Mind and its Three Dragons:

To become skillful with our health, we must understand even more subtle dimensions of our being than the body. In yogic tradition body is considered to be the semi-solid extension of our mind. The condition of the body – can certainly effect the mind, but the real power of health and happiness, as well as for social and environmental health and well being, lies within the mind. When the mind is disturbed, that disturbance is reflected in our environment, in our social relationship, and in our bodies. To create a healthy body, a healthy environment, and a healthy culture, we must become masters of the subtle thoughts and emotions of our own minds.

There are three destructive conditions of the mind: fear, self-hatred, and loneliness. These dragons blur our creative force of mind and corrupt our resources, creating disease, unhappiness, and suffering. They seem to be very powerful and we tend to forget that we are their only source of power, and that we can take it away from them.

FEAR:

The most dramatic consequence of self-mastery is the ability to live without fear. Much of anger and resentment are rooted in fear. Greed often begins with the fear of not having enough or of not being important. Then when we have enough we become obsessed in protecting what we have. We want power to protect ourselves, and more powerful we become, the more we worry about someone else becoming more powerful. This is the fear that in worst of scenario leads to terrorism and all the expenditure we have to incur to win the arms race.
But on more personal front our fears are more dramatic, but not the less destructive. Some people spend their entire lives fearful that they will not meet someone else’s standards. Religion, government, and communities use fear to control others, and parents use fear to control their children.
We usually don’t like to think of ourselves as being fearful. We use softer words, such as “worried” and “anxious,” which seem a little more acceptable. Most of become so skilled at worrying that it becomes part of our lives. And yet the only thing we accomplish from worrying is misery for others and ourselves. Worry and fear aren’t created by lack of things; they are created by how we think. It is a useless habit of mind that is the biggest cause of disease and unhappiness. There are people who live without being afraid. They realize that fear is the fantasy of mind that grips and destroys. Getting over your fears is the basis of yogic tradition and even martial arts master of Japan, the samurai used to master their minds to overcome fear. The greater our self-mastery, the greater our ability to face situation without fear and to live our lives without worry.

SELF-HATRED:

At times it seems that we are the masters of creating misery. When we aren’t worrying about whether or not something awful going to happen to us, we remember all the hurts, mistakes, and failures in our past. After so many failures, mistakes, and broken dreams we begin to give up on ourselves and on life. Some of us become depressed, withdrawn and passive thinking whatever this world has to give they have to endure. Others, angry at themselves become angry at the world, taking out their own misery on others.
Attacking ourselves is only the habit of the mind, a consequence of the way we learned to see ourselves as we grew up. Like fear, the dragon of self-hatred feeds on our lack of self-awareness and skill. The secret is to stop feeding the dragon by experiencing your own inner strength and beauty. You can’t create self-esteem by constantly telling yourself that you are a wonderful person. Self-esteem and self-respect grow out of the experience of committed effort. Whether or not you succeed is not as important to your self-respect as when you know that you tried your best. And if you continue to make effort, if you continue to work with your resources, you will eventually succeed. Self-mastery arises out of effort. The only true sin is sloth, the unwillingness to make effort. Mistakes are the necessary part of learning, not reasons for punishment. But without effort, personal power remains undeveloped and unused, and the outcome is self-hatred.

LONELINESS:

It is most difficult to defeat in part because it hides in our misunderstanding of its nature. We think if we have friends and family, people around us who love and care for us, we will never be lonely. But it doesn’t work. As rewarding as friends and family are, they do not keep us from being lonely, they only distract us from our loneliness. We think loneliness involves our relationship with others, but it really involves our relationship with ourselves. It arises out of our sense of individuality. Our life experiences seem to confirm that we are truly alone.
Yet there are times when we experience a sense of wholeness, of completeness, of kinship with the universe at large. It may happen when we look up at the starry heavens, or the birth of child, or participate with others in working through a crisis situation. It doesn’t happen because we have expectations or make demands, we simply experience a strong sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. At this moment, we lose our ego-sense of self, and experience being part of a greater identity, a greater “SELF,” and the loneliness vanishes. Unfortunately, these experiences are short lived and lost in day to day distractions. When we are genuinely loving, we also break free from our ego-sense of self. But we confuse “loving’ with “being loved.” Most of us engage in a desperate search for someone to love us, but we confuse the issue by saying that we need someone to love.
We all have a remarkable, unlimited capacity to love one another. There is a wide range of expression of love, from brotherly and sisterly love to romantic and sexual love. But as long as we continue to confuse love and emotional attachment, we will continue to be lonely, even when we have someone to love. We can conquer this dragon of loneliness, but we must turn to our deepest resource to do so, our spiritual self. When we become aware of self, we experience the mystery of life, the unbroken and unending connection we have with each other and with the universe.
Picture life like a large Banyan tree filled with leaves, twigs and branches. Our ego sense of self makes us feel like a leaf on this tree. When the wind blow, the leaves rub against each other. Sometimes this is pleasant experience and sometimes not. As leaves, we feel isolated and apart from one another, even though we can see that we all belong to the same tree. When we become conscious of our spiritual self, we realize that we are far more than just the expression of a single leaf. We are more than even a branch and the trunk. We are the life force within the tree.
We cannot realize the power of this experience by analyzing it. Those experience of wholeness gained by watching a birth or gazing at the stars are not intellectual, logical events. We must go beyond the intellect and become conscious of the human spirit directly. This is the heart of meditative tradition of self-mastery – to calm the mind so completely, to be focused, that we experience this spiritual self directly. This is what we call Samadhi, and in west it is known as “mystical experience.” As we become more skilled in our ability to have this awareness, we gradually lose all sense of loneliness, all fears are vanquished, and all self-hatred is eliminated.

Living with strength:

This mystical experience is not an empty promise, but the consequence of the systematic development of self-mastery. As we experience our inner strength and confidence, we become more flexible, unlocking rigid belief systems, losing our fear of mistakes and what others may think of us. The way we relate to others – our close personal relationships, our sense of community, our capacity to give, to belong, and to relate to other human beings – depends on who we are as individuals. If we teach our children and ourselves how to live without fear, we would have a culture without violence. If we teach our children and ourselves how to love and respect others and ourselves we would have a culture free of hatred and condemnation. We cannot have a society free of fear, violence, and hatred until we have the citizens free of fear, violence, and hatred.