[CHAPTER LVI.]
Description of the mind.
Argument:—On the liberation of the living soul, and description of the mind as the miniature of the world.
THE Lord continued:—Now Arjuna, forsake your sympathy for your friends, by the coldheartedness that you have acquired from the abandonment of your desires and cares, and the liberation that you have attained to in this your living state.
2. Be dispassionate, O sinless Arjuna! by forsaking your fear of death and decay of the body; and be as clear as the unclouded sky in your mind, by driving away the clouds of your cares from it, and dispelling all your aims and attempts either of good or evil for yourself or others.
3. Discharge your duties as they come to you in the course of your life, and do well whatever is proper to be done, that no action of yours may go for nothing (i.e. Do well or do nothing).
4. Whoso does any work that comes to him of itself in the course of his life, that man is called to be liberated in his life time; and the discharge of such deeds, belongs to the condition of living liberation.
5. That I will do this and not that, or accept of this one and refuse the other, are the conceits of foolishness; but they are all alike to the wise (who have no choice in what is fit and proper for them).
6. Those who do the works which occur to them, with the cool calmness of their minds, are said to be the living liberated; and they continue in their living state, as if they are in their profound sleep.
7. He who has contracted the members of his body, and curbed the organs of his senses in himself, from their respective outward objects, resembles a tortoise, that rests in quiet by contracting its limbs within itself.