Freeing From Raga-Dvesha

(Attraction and Aversion)

Self-Inquiry with Candid Rating:

(a) Rate yourself 1-9 (see scale below) at each of the 18 items below

on the extent you are that in your daily life.

1--------2--------3--------4--------5--------6--------7--------8--------9

Never Seldom Sometimes Often Always

(b) Mark especially the 3 most important to you now.

(c) Put a * * by any “Impossibles” (unattainables) for revisiting later.

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In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna asks an important question and then lovingly guides us:

“Why do you not already know these deep truths of God, the Cosmic Soul, Atma?

___ 1) As soon as you are born you are led to believe that the world around you is ‘real.’

___ 2) You forget your oneness with Divinity and fall into an unconscious pattern of likes and dislikes—“This is good, that is bad”—which literally rules your life! This unaware mind set, called raga-dvesha (attraction-aversion), gives rise to all sorts of desires and attachments.

___ 3) You unthinkingly begin to believe and live by an utter impossibility: the notion that you can avoid pain in life and only have pleasure. Yet, ruled by raga-dvesha, your habitual “good-bad, right-wrong” judgment patterns, your life becomes stuffed with annoyances.

You must become aware of this unconscious mental conditioning and free yourself from it.

___ 4) Be neither attracted nor repelled by anything of the natural world

___ 5) React alike to both pain and pleasure, victory and defeat.

___ 6) Be neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by misfortune.

___ 7) Be indifferent to loss or gain, neither rejoice nor grieve.

___ 8) Be calm under all circumstances.

___ 9) Be even minded in heat or cold.

___10) Be unconcerned with honor or disgrace.

___11) Look with the same eye on saints or sinners, relatives or strangers, friends or foes, well-wishers or even harmers.

___12) Dwell in the place where your mind is tranquil and your ego has disappeared.

___13) Be beyond the desire for enjoyment.

___14) Live free of the sights, tastes, noises, and agitations of the world.

___15) Have the same attitude toward praise or criticism.

___16) Live your life in the mental state of equanimity, free from all likes and dislikes.

___17) Be unaffected by your own mostly unconscious likes and dislikes that are so burdensome in your life.

___18) Be untroubled, unperturbed by life.

To be in the state of equanimity is truly to be lodged in the Divine.”

– Krishna

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