A certain degree of control and tranquility in emotions and rāga-dveṣas (likes and dislikes) in the apparent mind. This is necessary to understand your true nature as pure relaxation.

With a healthy inner calm and distance, I can better assess situations and respond appropriately.

Karma-yoga is the most efficient means of transformation for this. By acting according to dharma and unconditionally accepting the results of my actions as something to learn from, my mind evolves into harmonious reconciliation and attunement with the harmony of the way the world (īśvara) works. This will definitely bring inner peace. Of course, upāsana also helps here, the discipline of meditation on my participation in the glory of īśvara.

With a healthy inner calm and distance, I can better know what I am, and how the world relates to me.

Antaḥkaraṇa śuddhi is an essential condition for knowledge, jñāṇa. Only a mind that is free from bias and prejudice can listen purely and therefore hear well what is being taught. Otherwise, everything that is taught is, at best, filtered and interpreted by ‘what I think it means’. Then the mind makes the knowledge fit or adapts it, according to an existing set of ideas and concepts. A big problem, because the whole point is that I need a mind that knows that it is not real as such, that it is not me as such. This is the difficult shift to make.

Without a clear mind, knowledge will in many minds even be rejected as nonsense. This means that the meaning is not heard and understood, and I will not know the truth of myself.

In a ‘clean mind’ it is the guṇa sattva that is dominant, and reflects consciousness clearly.