Life is full of interruptions. We need to keep moving. We park somewhere and then we move again. Now if you park in a wrong place, you need to move it sooner, and if you park in the right place, you have freedom; you can move it when you want to. Similarly, you have to park your mind in a safe place. If you have parked your mind in your own garage, nobody can tell you when you should move it. But if you park your mind in somebody else's garage, they will be after you. Even then if you do not move, the police will come. Similarly, don’t give your life's authority in somebody else's hand. If you give it, you will have no freedom. And when you lose freedom, the next thing you lose is love, and compassion, because someone who is stifled cannot express their compassion or love. So take care of the car called mind which drives you. You should drive the mind rather than the mind driving you.

Wisdom empowers you to drive the mind how you want to drive it. Otherwise you are not in the driving seat, the mind is driving. It is an automated car which goes on its own. You are sitting, wondering that you want to go left, and the car is going right, and you feel helpless. Most of our life is like this. We don’t know what we are doing, we don’t know what we want, and we don’t know where we are going. So we need to see ‘from sitting behind, how I can jump into the driving seat? How can I make that leap?’ and that is what spirituality is. That is what the essence of all the scriptures is.

The essence of the Bhagavad Gita, is that “your soul is imperishable; repose in the Self”. The body has changed, the mind has changed, and the intellect has changed, but there is something within us that has not changed. This is a glimpse of the soul. Life has to be seen from a larger perspective. What is life? How long are we going to live here? What is the truth of life? When you go in meditation, then this is understood much better. Then such a smile will come on your face, that no one will be able to wipe it off.

Lord Buddha said, ‘Life has sorrow and sadness, but there is a way to come out of sadness.’ Lord Mahavir said, ‘Repose in the Self; the nature of the soul is happiness.’ Discontinuation of sadness and attainment of happiness, both will happen through meditation. This is not the first time we are here. We have been here so many times, met so many times. We are infinite, endless; there is an element in us that is eternal. A small glimpse of this is achieved when you realize that 'Nothing has happened to me, nothing has changed in me.' Go deep into meditation; everything else will keep coming and going.

Take control of your mind with the help of Bhagavad Gita’s timeless wisdom in an exclusive commentary by Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.