Capacity of the mind to cope :

Swamiji 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. When the mind is calm, problems become manageable.”


He went on to elaborate: “Years ago in the United States, say, around the 1920s and 30s, the newspapers talked of ‘situations’ - social, political, and so on.

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 a 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!”


Enthusiasm is the very fuel in all great men.

By inexhaustible ardour for whatever they undertake, they generate an extraordinary drive for action.

In spiritual self- improvement, and in serving the nation in its cultural and spiritual aspects, the workers and the missionaries must discover in themselves the secret of invoking the trajectory force of true and flawless enthusiasm

Swami Chinmayananda

Chinmaya mission Sidhbari