Protesting that the mind is wandering is progress over wandering with the mind

Sometimes when we start practicing bhakti and try to fix the mind on Krishna, we may become disheartened at how frequently and forcefully the mind wanders away from Krishna towards worldly things.

While the fact of the mind’s wandering is certainly sobering, we need to consider another, more heartening fact: that we are no longer wandering with the mind, but are protesting about its wandering.

Our protest itself indicates that we are spiritually growing up. We are recognizing that the mind’s ways are childish and so are no longer ready to entertain its restlessness. Probably, before we started practicing spiritual life, we might well have been entertaining the mind, or worse still going along with its childish fancies, losing ourselves in whatever fantasies the mind conjured up.

Of course, even in our pre-devotional life too, we sometimes need to control our minds, but that control doesn’t take us out of the material level of reality because our overall consciousness is materially attached.

Gita wisdom explains that we are eternal souls and are meant for eternal happiness in spiritual love for Krishna. But as long as our consciousness is caught in material things, we under-cut our spiritual potential by staying attached to things that can offer at best only temporary pleasure. When we try to focus the mind during meditation, we are redirecting our attachment towards the eternal, specifically the supreme eternal reality, Krishna.

The Bhagavad-gita (06.26) urges us to persevere on the path of spiritual grown when it declares that we should bring the mind back under control wherever and whenever it wanders. Striving to keep ourselves fixed in Krishna’s remembrance and service may initially seem disheartening but in due course it will be supremely rewarding for it alone can grant everlasting fulfillment.