Situations, Problems, Crisis

Thursday, February 11, 2010, 12:37

Gurudev, Swami Chinmayananda was talking to Barbara Gee, giving her guidelines for her management consulting work: "Just tell the managers you work with," He said, "to keep their minds calm, problems become manageable".

He went on to elaborate:

"Years ago in the United States, say, around the 1920s and 30s, the newspapers talked to 'situations' - social, political etc. Then, around the 1940s, those situations had turned into 'problems'. By the 50s and 60s, the words 'situation' and 'problem' had disappeared from our vocabulary, and everything had become a 'crisis'. Now, all we read about in the papers is 'the education crisis', 'the health crisis, the oil crisis' ..... Everything has become a crisis.

Nothing has really changed about the situations in the world, but we have reduced capacity to deal with them; Our minds today have a decreased ability to cope. What we need to work on is to develop that capacity of the mind to cope.

"If you treat a given event as a situation, it is just a situation to be dealt with. Keeping your mind calm, don't let the situation grow into a problem and then develop further into a crisis!"

About the author

Swami Chinmayananda

Swami Chinmayananda the great master's lectures were an outpour of wisdom. He introduced the Geetha Gnana Yagna. He wrote a lot of books on spirituality, commentaries to Vedantic texts, children books etc. He then started spreading His teachings globally.....