Om Namo
Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!
Essay 10:
Why do we behave differently at different
times?
(Know Thy Personality as per the Three Gunas
of Nature)
It’s our day to day experience that we tend to
behave differently at different times and respond differently to different
situations. We see all the contrasting shades of behavior in us; we may be kind
and cruel; gentle and rude; soft-spoken and harsh worded; forgiving and vengeful;
caring and selfish; patient and restless; intelligent and stupid; active and
lethargic. Our responses to various situations generally come from this
spectrum of behavior. Often, we don’t even know why we behave in a certain way.
It means our core personality is a mosaic of all these behavior patterns and they
come out at random without much of a conscious effort by us to control such
responses.
Cardiologists have identified two predominant
behavior patterns known as Type A and Type B about which most us must be aware.
Personalities that are more competitive, highly organized, ambitious,
impatient, highly aware of time management and/or aggressive are labeled Type
A, while more relaxed personalities are labeled Type B.
Now let us see how Gita handles this subject.
Gita talks about 3 types of ‘Gunas’ or qualities that characterize any person.
They are:
Sattva (Sattvik): Sattva is the quality of balance, harmony, goodness, purity,
universalizing, holistic, constructive, creative, building, positive, peaceful
and virtuous. But Sattva binds us to the desire for happiness and the desire
for knowledge.
Rajas (Rajasik): Rajas is the quality of passion, activity, neither good nor bad
and sometimes either, self-centeredness, egoistic, individualizing, driven,
moving, dynamic. The nature of Rajas is of attraction, longing and attachment and Rajas strongly binds us to the fruits of our work.
Tamas (Tamasik): Tamas is a state of darkness, inertia, inactivity and materiality. Tamas is the quality of imbalance, disorder, chaos, anxiety, impure,
destructive, delusion, negative, dull or inactive, apathy, inertia or lethargy,
violent, vicious, ignorant. Tamas binds one to ignorance and lethargy and therefore deludes all beings from their spiritual pursuits.
As per Gita, all these qualities emanate from
Nature or Prakrithi and become a part of all of us. Our personality has all
these 3 Gunas in a proportion that is typical to each one of us. That is the
reason why we respond in a certain way to a given situation. Awareness of the
existence of these qualities would help one to control and choose the type of response
one wants to come out with regarding to external stimuli.
Gita says, in a person endowed with more Sattva
Guna, Rajas and Tamas stay subservient. If the person has more of Rajas, it suppresses
the other two Gunas. So is the case with Tamas. Now let us see how to identify these
three types of people based on manifest behavior patterns.
A Sattvik person radiates peace, happiness and
knowledge. All his actions indicate Sattvik nature. The words he speaks would
be good, soft and knowledgeable, the books he reads would be of knowledge, the
actions he does would be good in nature, the food he eats would be fresh,
simple and healthy.
A Rajasik person would always be busy in doing
all kinds of action whether desirable or undesirable. He would be therefore
restless, short-tempered. He would be ambitious, loud and vain-glorious. He
would be running after worldly pleasures and eats hot and spicy food.
A Tamasik person is characterized by inertia,
inaction, laziness, carelessness, dull-wittedness. He is a work shirker and
delivers shoddy jobs. He eats sour, stale, uncooked and unhealthy food.
So, you can look at yourself, your family,
friends and colleagues and try to identify and classify all into one of the
three Guna types.
Gita exhorts all to make conscious efforts
through Saadhana, to gradually suppress Tamo Guna and move into Sattva and Rajo
spectrum and then through intense practice come out of Rajas and move into Sattva.
A spiritual seeker or some one on the path of
yoga finally would annihilate all the three Gunas and reach a state of Nirguna Paramathma
(Beyond Gunas).
***
