Understanding the "Gunas"

What is Guna ?

Basic traits of human beings that helps them to survive. This is at the micro level, the most fundamental thing required by human beings to survive.

What is a human body, a combination of flesh, bones, skin, etc etc. To survive, it needs food, water, air, etc. To arrange food, water, etc the body needs to act. If the body has the capability to act then the activity level will vary from lowest to highest. It could be as given below:

1. The activity level could be very low (Tamogun)

2. The activity level could be balanced (Satvgun)

3. The activity level could be highest (Rajogun)

The one thing that needs to be remembered is that there cannot be zero activity level. That can only be of a dead body.

Tamogun:

The person with this Guna has the lowest activity level. Such person tries to avoid hard work, act less. He prefers to act only to survive or to gather things that are very important. In real world we call them lazy people.

Satvagun:

These persons are those who have very balanced activity level. They think about present, future and act in such manner that their needs are fulfilled and are content about it. In real world we can take example of service class people who work to feed their family, secure their future but try to spend equal time with family, work, friends. These class are happy with their lives. Neither lazy nor very ambitious.

Rajogun:

These are the ambitious class, who believe in working too hard to achieve that they want. In the effort to fulfill their ambition they forget everything. Most of their time goes into working towards achieving their goal. Can take example of business people.

What needs to be understood is that our activity level vary within these levels. It would be a mix of these three levels. From time to time the reason changes, like in today's time its business people who are of rajogun, earlier it were kings/rulers. Goals keep changing with time but whatever it be, as a human we will have to act to achieve them.

To be more precise, if you invent a robot that can think and act. Which can charge its own battery by finding the socket, plugs avoiding hurdles coming in the way, which can use logic and be futuristic like if the socket is not free most of time then it can have a spare battery charged for survival, then you will notice that even they will have these 3 activity levels.
Gunas are not about humans but its about activity and the reason behind the activity. There is no guna of a dead body.

Any discussion on this topic is welcome.

Jai Shree Krishna.

Computing Power of our Subconscious mind

Dear Readers,

I am writing something on this blog after a long gap. This time lets do this in a different way, something that helps us in understanding patterns, our body, our conscious and subconscious mind, our thoughts and their impact on our action, etc etc. A common and single-most factor that is hidden behind everything existing in this universe.

I hope this will be an interesting journey for all of us. Let us start our discussion with the computing power of our subconscious mind.

Computing power of our Subconscious mind

How many of you have ever wondered about the function of our subconscious mind. What it does, when it does, how it works, in what way does it help us. A general perception about the subconscious mind is that it wakes when we sleep and it sleeps when we are awake. This is not the complete truth. It works in a subdued form even when we are awake.

What actually does it do when its awake, the answer is it keeps computing, analyzing the events around us and creates a perception about them. This perception helps our conscious mind to take decisions and shape our actions. All this happens at such a blazing speed that many times you never consciously take decisions and yet they prove to be right. The subconscious mind takes those decisions.

To elaborate this, you can consider an example of players, lets take an example of a cricketer. When he starts practicing cricket, his subconscious mind starts computing the events, the weight of the bat, the strength of his arms, the flexibility of his body, the speed of the ball, etc etc. After doing this it polishes our body movement that is so accurate that our eyes just see the hand of the bowler and the speed at which he runs towards the batsman. It immediately calculates and helps the batsman to hit the ball out of the ground. The batsman does not see the ball till the last moment, the speed of ball is such that you actually cannot follow it consciously and then take a decision, everything happens in a fraction of a second and still happens so perfectly. All this is done by our subconscious mind.

Another example, you walk bare foot on a road which is full of stones, a under construction road. Now try to jump on that road from a height of 5-6 feet. Your subconscious mind would have already calculated the result of that action by measuring the softness of your feet and hardness/sharpness of the stones and their effect on your feet. If you are used to wearing shoes daily and never walk bare foot, then your gut feeling will stop you from jumping, somewhere in your mind you will feel that you will be hurt if you jump. 99% your gut feel will be correct, this gut feeling is nothing but the calculation of your subconscious mind. You have never jumped on sharp stones and yet your mind was able to calculate the effect of jumping just by judging your feet's softness and the impact of those hard stones when you walked.

Such is the power of our subconscious mind. It is so sharp that most often you never know that your actions are actually the result of your subconscious mind and its past experiences. It computes like a powerful computer, collecting vast real-time data and deriving possible outcomes.

This opens up a new way of thinking and understanding Bhagwat Geeta. We will try to understand the technicalities of Nature, mind, thoughts and try to view spirituality through this knowledge. I will try to write regularly here.

Jai Shree Krishna.