The technique of self-unfoldment was irrevocably declared by the Lord in the previous verse. The seeker has to fix his mind totally at the feet of the Lord and bring his intellect to play upon and rip open the significance of the Form-Divine. This double act needs an extremely subtle intellect and single-pointedness of the mind. Perhaps Arjuna felt, as any average man would, that this ‘Path’ was almost impossible for him to pursue successfully. The kindly teacher in Krishna, reading this despair from the face of his disciple, tries to give him an alternative method of Self-unfoldment.
IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO FIX YOUR THOUGHTS STEADILY ON ME — Then the only practical method would be to pursue the Yoga-of-constant-practice (Abhyasa-Yoga). This Yoga-of-practice was earlier described (in VI-26) as: “Wherever the mind wanders, restless, from there let him subdue it and bring it under the sway of the Self alone.”In short, whenever a meditator tries to meditate by fixing his mind upon a chosen point-of-concentration, the fickle mind will always try to run wild into dissimilar thought-channels. The advice here is to gather all the rays of the mind, whenever they wander away from their main point-of-concentration, and focus them all again and again on the Divine Form.
Every meditator must admit that the mind steadily fails to balance on, for any length of time, totally engaging itself with the theme of its contemplation. That the mind runs away into a wild wool-gathering is not in itself such a tragedy as that when the meditator himself gets abducted by the mind and unconsciously follows it into the fields of ready distractions. The Yogeshwara (Krishna) is only advising us not to get enticed away by the mind from our divine pursuit.
In order to gather the dissipated and riotous mental rays and to focus them at the point-of-concentration, the meditator must develop a capacity to stand by himself, and in himself, apart from his wandering mind. If we identify ourselves with the mind, wherever the mind takes us, we also must go. Therefore, in order to control the mind, the meditator must stand apart from his mind, identifying himself with that power in him which possesses the ability to rule over and direct his mental energies. This direct controller and ruler of the mind is the higher faculty in man called the intellect. With our discriminating capacity alone can we rule over the lesser faculties of the mind in ourselves.
This alternative method suggested by the Lord is to help those who are not able to accomplish the most direct ‘Path’ indicated in the previous stanza. By striving hard in Abhyasa-Yoga for a length of time, our mind gets so well disciplined that we will be able to practise the immediate method of self-unfoldment advised in the earlier couplet.
IF THIS ALSO IS NOT POSSIBLE, THEN:
