4. Mind games

Gita lays emphasis on our senses as they are the gateways between our inner and outer world. Neuroscience postulates, "Neurons that fire together wire together". The Gita's words too convey a similar message using the language of its time. Our brain has about a 100 billion neurons. Some of them are wired by DNA to take care of automatic functions of body and some are wired by us during our life times. On the first day, before a driving wheel, we all found it difficult to drive and then slowly got used to it. This is because of hard wiring that the brain does, with unutilised neurons, to coordinate all the activities involved in driving. Same happens with all the skills. Starting from simple walking to sports to complex surgeries by a surgeon. Hard-wiring saves a lot of energy for brain and makes our lives easy. A new born is a 'universal baby' capable of many things. The Domestication done by family, peers and society, leads to formation of many neural patterns. These patterns expect us to look for a particular type of impulses and sensations from external world and we work hard to get them. For example, we all like to hear praise about ourselves as our neural patterns expect and enjoy the same. These patterns are foundations for expectations, prejudices and judgments. Combination of these patterns coupled with efforts made, are nothing but Ahankaar and in today's world, success and happiness is defined as getting sensations matching our neural patterns. One gets centered in self once these are broken. As a result joy flows as we are no more dependent on external sensations and Krishna calls it Atma Raman. To live a Gita life is to use various instructions/instruments given in Gita to break these patterns, which makes us joyful and free of judgments.