, and if at the same time we begin to feel that the mind is inside the body, it would appear that we ourselves are inside our own bodies. But this is not the fact. We have never been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion, even today, as to where the mind is located and what is its relation to the body, because neither can we say that it is the same as the body nor can we say that it is quite different from the body. The entire distinction that is sometimes drawn between the mind and the body would lead to a peculiar situation where the mind cannot act on the body at all, while we feel that the mind certainly acts on the body, changing even physiological and chemical operations inside and vice versa—physiological conditions affect the mind also.

So, it is not entirely true that the mind is so very markedly set aside in some part of the body. It is vitally associated with the body as if it is permeating every cell. Inasmuch as a parallel existence of the mind and the body cannot be conceded due to the action and reaction appearing to take place daily between the mind and the body as if they are one and the same, as if they are two phases of one single element acting, many have held that there is no such gap between the mind and the body—it is one single act taking place which, for want of better words, we may say psycho-physical, sometimes psychosomatic. ‘Psycho’ and ‘somatic’ are not two different concepts; they are only two words used to convey a single operation which is not just partly physical and partly mental, but at the same time is psychological and physical.

We are both mind and body at the same time. We are the mind-body complex. This is what we mean by saying ‘psycho-physical’—the human mind is also the human body and vice-versa. The human body is the human mind to such an extent that it appears that the body is nothing but a concrescence of the mind. An ethereal, rarified form of the body seems to be the mind, and a more dense form of the mind is the body.

The concept of the five koshas or sheaths, well known to us in Vedantic parlance, seems to justify this feeling. We have heard that there are sheaths, koshas—annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamaya koshas—described to us in such a way that we are made to feel that they are like five shirts that the soul is putting on, like peels of an onion, one being there over the other. But the sheaths are not so placed; they are not coats or shirts or peels. They are densities of a particular activity which is called individuality, jivatva, and we cannot demarcate the presence of one sheath from the presence and activity of another sheath. There is a gradual density, or condensation of activity, we may say, appearing to take place from inward to outward performance, and a rarification from outward to inner conditions. It is one single modification in a gradated system of concretisation of experience from the centre of our personality inwardly to the outer periphery of our experience, ending with the physical body.

In a similar manner seems to be the relationship of the mind to the body. Psychology in its history, right from early times until the present day, has been a very interesting study, and its studies are not complete even today. Researches are being conducted to astonishing conclusions in respect of our own internal make-up. We are great mysteries and wonders in our own selves. We are not so simple individuals—going for a walk, having our meal and going to sleep—nothing of the kind is what we are. Very interesting, complicated and inaccessible is our essential nature.

We are mostly in what they call the conscious level of activity. We are just now conscious, and this state of a conscious mental activity is mostly considered as the whole of activity. Whatever I am thinking just now is the whole of what I am thinking. This is, again, a crude understanding of how the mind can act and react. There are immense possibilities in our minds which can shoot forth such forms of experience that in a moment we can become different individuals, to our own surprise, and we would not be a moment afterwards what we were a moment before. There are capacities in us to behave as all the forms of species that appear to be there in creation. Every species is imbedded here in potential form in human nature, the lower as well as the higher. The divinised potentialities and the lower potencies are both present in human nature. The conscious activity of the mind is not actually the whole of activity.

Our life in the world is conditioned by pressures from outside to such an extent that we cannot be wholly free in our conscious life. This limitation to our mental freedom arises on account of the existence of other people who also have similar minds and would expect a similar kind of freedom to act in society. The conceding of freedom to others as one would like to have freedom to one’s own self is, at the same time, a limitation that one puts on the freedom of one’s own self. We cannot be entirely free if other people also are to be equally free, because the very existence of another is a limitation on the existence of our own self. We cannot be free inasmuch as there are other things which are also clamouring to be equally free. Inasmuch as everyone cannot be absolutely free, because absolute freedom granted to everyone would be the abolition of freedom to anyone, freedom seems to be a very peculiar thing as it implies the presence of a limitation together with what we consider to be the act of freedom.

Thus we do not seem to be entirely free in our conscious life. We are bound souls, even if we may seem to be free souls as we may appear to our own selves. I may walk on the street—who is to question me? But we cannot walk on the street as we would like. There are limitations set even to our walking on the street, we know very well. We cannot behave in the way we would like under the pressures of our own inner calls, because every individual is a social unit, fortunately or unfortunately. The social aspect of the existence of an individual is the limitation set on the experience or freedom of the individual. This limitation is not a happy thing, though we know very well that it is not possible for us to live in the world with an exercise of ultimate and final freedom because of the presence of other people and other things in the world—it would create a feeling of rancour in our own selves. We feel unhappy that other people are, we would wish that they are not there, because if nobody else is there one can be wholly free. But this is only what they call building castles in the air; it cannot be that others are not there—others have to be there, as anyone else has to be there. So freedom has to be limited.

This consequence following from the limitation of the freedom that one exercises produces such an effect and impact upon the mind that it very sorrowfully receives these consequences and buries them inside. Every action produces a reaction, so while thought can be regarded as reaction, the consequences, results following from a mental action would have such impact upon itself that it would receive them back and keep them in a chamber created by itself, unknown to itself on the conscious level, deceiving itself as it were, as if these consequences have not followed at all. We behave as if we are wholly free, though we know that we are not wholly free This is a self-deceptive psychological attitude which creates inward agony, but this agony is not consciously felt since such conscious agony would be a death blow to the very existence of the individual. So the inner sorrows arising from the fact of the limitations set on human freedom are kept inside in a dark chamber, inaccessible to the operations of the conscious mind, as if there is another mind altogether which is different from the conscious mind. Actually it is a background of the very same mind, part of which acts as the conscious level, part of which acts as the subconscious or the unconscious, whatever we may call it, which is at the back. These fields, which are kept as a stock of our griefs, lie there as ungerminated seeds waiting for the rainfall of conducive circumstances, at which time they can slowly germinate into action and surprise us, because we would not know that they have been there at all. The surprise arises because they have been kept in an unconscious form, while we have been limiting our life to the conscious level only, never knowing that we have other chambers of mental activity which are at the back of the conscious level.