Children are either obedient or disobedient. If they are obedient, we treat them as our slaves. And if they are rebellious, we wash our hands of them. Our mind, too, is like a child, and children are never the same.

Poets from all parts of the globe have talked at length about the vagaries of the mind. One compares the mind to a monkey. The other one says it is a mad monkey. Yet another talks of it as a drunken mad monkey. Mind like a monkey hops from branch to branch but rests nowhere. It is this consistent movement that makes the mind disobedient.

The mind is ever active, even when all the other parts of our anatomy are motionless. It is all because it is the only one capable of fantasising. It is always carrying something or somebody on its "shoulders."

An old Zen tale explicates this fantasy. Once, two monks came to a river. They had to cross the river to complete an errand. On the bank of the river, they saw a buxom, blithe, and debonair woman who, too, had to cross the river, for what purpose God only knew. She was afraid to cross the river even though the two monks tried to cajole her into wading through the water. Since she was timid, one of the monks invited her to climb on his sturdy shoulders. She did without any hesitation. And the monk who gave her a ride on his shoulders reached the opposite bank and asked her to climb down slowly. She got down, and the monks continued with their journey.

"You should not have done such a terrible thing. We are monks and how dare you take a woman on your shoulders? Aren't you breaking your vows?" reprimanded the second monk. The first monk coolly replied: "Oh brother! I left her on the river bank. But you are still carrying her."

This story indirectly speaks about the direction of the mind. It also tells us about the control of the mind. It is time to laugh at the workings of the mind. The two monks in the Zen tale refer to the obedient and the disobedient mind.

The eminent Tamil Saint Poet Vallalar, in his famous work 'Deiva Manimaalai,' describes all the dangerous things his mind does. Unable to curb Desire, the mind falls into Kama, which is like swirling water from which a person cannot save himself. To put it another way, Kama is like deep water in a river that ends a person's life. Moha is the darkness into which the mind moves. Miserliness is the dark cave into which it disappears. Arrogance is the hill it climbs only to fall from it. Jealousy is the pit into which it falls.

All of us invariably have such a mind that cannot be controlled. Then who will save us from such a plight? Keeping the mind still is not easy, of course, but it is often stressed as the first step in spiritual enlightenment. But this means to say that spiritual enlightenment is nothing but understanding oneself.

What exactly do we understand by 'Mind,' also a four-letter word? Mind is like poetry. No two definitions of poetry go hand in hand. That may be the reason why Dr Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer and poet, whose famous 'Lives of the Poets' talks of poets and their poetry, was so sharp in his statement. When he was asked 'What is poetry?' he humbly remarked, "If you ask me, I don't know ... if you don't ask me, I know." Neither two poets agree about poetry nor two people agree about the mind. That is the way of poetry and the mind.

One among the eighteen famous Tamil siddhas by name Kaduveli, in all his thirty-four quatrains, admonishes his mind to remain calm in turbulent times and brands anger in vitriolic words. He calls it 'Chandala,' meaning 'a heinous criminal.' Having called it so, he rushes to find a way out. In verse 8, he advises, "Only through meditation one can kill anger, the criminal." Of all the intense emotions that man is blessed with, anger is the most insulting, unfair, cruel and unacceptable one. The great Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, too, in his Thirukkural (couplet 304) opines:

"Is there a foe more dangerous than wrath
Bound to kill laughter and love?"