Varsha Das's Key Ideas from Effective Life Management
by Swami Amartyananda

Propelled by insatiable material, emotional and intellectual goals that modern social life demands one naturally feels the urge to struggle for a better state of life than present one.

And why do we aspire for a better state of life? - to feel happier, to be more at peace, more powerful, more miserable, isn't it?

Sadly, despite our incessant efforts, the peace and contentment eludes us and all efforts appear meaningless.

None are us are truly happy.

As we get up everyday and strive to achieve the things missing in our life, we still fall into the herd mentality of pursuing one goal after the another and a vicious circle follows.

The more we chase material goals, the more we suffer.

Uninterrupted peace and unalloyed happiness is our true nature and we are all struggling to return to it.

All the material goals that we seek are not the end-all of life, they are merely the intermediate goals, necessary to at least obtain food and security and to provide for our needs of human body.

The only goal we should be wary of in our life - God realization.

Introspect to improve, look within yourself, think about your thoughts.

Examine the source of your emotions and seek possible solutions using the 'M' of SDM technique.

Our mind projects its own thoughts and feelings onto the world around it just as a colored prism and labelling things as good or bad.

World has no power to control us unless we allow ourselves to be influenced by external environment.

Introspection gives us the ability to determine the inner workings of our mind.

Just as before using any machine, we read the manual of the machine first same goes for our mind.

Our mind is nothing but a flow of thoughts like a river is a mass of flowing water. So to purify the mind river, we must purify the thoughts that go in.

One's personality is shaped by the thoughts he possess. The main reason of all the suffering is caused by the unruly and undisciplined thoughts that we allow to wander in our mind.

How to control overthinking - discipline and meaningful engagement.

How to have good thoughts - eliminate anger, greed, desire, jealousy and your mind automatically becomes peaceful.

Our thoughts tend to flow in one direction and leads to doom scrolling on Instagram.

Rather exposing minds to holy ideas i.e.the S of SDM technique can strengthen our inner being and lead to clarity of perception.

3 motions of mind.

Movement of thoughts between one object to another can be controlled by true meditation called 'dhyana', where we choose some object of concentration and fixate our attention on that.

Movement between running in space is called 'dharana' where we fixate our mind in one place.

Movement in time, oscillating between present, past and future can be controlled by 'samadhi' where we lose count of time.

Prolonged dhyana leads to samadhi.

Work = physical power to do something.

Karma = volitional or action with intention, accompanied by desire for fruits.

You come home from work and spend entire evening watching Netflix, in this case he is not doing any physical work but the conscious choice to watch Netflix is Karma.

Process of so many thoughts passing through our mind is karma.

None can escape this.

Each one of us is reaping the fruits of our karma performed in the past.

Karma of past impacts present.

Karma of today impacts future.

There's no undeserved merit or demerit in the world.

What you've earned by your past actions, none can take away from you.

So, the ones who seem to be having a great life despite not being a good person, it is possible that the righteous karma that they might have done in the past like in previous birth is creating a favourable situation for them and making them eligible to reap the fruits today.

So is true for the good people who suffer today. The unrighteous karma that they might have done today provides them an unfavourable situation.

Every karma produces 2 results - immediate result and a hidden result.

When you burn your finger in fire, immediate result is you scream in pain, hidden result is a latent impression created in your subconscious that you become wary of fire and impression of fear is created.

So, the nature of impression depends on the nature of the karma and these collective impressions of our mind are called 'samskaras' in Sanskrit and this determines our personality.

Thus, our personality is primarily shaped by the 'samkaras' from previous births, and not our parents, not our environment, not our upbringing.