Sadhana Panchakam, Instruction 11

Translation and Commentary by Jayaram V

2.3. Cultivate peace and the like

There will be no peace until you withdraw your mind along with your senses from sense-objects and overcome the craving, attraction and aversion to the dualities of the world. Desires and attachments arise due to the activity of the senses. They create deep furrows in your consciousness and make you restless, impairing your ability to think or act clearly. Therefore, to experience peace, first you have to restrain your mind and senses and withdraw them into yourself. This is the first step to reduce your involvement with the objective world.

However, by merely withdrawing them from the world and restraining your mind and senses, you cannot experience peace. Your mind is still a part of the world. You may withdraw from the external world, but you cannot easily withdraw from the world that exists in you, unless you overcome desires and attachments to worldly things, which keep your mind restless and unstable.

Desires and attachments arise mainly due to the triple gunas (sattva, rajas and tamas). They induce desire-ridden actions and bind the beings to samsara. Therefore, to overcome desires and cultivate peace, you have to cultivate sattva and suppress rajas and tamas, which are the main sources of impurities. With the predominance of sattva, you will also strengthen divine qualities which will help you endure suffering and establish peace as your natural state. When peace is established you become stable-minded (sthithaprajna), your discernment will improve and you will make right choices, whereby you will also make quick progress.

Just as devotion, you cannot practice peace in isolation. It requires a long and arduous spiritual practice and an all-round spiritual development when you cultivate associate virtues such as detachment, devotion, sameness, equanimity, etc. Tradition recognizes sixfold mental virtues which are associated with peace or shanti namely śama (samemess), dama (self-control), uparati (renunciation of desire in actions), titikṣā (endurance), śraddhā (faith) and samādhāna (one pointedness). They are all interconnected like the petals in a flower.

Peace is the natural state of a yogi who has conquered his mind and body and developed discerning knowledge and wisdom. He is pure and blemishless, with firm control over his thoughts and actions, which give him an added advantage in practicing concentration, meditation and samyama (restraining the mind). Without craving, renouncing all desires, without the sense of ownership (nirmamah) and egoism (nirahankarah), he moves amidst the objects of the world with peace and equanimity.

Thus, peace is the foundation to make progress on the spiritual path and dissolve the mind in self-absorption. The Bhagavadgita sums it up in the following words, “For the unsteady, there is no discriminating intelligence, and for the unsteady no concentration (either). For him, without concentration there is no peace, and for the one without peace, how can there be happiness?”

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