Gita for Youth - Samkhya Yoga - Single Minded Intellect 1

Determined or One Pointed Intellect

Arjuna said, “Can you please explain to me these concepts of determined or single minded intellect? Who can be said to possess such single minded intellect? How does he speak or sit or move?”

In short, Arjuna wanted to know the difference between steadfast intellect and ordinary intellect and the mark of a man who possesses such an intellect.

Krishna then began explaining the characteristics of steadfast intellect or Sthitaprajnya. Such a person is unique in that he has been able to shed all traces of desire from his mind and is ever content by remaining immersed in contemplation. He is never dejected in sorrow, nor is he joyful in happiness. He is simply above the mundane pleasures and pain of life, knowing them to be fleeting or transient. He is devoid of passion, detached from anger or hankerings of material things and steady in his wisdom. In short, he is a true sage.

One who is unattached to success and failure and fruits of action, does not covet praises and detest blames, is said to be of steady intellect. Like a tortoise which is able to withdraw its limbs inside its shell, a person of steady intellect is able to withdraw the five senses from their resp. objects and thus remain indifferent to the pleasures derived from the senses, like the pleasure of seeing a beautiful flower or of relishing a good dish, as well as to the consequent pains (of having to relinquish the transitory pleasure). In this manner, by controlling his senses, which otherwise tend to drag his mind and intellect in different directions, such a person can remain unperturbed under all circumstances.

Being slave to one’s senses makes one slave to the passions, to the fruits of actions and to the desires and impulses. By controlling senses, one is able to master over every kind of emotion and impulse and is therefore able to withstand the vagaries of life far better than one devoid of such controlling power.

A Sthitaprajnya is not Stoic. He is not indifferent to the sorrows and miseries and pains and pleasures. He is above all these dualities. They touch him, but cannot soil him, because he floats above them. He knows that everything is transient, not by mere intellectual reasoning like the stoics, but through actual experience and realization. Therefore unlike stoics he merely does not hide his feelings and wear a mask, but he is joyous and playful knowing the illusion of the world. To him this world is a world of shadows, of a theatre of which he is just another actor and therefore he plays his part calmly, knowing all the while that the play must end and a new one would begin. He can, at his will, withdraw his senses from the sense objects and thus never gets attached to anything or anybody. He is thus liberated from the bondage of the world in his very life. He is ever blissful, that's the only word to describe him.

In the beginning we have discussed that Gita explicitly deals with two types of personalities, one above all actions and ever immersed in Bliss and the other has to always engage in actions. Arjuna and most of us belong to the second category. Therefore Sri Krishna is telling Arjuna how a person who is above all actions different from the rest of us. Unless we achieve this state of Sthitaprajnya, we'll have to perform our duties.

In the fourteenth chapter, this same state has been redefined as that transcending the three gunas or qualities of nature.