Emerson has said that “Mind is such a thing that it can make hell into heaven or it can make heaven into hell.” What is this mind? You cannot touch it, you cannot taste it you cannot feel it, you cannot see it. It’s so subtle, subtler than air, subtler than space. But yet it is all powerful within this world. It is due to the mind alone that the conditioned soul is trapped within the repetition of birth and death, where a head of state can take birth as a dog, where a demigod can take birth as an insect. That is the power of the mind where a person with all facilities could take their next birth as a worm in the stool of a hog.

That’s the power of the mind. Who are we to compete? It’s very difficult to control this mind. Vishwamitra Muni lived in the Satya Yuga and Treta Yuga. He was a real yogi who can perform severe tapasya and who was able to control the mind. If you cannot control the mind you cannot control the senses.

There is illustration in our Bhagavad Gita that body is like our chariot and the senses are like five wild horses that just want to taste, want to touch, want to see, want to smell, want to hear and what is the mind? The mind is the reigns, intelligence is the chariot driver and soul is the passenger. If we have good intelligence & we are listening, listening to the need of the soul, listening to Lord, then the intelligence that comes through Guru, Sadhu, & Shastra is strong and through the mind we can control the senses and then our human form actually goes in the right direction. Otherwise there are 84,00,000 (8 million 400) species and the soul can end up in one of those chariots. So it is very critical to control the mind. But the problem is it is very difficult to control the mind.

So, everyone should be very humble. No one should be proud. No one should think they are great. Because as soon as you think that way you are already in the clutches of illusory energy and all the rest will follow subsequently. So if someone like Lord Shiva or Lord Brahma or Vishwamitra Muni or Saubhari Muni were bewildered due to inattentiveness, if their minds dragged them down into such embarrassing conditions then what is our position? Our position is very humble. Srila Prabhupad explains the remedy of not falling into illusory energy’s control by focussing our mind and senses in service to Lord. A great soul can be like a lotus flower in a very very muddy place of material world where there is distractions everywhere.