विनाश काले विपरीत बुद्धि (Vinaashakaale Vipareetabudhhi)

The title is a saying in Sanskrit meaning that when the time of one’s destruction comes, his or her mind thinks the opposite of what it should. It’s used often as a rhetoric to describe a person’s wrong decisions. When a person’s decision goes wrong, when he or she thinks against general well-being, people around use this phrase to describe his or her unfavorable or reversed thought process – one which is leading to disaster instead of progress or success. The phrase is used to describe the wrong thought patterns of one person by another person.
I’d rather use this famous saying for managing my own thoughts – to help me be more at peace and stay calm and in control of my thoughts. The only thing in my control being my own thoughts, I looked at how I could apply this saying for my betterment. I found most people using this adage to blame someone for their wrong decisions. Blaming others hardly helps me keep myself peaceful and positive. Hence, my objective of how I could use this adage for my own mind control.
A friend of mine was complaining about his brother who was creating issues in his family. His brother was doing something which everyone felt was wrong and would lead to miserable consequences. My friend had tried his best to tell him the ill consequences but his brother refused to listen. My friend was pouring out his frustration and his woes to me and I was listening thinking of what I could do if I were in a similar situation. Then this saying came to my mind – विनाश काले विपरीत बुद्धि (Vinaashakale Vipareetabudhi). That described the situation of my friend’s brother. Everyone knew he was headed in the wrong direction but he was refusing to hear out any sense.
The perspective with which I saw the situation was that, whatever was happening was but a phenomenon of the mind, as defined by Nature, well documented over the ages.
Some say that this saying was first used to describe Lord Rama’s misadventure with the golden deer. Any right thinking man knows there is no such thing as a golden deer but still the foremost of men of that time went out to hunt for this strange creature which ultimately lead to Devi Sita being kidnapped. So, when a person’s time for ruin has come, his mind is bound to betray him.
I shared this with my friend and we discussed for some time. We agreed that what his brother was going through was but a natural phenomenon which has been going on for time immemorial. With this realization, my friend became peaceful. We realized that his brother had come to a point where he was on the brink of failure. (It did happen subsequently as expected.) His time of downfall had come and he refused to listen. The other way around is that he refused to listen and hence his downfall had come. In any case, when we realized that his brother was only a subject of a natural phenomenon, he was not really doing something of his own free will;  when we agreed that he was as much out of control of himself as my friend was of him, he was simply following a pattern which Nature has set out – it was no longer his fault, there was nothing to blame him for and nothing that anyone could do about it either except retaining one’s patience; then my friend found back his peace and tolerance. He accepted the situation and went back to what he could do rather than what he could get his brother to do.
A person’s wrong thoughts are not entirely his or her fault. There are very few people who actually even realize what it is that they are thinking, fewer who accept their thought patterns, fewer who try to regulate their thoughts and a minuscule percentage who succeed in controlling their thought patterns. One needs some techniques to exercise mind control and I discovered this one to tolerate someone’s negative and disastrous thinking.