***In order to attain mental aboveness, man must practice a neutral attitude to all earthly changes.***

***In order to attain mental aboveness, man must practice a neutral attitude to all earthly changes.***

"O Flower among Men (Arjuna)! he who cannot be ruffled by these (contacts of the senses with their objects), who is calm and even-minded during pain and pleasure, he alone is fit to attain ever-lastingness!" —The Bhagavad Gita II:15

"The basic principle of creation is duality. If one knows pleasure he must know pain. One who cognises heat must cognise cold also. If creation had manifested only heat or only cold, only sorrow or only pleasure, human beings would not be the irritated victims of the pranks of duality. But then, what would life be like in a monotone existence? Some contrast is necessary; it is man's response to dualities that causes his trouble. So long as one is slavishly influenced by the dualities, he lives under the domination of the changeful phenomenal world.

In order to attain mental aboveness, man must practice a neutral attitude to all earthly changes.

The saints have found that happiness lies in a constant mental state of unruffled peace during all the experiences of earthly dualities. A changeable mind perceives a changeable creation, and is easily disturbed; the unchangeable soul and the unruffled mind, on the other hand, behold, behind the masks of change, the Eternal Spirit. The man whose mind is like an oscillating mirror beholds all creation as distorted into waves of change; but the man who holds his mental mirror steady beholds there naught but the reflections of the Sole Unity—God. Through realization, not mere imagination, he sees that his body and all things are the condensed consciousness of Spirit. The mind, free of artificial excitation, remains centered in its native state of inner peace and soul joy.

When the mind by deep spiritual development manifests its aboveness to the suggestions born of the external activity of the senses, the advancing yogi, like Arjuna, finds that before he can attain the promised state of everlastingness he must also neutralize, by meditation, the effects of the inner action of the sensory powers."
-Paramahansa Yogananda