Podcards: Recent Episodes
Maitri
Podcards are brief, beautiful, and pocketable reminders to bring back more love and kindness into your life.
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Being able to reflect on ageing, sickness, and death (दोषानुदर्शनम्) is a central tenet of the Vedic tradition. Freud says that you cannot imagine your own death because when you imagine it, you merely observe (in a superficial way) what it might be like from the outside, disassociated from the visceral reality. Death is the end of experience as we know it, so the only recourse we have is to deny its fearful existence. Others may die around us, but we can never really comprehend what that means for us, and the ego assures us that we cannot die. But no matter how much society tries to brush aside the facts of ageing, illness, and death, the reality is that they are the only certainties in life; ageing brings with it pain, suffering, separation, and loss; death is most assured. Life is a gift, all will say, but the spectre of death is always present, no matter how rich and powerful you are. ‘“So careful of the type?” but no’ says Tennyson, ‘[she] cries, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go."‘ And though we are apt to dismiss the notion, the human spirit knows that all lives are interconnected and even though death takes many, others are spared.
If you keep running away from the facts of ageing and death, you will end up suffering more from the pain of encountering them and the bewilderment that arises out of sudden knowledge of their implications. The ordinary vicissitudes of life—a life-changing ailment or the sudden loss of a loved one—have devastating effects, even though you know, deep down, that such things are a part of life. To face these existential fears is to examine how you unconsciously act or react to their presence. Do you allow yourself to grieve in sympathy with others at their loss or do you let it foster your own fears? Do you despair at the thought of never indulging in physical pleasures? To accept life and death, pain and pleasure, is to accept that they are not opposite forces but the two phases of the same continuum. To deny one in favour of the other is to gradually offset the delicate balance that sustains all life everywhere. On the other hand, to accept your own vulnerability is to accept how naked and utterly exposed you are to the ravages of time and tide. Instead of an egocentric preoccupation with overcoming this vulnerability or a morbid fixation with mortality, you embrace this vulnerability, this tenderness in an open way. You can accept your own insignificance and perhaps even extend your compassion to those outside your group who are different from you. You can begin to live and cherish each day as a chance to give and give back, with no guarantee of a tomorrow. And in the process you’ll discover what is really meaningful to you.
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Muditā (मुदिता) means sympathetic or vicarious joy. It is one of the four brahmavihārās (ब्रह्मविहारा), the sublime attitudes, and also the hardest to cultivate, perhaps harder in our day and age as we see abject inequality around us. Your happiness is tainted by the suffering of others to the point where you unconsciously resent the simple moments of joy in your life and in the lives of those around you. Indeed, when someone has fortune and felicity undeservedly heaped upon him, it doesn’t seem fair to all those who suffer. Apart from resentment being no damn good to anyone, such feelings more likely arise out of the ordinary human appetite for competitiveness which in turn is driven by fear blended with the volatile energies of sex. Remind yourself that those successful people often got there by throwing themselves into the turbulent gulf stream of life for the sheer pleasure of experiencing it in its fullness. You can allow yourself to revel in the joy of others: in the ebullience of happy children; in the intrepid passion of the adventurer, entrepreneur, or artist; in the triumph of the sportsman.
There is happiness in doing and it is most natural to derive pleasure from your actions. We, like all animals, get our stability and form by the perpetual motion of our various disparate parts. In fact, our actuating faculties carry in themselves the impulse to their own exercise, and in that exercise there is pleasure—the delight of sheer aliveness. “Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it,” says William James, “there the life becomes genuinely significant.” That fleeting feeling of aliveness is often serendipitous and the moments of unbridled delight it evokes seem incommunicable, perhaps that is why our language has no fixed term or turn of phrase for such experiences. The French expression joie de vivre comes closest to describing the sheer ebullience of experiencing life; that simply being alive is an extraordinary experience. And even though you may be suffering all sorts of hardship or illness, in this moment you allow the ecstatic rapture of life to envelope you and spirit you away to a place devoid of time and space—for to miss the joy is to miss all.
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The fourth and fifth skandhas (स्कन्ध) of egotism—intellectualism and consciousness—give rise to discursive thought and the freewheeling swells of strong emotion that it brings in its wake. But even discursive thought serves a purpose: it simulates the various outcomes of past and future actions as the mind attempts to consolidate experiences into well known concepts; which it then uses to anticipate every snippet of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch that you will experience, and every action that you will take in response. This is the natural modus of the survival mechanism. For to be simply reactive would place our relatively vulnerable bodies at a fatal disadvantage in a hostile world. Forbidden emotions like fear and anger dominate discursive thought because they must invariably lie at the bottom of your disconcertment. Their instances, past and future, have a high impact on your body budget. A flash of fear floods your mind and then recedes, but it leaves in its wake a slew of agitated neurons and chemical effluents from the priming of your defence system. These effects linger around long after the feeling has passed and give the illusion of prolonged malaise. So it is prudent for the self system to inhibit or subdue such feelings of irrational anger, guilt, fear, and loneliness by literally blocking thoughts and associations that have even a whiff of the forbidden. Fearing your fear, being angry about your anger, agonizing over your loneliness only makes things worse. And when you have contracted so many ways of “losing face”, the need to inhibit and censor thoughts quickly becomes untenable.
A more viable alternative is to embrace unwanted and unbidden emotions fully; to sit them out and understand where they’re coming from. Feelings of anger towards someone are really part of a wider and deeper anger towards similar people and situations from your past. Fear, anger, self-satisfaction, and self-pity share a common provenance—they are all emotions of the ego. They arise in reaction to how people and situations affect your personal identity and how you relate to them. By letting yourself feel your fear without trying to justify it or otherwise explain it away, or worse yet, condemn or suppress it, you gain a better understanding of what makes you tick. By facing your emotions without reacting to them, you develop greater confidence in your own ability to cope with whatever life throws at you.
In the Eastern tradition you are encouraged to sit with your anger, to let it well up and fully occupy the space it requires. Allowing the raw energy of your emotions to expand and grow this way lets you focus on the feeling instead of the objects that produced it. That is, you don’t focus on the thoughts and perceptions that produced the anger, but the feeling with its complexities and interwovenness as it sits heavily inside you. Anger is transformed from a destructive force into a catalyst for empathy and compassion. Fear no longer triggers the instinct to run away and hide but to pay closer attention to what is going on outside and inside. Loneliness reveals itself as the basic human need for connection and vulnerability. In this way, your emotions are transmuted from mere objects to react against into instruments of self-discovery and self-realisation.
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Your brain does not care if your internal representations bear no more than a fleeting resemblance to reality. It distorts, omits, and even deletes parts of your perceptual experience, depending on your tendencies and your temperament. It is this neurological ambiguity that transforms mere spectres of the imagination into all manner of tangible things, ranging from utilitarian to useless. Thoughts themselves are the cornerstones of this imaginative capacity. Merely recalling a memory rearranges its previous associations by changing its connection to other neuronal circuits. Your thoughts actually affect the neurological functioning of your body, from the actions you take thenceforth, to the subtle physiological functioning of the body that constitutes its general health and wellbeing. So, optimism is essential for maintaining a healthy brain and body while also propelling you forwards with eagerness and alacrity.
While positive thoughts neurologically suppress negative thoughts, a fearful and pessimistic attitude to life can quickly spiral into the void of depression. Focussing on things that make you frightened and angry trigger the same priming of the bodily system as biological imperatives and genuine threats do. If you are someone who focuses excessively on the negative aspects of yourself or your life, your brain’s limited pool of energy is rapidly depleted by the hollow pinging back and forth of areas of your system in response to imagined threats. Simply focussing on an image of benevolence or compassion, or one that give you hope for at least twelve minutes a day in a quiet space, will build and strengthen new positive neural circuits which will, in turn, interrupt and suppress the negative neurological tendencies that only find outlet in anger and fear. When you change how you focus your attention, you change the way you think and as you begin to think more positively, you begin to change your outward circumstances for the better.
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Because the mind is a tangle of sensations, vivid recollections of sensations, images of events as well as images of states of mind, new experiences are not entirely detached from those images and recollections. In fact, we are constantly reliving our past experiences at a certain rate in time or perceiving meaning in a flash of insight that is only experienced as an inner duration. Through all of this, our innumerable subtle faiths, fears, anticipations, instincts, superstitions, and blind tendencies forever tinge the fabric of our reality. The universal tendencies that lead to suffering are the five kleśas (क्लेश): hatred, greed, envy, pride, and ignorance. When you are so self-involved, you tend to only notice things when your tendencies are crossed or satisfied. And because you fail to notice what you have failed to notice, there is little you can do to change—until you notice how failing to notice shapes your thoughts and deeds.
We have a need to go beyond ourselves, to step outside our familiar, safe boundaries and taste life on a larger scale. So the natural tendency is to always explain or explain away experience so that you can maintain some measure of control of your world and the persona you have cultivated for yourself. At the heart of this egotism is really the noble tendency to realise yourself as an individual and live a full and rich personal life. The very word tendency (from Latin tendens) means a “stretching to”, to aim at something. You can only begin to understand what makes you tick by observing how you act and react in different situations. What satisfies or antagonises your tendencies is usually felt instinctively as pleasure or pain. But tendencies like intuitions are more limiting beliefs than any prescient indicators of unfavourable things. So pay attention to the things that you like to do that give you bad results and the things you don’t like to do that give you good results whenever you encounter such thoughts and feelings. In time you’ll learn to be more skillfully discerning in how you shape your awareness.
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You do not have to account for the course your life has taken by the paucity of your chromosomes, ancestral traits, familial neglect, childhood traumas, the actions of your early years and the short long years now already long behind you. Your life is not written in stone and so you really don’t need to limit your world to what it should be or has to be. Sure, the hand you are dealt is random and who knows what destines one life for all the riches of success and another for the hardships of destitution. Our inequalities are what make us unique and, paradoxically equal, for there is no other being who is exactly the same as you, therefore it is only you who are blessed with one or more unique skills and abilities, whose confluence with your experiences yields the essence that is your singular character. The Ancient Greeks believed that it is your daimon that encompasses your lot in life—everything that is uniquely allotted for you. The daimon is your guardian, guiding you through the vicissitudes of life. Since the daimon is neither bound by time nor space, its dominion is infinitely extensible and the characterisations it imparts always flexible, evolving and growing over a lifetime and capable of being updated as you encounter new situations while staying vigilant to the sly winks of fate. To live in harmony with your daimon is to live in harmony with your true self instead of simply living in conformity with progress or expectations.
According to the ancient teachings, your true self is not your cultivated and fragmentary persona, but a wholeness of being that has faded into the shadows along the plains of time. But it still subsists within you; it is where your wisdom and creativity spring from in those brief moments when you give up the struggle for life. To bring it out of the shadows and cast it into the light of each present moment requires you to scrutinize events as they unfold from moment to moment and see what portion of that is part of your daimonic inheritance and what portion you have affected by dint of skill and is unaccountable. The former is out of your control, but that does not mean that you blindly fall into step with your inclinations. You invoke your abilities responsibly and allow yourself to even refrain from exercising them occasionally. And who knows? You may by pleasantly surprised as you encounter new situations and experiment with new ways of being.
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Imagination is distortion, fabrication, and mithyā (मिथ्या), but it still has an important place in shaping your life. Before you can begin to see all things simply, you have to get skillful at navigating the complexity of imagination. Using your imagination you begin to see solutions to problems in your world.
Usually you construct your goals to counter and overcome problems in your world, so visualising a solution activates the cognitive circuits involved in those knowledge-centres of the brain and calls forth latent memories conducive to a solution. When you imagine favourable outcomes or solutions to problems, the wealth of subconscious knowledge is called forth by the mind, which always demonstrates remarkable sagacity in the choice of means it then employs to move you swiftly towards your destination. Imagination, then, ceases to be mere distortion and becomes a potent tool of self-actualisation. Creative people are able to generate a vivid image of the object of their imagination and then hold it at the front of their mind, where they may scrutinise every aspect of its design and every detail of its construction, rearranging their characteristics and directing the mise en scène to represent the particular spiritual or emotional state they seek.
Imagination doesn't take the conventional route of ordinary causality in realising itself, but seems to translate into its own language and cast in its own mould the perceptions incident from the outside. It is a spontaneity that follows the universal sequence and ordering of all things and may only be directed through reflection. When you reflect, you recall past images, sensations, perceptions, and conceptions so that you may shape them up into a coherent whole, an object, or an end. Along the way, you use your judgement to recognise novel representations from the conceptions that you already have available to you. So properly exercising your imagination keeps your mind in order and reduces its capacity for distortion. How skilled you become at this art is contingent upon your positivity, energy, and discipline.
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In ordinary men, every faculty carries in itself the impulse to its own exercise, and in that exercise there is pleasure; though it may be arduous or painful, the craving of the whole man for some end is sufficient to outweigh the discomfort of exercising particular faculties. In fact, it is in this struggle that he is most alive, for it is in his striving and seeking for something that he feels like he is actually living—reaching out towards harmony and tranquility as it were, through the mists of hardship. Without this constant struggling, his life slows up for him, and not knowing what further to strive for, he falls into a kind of despair and ceases to value what he had previously yearned for. Then none of the prizes of life are sufficient to rouse him from his inertia. He sees through them and knows beforehand how hollow and unsatisfying they are. When riches no longer satisfy him, he looks to power and prestige for his redemption.
Power and riches fuelled by the insatiable desire for material needs must be kept in order with the most anxious attention. They demand the sacrifice of a lifetime, given up to their care and cultivation. These irrepressible “needs” of man are cleverly exploited by savvy entrepreneurs, politicians, and corporations to keep the huge operose wheels of industry turning. Now you are forced to think fast “on your feet”, thinking that is linear and logical and delivers immediate solutions to well-defined problems—like a computer program. But it is nay impossible to slow down with the constant barrage of media and information that you are subjected to. Your thought processes are accelerating exponentially as they try to keep up with the world and everyone else around you. This constant influx of data is not a good thing; a delay in your perception of experience is vital for the proper functioning of your brain. Indeed, the brain itself relies on delay neurons to regulate signal transmission from the senses, forestalling their flow for mere milliseconds, which allows for sequence and order in your apprehension of reality.
When you slow down the rate at which the world is perceived, you also give your slower anaesthetic system a chance to inhibit an experience of fear or anger before it enters consciousness. By deliberately slowing down your actions like speaking and reading, you become more psychologically relaxed. Slow thinking is intuitive and creative but is only possible when you’re not under pressure. It’s the kind of thinking that yields insights and epiphanies. Slow breathing triggers the body’s relaxation response. In meditation, you learn how to slow down both your thinking and your breathing. You’re not frantically grasping for a solution or trying to figure out experiences and perceptions so that you can move on to the next thing on your list. In meditation, the posture itself is a mudra—a symbolic gesture—expressing your connection with the earth and a willingness to slow down and face your experiences directly. In Rinzai Zen, you place a koan or question in the abdomen and wait for an answer to come from there. There is no “getting to” somewhere, be it to health, or to God, or to some some other form of self-improvement, but a patient unknowingness without expectation. So today, give yourself the chance to slow down and enjoy just being without doing.
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Lust, fear, and anger are inextricably linked with atavistic survival mechanisms in the oldest parts of your brain and so they will always be part of your neural and spiritual personality. However, evolution has made us social animals and so we abide by certain universal ethical standards. Your Self is threatened by the appearance in consciousness of prohibited experiences like irrational anger and malicious desires. Because it is conscious awareness of these states that is dangerous, the threat can be allayed by inhibiting the sensations that trigger these events. And since there are always gaps in your self-consciousness, your Self System continually fails to shield you from this pain of awareness. Instead of suppressing such thoughts when they arise or chastising yourself for thinking such things, accept that your thoughts aren’t necessarily part of who you are. Meditation allows you to leisurely explore the provenance of the thoughts that led to the feelings of anger or desire, to gently tease apart the interwoven strands in a languid and unhurried way and without the pressing need to resolve them. So instead of self-condemnation, you acknowledge that certain acts occurred, whether mental or physical, that were not appropriate and that these acts were driven by desire, fear, or anger. Endeavouring to approach your fears, insecurities, and desires with warmth and compassion is approaching them in maitrī (मैत्री), so that you get to know those parts of you that you find so abhorrent and repulsive. When you do not try to avoid, subdue, or rationalise negative thoughts, feelings, or experiences, they lose their power to alarm and confuse you when they unexpectedly arise and you can approach them calmly and rationally or simply let them go.
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Upekṣā (उपेक्षा) is equanimity in Buddhism. The Vedics call this frame of mind nityam samacittatvam (नित्यम् समचित्तत्व)—being changeless or imperishable. It’s easy to lose your footing and stumble when life robs you of what you hold dear and destroys your hopes. Likewise, it is easy to get carried away in elation when things are going your way. Things simply happen, it is your mind that infuses events and experiences with meaning. Your brain is primed to predict the probability of certain events taking place. It does this by weighing all the factors, within and without your control, that contribute to successfully produce the event or thwart it. That is, it brings to the fore of the mind, simultaneously, the pseudo images of success along images of failure. The latter act as antagonistic reducers, the net result being a positive or negative determination for any action or event. Now the only difference between pessimists and optimists is in the degree of their aversion to fear of failure and the intensity of their desire or appetite for success at any cost. Both extremes of human nature are driven by perception and as such must rely on this experiential distortion to keep these states going. You don’t want a mind that is constantly sore buffeted between depression and elation. Real strength is the ability to accept situations as they arise and face facts objectively. There is no cloaking facts in perception, with its likes or dislikes, faiths or fears, hopes and doubts. You stay fully present in the event and swiftly do what is required without being swayed by any polarizing factors.
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Anabhisvanga (अनभिष्वङ्ग) is letting go of the the intense attachment you feel for your loved ones and the much beloved things in your life. When you examine such feelings, you see that you have objectified your loved ones and that your attachment is really a way to exercise control over your own fluctuating world. Life gives us the gift of nurturing and caring for our young ones when they are weak and vulnerable. It also necessitates that you exercise that love and affection with discernment. You never stop caring and you must experience the grief of their separation, but you always maintain your objectivity as regards everything in your life.
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Kāma (काम) is sensual pleasure in all its forms, it is also the personification of the god of love—akin to Eros in Greek mythology. Although kāma and artha are the two great evils, the kāma of love and intimacy is an essential need that fulfils a much higher purpose. In 1969, shortly before his death, the psychologist Abraham Maslow amended his seminal thesis on the hierarchy of human motivations. At the pinnacle of his hierarchy of needs, he now placed self-transcendence. Borrowed from Eastern philosophy, Maslow regarded the dissolution of ego to be the highest state of actualisation for people who were fortunate enough to ascend to this level of consciousness. Experientially, you get a glimpse of what this feels like in certain transcendental states in ordinary activities. In acts of intimacy, you can come closer to bridging the gap between your self and not self. In the space between a lover, you feel safe and secure to love, feel loved, and be able to love, feel respected and have self-respect; and you are able to turn your attention away from self-ishness towards more transhumanistic emotions like care for others, sympathy and self-sacrifice, for compassion and self-effacement, and for pure love.
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Mātsarya (मात्सर्य) is the feeling of sadness and incompleteness that overcomes you when you notice particular traits and characteristics in others that you crave, want, or desire. And even though you see their endowments in isolation, you attribute those singular things to the person and begin to see yourself as inferior to them. By and by you see yourself as being disadvantaged and incomplete and this makes you singularly uncharitable to the world around you. Love, kindness, genuine friendship may flow into your life, but you will scorn it, degrade it, and dismiss it because it is a sorry replacement for the things you covet and cannot have. When feelings of jealousy do arise, you can instead separate out the particular quality in the person and appreciate its particular beauty, aura, or charm. Appreciate how it shines through in this particular moment and the confluence of factors that gave it light. See how a generosity of spirit helped these qualities shine through them (for true beauty is an uncovering of the soul) and that the same beauty resides in you if you give it the light it needs to shine through.
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We make a lot out of giving love and loving others unconditionally. Any healthy society teaches its young to love and care for others by making contact, by nurturing an understanding for people who look and sound different from themselves, so that they curb the natural impulses of hostility and egotism. To love then means to be completely open and vulnerable when you reach out to others, which in turn means that you have absolute trust in yourself as you let down your defences in favor of compassion and empathy. When you love somebody deeply and completely, happiness happens in giving them your love and devotion. The more deeply you are able to love someone, the more must you suffer grief at their loss.
But what of your capacity to accept love? People who feel loved are the one who are necessarily able to love, who necessarily feel safe and secure to love, who necessarily feel respected and have self-respect. The psychologist Abraham Maslow says that such people are exceptionally fortunate because they (usually) have lived their lives in the best conditions, having had good reference experiences and plenty of choices along the way. Such people seem to lead happier and more fulfilled lives because they see through the complex intermediate layers of value, which entice and ensnare ordinary people, to the simple truths and needs that activate an eagerness to live: to express themselves without fear; to act with integrity; to love and be loved; to feel like they have a stake in their world and therefore have a vested interest in its care and maintenance. So the path to love then appears to be a heightened development of your awareness, reason, and capacity to love, to such an extent that you transcend your own egocentric self-involvement, leaving yourself absolutely open and vulnerable to the possibility of its devastation and loss.
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Thoughts arise of their own volition depending on the natural ebb and flow of sensations and revived memories of sensations. In one instant your actions are propelled by a thought that has built up in intensity and in the next you condemn the action and the state of mind that thought the thought. This is the natural process of jñeyam (ज्ञेयम्)—of discovering your self. Troubles arise when you believe that your thoughts and actions are an immutable part of your being and must leave an indelible mark on your personality rather than being a mere transitory epiphenomenon, brought on by various influences from within and without. If you treat your mind with the sanctity of a home, you could be more discerning of the thoughts that arrive at your doorstep. You can choose to let thoughts in or keep them out, as you like—or let them just go passing on by. Of course, you can’t deny the bad thoughts away, but you can replace them with good ones. Since you know that your thoughts are not always within your control, you can disassociate from them without feeling any pressing need to try and understand them or assuage them in any way. When these ill-conceived half-thoughts arise, you can let them pass away just as they are.
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It could be said that your world radiates out from some hypothetical centre within you and extends as far as the limits of your senses take you. At some point, your world fades away into the horizon. Within the immediate limits of your world, you must also limit which of your five sense accesses an experience, so what you perceive is never a full representation of an event. This is why the Bhagavad Gita distinguishes between consciousness and the contents of consciousness. Pure consciousness is always refined by factors within ourselves, and no matter how subtle is the tinge, the new experience is automatically transformed within the established lineage and itself becomes one of its contents—another nexus of consciousness that gathers around it the opinions, feelings, and distorted perceptions that support your fabricated personal identity. Most people spend at least half their waking hours simulating their experiences instead of living them. With their inattention to the facts, their purely simulated reality drives their feelings and emotions in unexpected directions. So you really need to pay attention to ordinary things without distorting their facts. Attention is different from concentration. While concentration excludes all else to the object of focus, attention is full and total awareness that excludes nothing. You cease being the observer of things, including yourself and develop greater sensitivity to what is happening in the moment—the note of tension in the voice of a loved one, the source of the feelings of irrational anger, guilt, and loneliness as they arise, or even merely appreciating the sunrise in all its simplicity. Through meditation you learn how to live from moment to moment instead of a reality that is hijacked by your own thoughts. Your intention is simply to let go of your notions of how things “should” be. When you have a worthy intention like this in mind, you don’t need a contraption or method to reign in your focus, instead you develop a sensitivity to the present moment as it unfolds around you.
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Because you believe that you are incomplete, you need to constantly validate the person you purport to be. By throwing yourself into the company of others, especially those easily beguiled by the stories you concoct of yourself, you distract your mind in other directions and avoid the pain of gaining any real knowledge of yourself. Even the distraction of a hobby is a way of getting away from the facts of your life when it serves only as a distraction, a way of passing the time. Vivikta (विविक्त) is the act of separating yourself from others, not as a means of alienating yourself from society, but as a way of separating yourself from worldly things so that you may be free from their influences. The pre-Christian concept of contemplation is what the ancient mystics valued most highly. Aristotle believed that contemplation (theōria) is the ultimate culmination of all thought and action. It is the means to ascertaining truth, and truth may only reveal itself in complete stillness. In the great Eastern traditions, this truth or self-knowledge has an extraordinary meaning. It is the full and total acceptance of yourself and the nature of the world around you. It is the letting go of the need to control and direct things, especially your being itself, and accepting what you actually are from moment to moment—accepting your fragmented self and your utter helplessness within the vast integer of the universe. Therein lies the primacy of contemplation over the vita activa: that all man’s achievements pale in comparison to the perfection of the universe; a magnificent, perpetual clockwork mechanism whose cogs interlock in perfect synchronicity, right down to the escapement beating in his own heart. A perfection that has alone made possible the continuity of life over millions of years and gives living beings the chance to be more than what they were by a continual evolution or mutation or any other myriad ordered changes in their organism. This truth discloses itself only when all movement and activity is at perfect rest. To be humbled by this true knowledge of yourself is then the ultimate revelatory aspect of the solitary life.
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kṣānti (Sanskrit, Pali: क्षांति) is an attitude of equanimity that stems from patient acceptance and tolerance. It is akin to Apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια) for the Stoics or wise surrender—a word that got cheapened into an attitude of lethargic torpor over time. Wisdom is knowing that you cannot expect people or events to conform to your expectations and that all planning must inevitably lead to disappointment. So rather than insisting the world behave in ways that you think would be pleasing to you, you can find delight in the actions of others and the serendipitous uncertainty of life.
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There is a certain power in faith—not just a faith in God, or love, or science, but faith in the human spirit—that drives and sustains us. Of the Buddha’s Five Strengths, pañcabalāni (Sanskrit: पञ्चबलानि), a faith or conviction that your actions do matter comes first. And because your actions impact all things around you, you must exercise them with care or you’ll end up creating a lot of suffering for yourself and for those around you. Faith in yourself and others gives you hope and optimism so that you can pursue with eagerness those processes of life that challenge or consternate without falling into the black pit of depression and despair. Faith is what sustains humanity’s progress right from individual accomplishments through to advancements in the sciences. We do not know, we can only guess, and our guesses are guided by faith in laws. Einstein believed in what he called a cosmic religion—to him, less a religion than a "rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection." Faith in a benevolent God or universe rather than an authoritarian figure or punitive force actually suppresses your impulse to get angry or frightened by stimulating a tiny area at the front of your brain called the anterior cingulate. When you choose to believe in a loving divinity, kindness, compassion, and understanding prevail in the active centres of your brain. Conversely, the belief in a punitive, vindictive, and authoritarian God evokes feelings of fear and retribution, priming the brain for fighting. So choose to have more faith in humanity and yourself and you’ll find a kinder and more forgiving world around you.
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Māna (Sanskrit: मान) is an attitude of excessive pride in yourself and your abilities. It is conceit that stems from your overrated sense of personal value, based solely on your qualifications, wealth, learning, or any of the other markers of social standing. Study after study has shown that people tend to think that they are better than average, especially when it comes to their abilities and their conduct in issues of morality. As social animals, we need to present ourselves as being beneficial and effective so that we attract as many friends, lovers, or collaborators as we can. The problem is that beneath this thin veneer of public posturing is the vague uncertainty that you are not quite as knowledgeable and efficient as you believe; that your learnings and achievements are not as profound as you believe. It can be no other way—all you have achieved and accomplished is more by dint of luck and circumstance than any innate ability and there is always going to be someone else who will outdo you in favourably presenting themselves to others. Very soon, your world is filled with millions of other challengers, countless numbers of whom will present opportunities, real or imaginary, for games of undignified oneupmanship or other narcissistic pursuits. So instead of constantly vying for social standing, be kinder to yourself. Accept that you are constantly learning and growing and that you do not have to compete to prove your value. You’ll find that you’re more empathetic towards other people; that you nurture others’ ideas and ways of doing things; and that your world, in general, is less caustic.
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Śaucam (Sanskrit: शौच) is the quality of having a clean and pure body and mind. It does not imply sterility of thought and action, but rather a conscious effort to disassociate from anger and hate in all its various forms. Science has shown that words and images laden with hate and anger are literally vitriol in the mind, destroying healthy neural circuits and priming the body’s defence mechanisms. Even expressing or listening to angry thoughts can disturb the normal neural functioning of the brain. On the other hand, simply focussing on an image of peace and happiness, either a person or a place, builds new neural circuits of compassion and empathy—the two qualities vital for you to allow yourself to love and be loved.
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In strong feelings and emotions like lust, anger, or fear, there is always a part of the mind that is enjoying it and another part that is suffering. A strong feeling is destructive in intent because it seek to subjugate whatever free-flowing libido is not bound by the rules of its reason or out of reach of its desire and, as such, it is exerted at cost to another living creature. Merely thinking such thoughts sends a rush of adrenaline and cortisol through your system, preparing your body to attack or defend itself, should the need arise. The heightened blood pressure and glandular activation continues for a long time after the thought has receded, keeping your body in its aroused state and fooling you into thinking that you’re still angry or fearful. Yet, you wouldn’t have such thoughts if there wasn’t a part of you that invited them in. When you practice thinking that is imbued with lust, antipathy, malice, and delusion, you habituate the mind in that way and catalyse all the actions that follow in their suit. So instead of paying heed to the loud, obnoxious voice of hate, try to give voice to the part of you that is suffering and sees the pain being caused within and without.
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Asaktih (आसक्ति) is the absence of the desire to own things. According to the ancient traditions, ownership is a fallacy. You cannot own anything because all things by their very nature are transitory. Your house, all kinds of property, your knowledge and faculties, and even your own body are not immutable. Life gives you a chance to possess these things for a while, to enjoy their presence, facility, and security. But when social status itself is a commodity that can be purchased by acquiring things of value or exclusivity, you must constantly acquire new objects of desire to stay ahead of the competition. Buddhism tells us that suffering arises when we try to tenaciously hold on to things. While you can plainly see that all material things, including your physical body, are subject to the ravages of time and circumstance, it is not so obvious that this frailty extends to your thoughts and what you consider to be the very essence of your true self. The image that you have of yourself is only a rough precis of your past experiences and inculcated beliefs. Your personal identity was always meant to be a subtle tempering of your true nature with time and circumstance. More suffering ensues when you try to hold on to a fixed notion of your self; try to always “keep your composure” and never act “out of character”. Instead, experiment with new ways of being and allow yourself to be surprised and even elated occasionally. Freedom is won when you set things free, starting with yourself.
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In the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra with sudden deep insight that “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form”. By this he means that all things are the same; not this or that; not good or bad; not ugly or beautiful. The quest for beauty is central to western culture and thinking. All your life you have been brought up to discern between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which is not. It is a means of escapism and another way that ego distorts reality in favour of the things it finds more preferable. All sorts of philosophical posturing are also part of the distortion process. After all, when you judge things as ugly or worthless to you, it is easy to dismiss them and ignore their existence. And the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy—like the Amazon rainforest that has been systematically decimated for decades or the four interconnected oceans around us that are at levels of toxicity surpassing the last ice age. Besides the sociological and ecological impacts that this type of thinking entails, the quest for a pretty little world brings with it all kinds of suffering. Śūnyatā (शून्यता) is the state of mind in which you deliberately refrain from fitting concepts or labels to ordinary things. But even when you divest these things of their names and associations, there’s the empty space left behind—don’t label that either. When you make no distinction between this and that, you’ll accept all things simply as they are as part of a continuum, each caused by and causing the other.
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Your values are literally what’s valuable to you. Human beings are inherently goal-oriented and we tend to act in ways that get us to the things we want. Even at our noblest, we want to achieve something or get somewhere; whether to God, or love, or strength, or self-esteem, or security, or any of the other commodities that social order deems valuable and necessary. We want these these things for us and we want others to treat us in a ways that facilitate our goals, for evolution has made us social animals and there is a certain amount give-and-take and “playing by the rules”. But all the while, these ethical and moral norms of good social behaviour are what you more stringently hold others to while the same rules are more flexible when applied to yourself, so as to accommodate your own highly desired personal goals. You expect others to be truthful, kind, compassionate, humble, charitable, and so on towards you so that you can be comfortable and secure. But as you think and act within loosely constrained ethical and moral codes, conflicts inevitably develop as it is in our human nature to constantly align thought with action. Action that is contrary to thought diminishes your own self-confidence over time. If on the other hand, you were to give up your personal goals and uncompromisingly accept ethical values, you will no longer be conflicted by your personal half-values.
It is said that the bodhisattva (बोधिसत्त्व) has assimilated moral and ethical values to the point where they simply act. They do so not because they have resigned themselves to the rules, but because they embrace a spirit of openness. They already love, feel loved, are able to love, feel respected and have self-respect so they are not desperately grasping for the things of this world. They ask themselves questions like: What are the moments which give me the greatest satisfaction? … What are the most rewarding moments in my work and in my life, moments that make my life worthwhile? When you’re in the presence of such people it’s like entering another realm. They always appear to act correctly, always seem to do the right thing at the right time. So like the bodhisattva, when you give up wanting ordinary things and look for the simple things that you really need, life as a whole becomes simpler.
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Sthairyam (स्थैर्यम्) means perseverance and steadfast effort towards a goal that you have committed yourself to. Buddhism’s warning to the curious is "Better not to start, once begun better to finish." This simply means that half-work is just a dangerous as half-knowledge and there is no place for dilettantism when it comes to the serious work of putting your life in order. You can master any skill if you work persistently in simple and small steps, emphasising the positive and gently edging yourself forward. Practice precision, practice getting skilful in doing mundane tasks that you’d usually zone out of and instead, really be present. As you choose to give yourself completely to this work, there is the element of loss, of giving up the distractions and diversions that hitherto pulled you into into the easy flow of life. If you lament these things that you have to leave behind, the time you have had to give and give up for this work, and the still long road with its sacrifices ahead, you’ll hardly have the peace of mind to persevere. If instead, you focus on the next small step, the work seems less insurmountable, and lesser still thereafter.
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Your brain attempts to predict the outcome of every action and experience as it unfolds before you, from moment to moment. Millions of neurons talk to one another and try to anticipate what you will see, hear, smell, taste, and feel and the entire sequence of actions that you will take in a given situation. Experience now is “constructed” from the reference data and known facts already assimilated from your past experiences. So your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions can really be considered to be a fabrication—constructed not only from a myriad different sensations and revived images of sensations, but also the subtle faiths, fears, anticipations, instincts, superstitions, and blind impulses that plague the soul. As you chew on that first morsel of lunch, your brain is busy predicting the next sequence of actions you’ll take as you reach for that next spoonful and before you are consciously aware of the intention. To maintain a reasonable probability of success in any event, your brain must necessarily limit the variables of experience to those that are most familiar to you and hence, ipso facto, “good” for you. Problems arise when your brain makes broad associations and excludes entire categories of things from experience.
Whenever you agonize over what you should or should not do, you are really compartmentalising your experiences into categories, one pitted against the other. That this is good for you and this is bad. So instead of direct encounters with the real, moving world, the natural ebb and flow of life is stymied by judgements about whether you should be doing this or you should avoid doing that. In the process you add unnecessary complication to the basic simplicity of what you are. You don’t need to impose injunctions on your mind, but you must also ensure that it is sufficiently grounded so that it doesn’t wander. Meditation gives you the space to just experience the freewheeling movement of ego without avoidance, while enabling you to gently nudge the mind towards more skilful ways of working. Through this simplicity and straightforwardness, though fear and anger may arise they dissipate of their own accord and you actually have a chance to learn from your actions instead. When you attempt to direct your consciousness with injunctions, there is no learning—only petulant rebellion that eventually manifests itself in fear and tension.
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Duḥkha (दुःख) means all forms of pain, from the stubbing of your little toe to your grief over the loss of a loved one. Society teaches us to use any means necessary to get what we want, but excelling in personal fulfilment does not prepare us for the impermanence of life, the grief of loneliness, and the inevitability of death. Pain is part of the finite continuity of your life and cannot be avoided, but suffering can. Sorrow, anger, grief, or hurt cannot exist in isolation, they are brought on by some one, some experience, or some feeling. Beneath your fragile sense of personal identity, your real self can only exist as as a disconnected, fragmented, and dispersed set of characteristics that coalesce in myriad different ways from moment to moment. Even when you deny the transitory nature of your self, there is always the pain of awareness between the gaps of ego-consciousness. And since you cannot be what you wish to be, at least not always, your actions, thoughts, and feelings as they arise from moment to moment seem alien to you, causing you pain or the perpetual fear that results from repressed knowledge of pain. But if you keep running away from the things that are painful to contemplate, you paradoxically end up inviting more pain into your life as you try to stem every avenue by which pain my seep back into your life. And when memory is so deeply intertwined with language, words themselves seem to conjure up painful memories. Certain trigger words bring up entire sets of images and feelings from the past that were associated with pain, humiliation, or shame. The words—specifically the labels—that you give to the thing that is “pain” characterise it a certain way: a thing to be shunned and avoided. Similarly, pleasure becomes the thing to be coveted and pursued. It is perception that brings on these feelings and characterisations, but they are all mental fabrications or citta saṅkhāra (चित्त संस्कार), the labels that the mind gives to things—pleasure or pain, good or bad, liked or disliked, loved or feared. If there were no labels for these things that occur naturally in the psyche, then they would merely exist equally, as facts. You are not separate from your pain and it cannot be the thing that causes you to suffer. You are the pain, you cause the suffering. You cannot brush it aside. Making space for pain allows you to overcome it, not by vanquishing it, but by accepting it as part of yourself. When you include pain in your life, it no longer has such a hold over you. Instead of running away from pain, if you turn to face it, it reveals itself as a reflection of your own naked vulnerability, bereft of the stories that you previously used as diversions and the judgements that suppressed your own raw emotions.
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Vairāgyam (Sanskrit: वैराग्यम्) is the absence of any desire for material objects and sensual pleasures. Your mind has an insatiable desire for material things because they are firm and solid—things that you can hold on to in a world that is seemingly out of your control. You believe that you are irresistibly drawn to pleasure when you are actually running away from pain. The five skandhas (Sanskrit: स्कन्ध) in Buddhism are the physical and mental factors that compel you to cling tightly to the things of this world. First and foremost among the skandhas is form, or your appetite for the physical; then there are the sensations and feelings that form gives rise to, long after the physical experience has passed away, for perceptions continue to distort and transform direct experience by reframing it within your familiar mental constructs; then come the plentitude of associated thoughts that perception fosters accompanied by a proliferation of utilitarian explanations, which further distance you from the reality of the experience; finally you strive to maintain these states of consciousness so that you may continue to have all of the above, as if letting go would mean the loss of life itself. Suffering arises when you try to hold on to things that are gradually evolving and changing—like your character and your identity. Things that are meant to be a flexible summary of your experiential aggregates, ever-changing and capable of always being updated. When you contrive to be and act a certain way so as to be and have the things that you desire, your life is governed by a series of injunctions that you struggle to conform to. So learn to discern between your needs and desires; between what would help you grow and evolve and what would keep you entrenched in suffering.
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Ruminating is the act of reliving stressful events uncontrollably in your consciousness. It is a form of destructive contemplation where you hold on to things that make you frightened or angry. Why does your mind do this? Well, part of its natural instinct for survival is to take apart stressful experiences so that you can prepare for them in future, notwithstanding the total improbability that you will be exposed to the same set of experiential factors again. The mind is constantly trying to ward off feelings of guilt, anger, and loneliness and is ever-vigilant to the experiences that may trigger them. Ironically, it is this heightened state of awareness that leaves you more vulnerable to pain as the mind gradually increases the radius of known threats to your ego. Soon you can have any number of fearful memories that play off each other in succession. Since there is no way to suppress memories, you can learn to stay with them instead of running away from them. In meditation, you create a safe place to leisurely explore the dormant and underlying thoughts surrounding these fears without a pressing need to resolve them or get to their roots. In time, you will learn to simply let them go when they are found to be baseless or to gently take them apart when they point to something more meaningful.
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Do you often wonder if you only had a certain thing or if you could only get rid of this particular trouble then you could be… be happy, perhaps? Complaints about being depressed, being in an unhappy marriage, being in the wrong job, and so on, are the only socially acceptable forms of rebellion that our culture permits us to express for the alienation we feel from ourselves and the world around us. Coupled with that all-pervasive fear that life is running out of your hands like a stream of sand, it is but natural that you fear you will die without having lived. But what does it mean “to live”? Well, you’re shown every day what the good life is. Being unrealistically unencumbered by responsibilities is the hot commodity pedalled by so-called influencers. The good life is really just a good lie. A certain science measure livingness as the efficacy with which the process of life invokes an eagerness in the person who lives it such that life becomes “genuinely significant” to that person. To live then is to treat each moment with significance and be fully engrossed in it. And what of time? Must it only be like ungainly sand that infernally slips from your grasp? Time really is very experiential and personal. Think of that time when you were fully engrossed in a moment and then the series of follow-on moments that absorbed you completely with ever-increasing intensity so that time itself seemed to stretch out infinitely. In contrast, the ordinary moments when you are detached from the present, perfunctorily, in a trance, lost in misgivings of things past, time slips away, literally without the feeling of having lived it. You really have not lost anything and you haven’t lost out on anything, the lessons that the experience of life give you are universal—that you don’t lament the past and in turn, waste the present.
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All the time there is an inner emptiness that the veneer of your public persona conceals. The more you desperately try to live up to the things that you say you are or the things that your loved ones say that you are, however well-intentioned, the more you must seek validation of those attributes from the people who fill up your life or cross your path. How you look, what you know, how you conduct yourself becomes serious work. When the deep-seated doubts about who you are are not assuaged, you feel “hurt” and either slump into sadness or retaliate against those who disagree with your particular characterisation. In either case, you’re not likely to sit peacefully with yourself for very long as you keep conjuring up images of past insults, hurtful situations, and the perpetrators of your hurt. When you’re desperately trying to maintain your fragile ego, even happy moments of serenity are instantly embittered by memories of past slights. When you have contracted all these ways of losing face, there’s not much energy left for your brain to capture and comprehend what’s really going on around you.
Try to accept yourself for who you are, and tear down the facade of who you think you ought to be. Remember that you are always evolving and, as such, you don’t have to hold on tightly to previous notions of yourself. The spectrum of what you are and what you feel springs from the basic life stream coursing through you. You can allow yourself to just be who you need to be in this moment without needing to indelibly identify yourself with simple, transient states of being.
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Your thalamus (the part of your brain that regulates your consciousness and alertness) makes no distinction between inner and outer realities, and thus any idea, if contemplated long enough, will take on the semblance of reality. Your belief becomes neurologically real and your brain will respond accordingly. But for someone else, who has meditated on a different set of beliefs or goals, a different reality emerge.
Your thoughts clearly affect the neurological functioning of your body and optimism is essential for maintaining a healthy brain. Positive thoughts neurologically suppress negative thoughts. When you change the way you think, you begin to change your outward circumstances. Consciousness, reality, your mind, and your beliefs are profoundly interconnected and inseparable from the functioning of your brain.
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When you say or think one thing and do another, you separate the you that thinks thoughts from the you that does the deed. And since there is discord between the two selves, by and by you lose faith and confidence in thought and action. When thought is separated from action, reaction reigns supreme. When you try to be as simple as possible instead of the sophisticated mess that most people aspire to be you automatically act and speak in a straightforward way. You’ll find that even when you make mistakes, get angry, or feel fearful, in your own simple way you are able to learn from your reactions instead of cloaking them in layers of denial and rationalisation.
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The mind’s innate tendency is to take apart experiences from memory and look for threats, points of failure, and opportunities for improvement. This is a part of its priming towards survival and expansion. Given how unreliable memory is, it doesn’t take much for the mind to pick holes in everything you have done, depending on your current level of neurosis. It's easy to focus on your failures, so learn to give yourself pep talks. Celebrate the small wins with a smile, a pat on the back, and an encouraging word—“you handled that really well… you’re doing so good right now… tomorrow you’ll do even better.” Eventually you will find yourself gravitating towards the things that make you feel good instead of those that make you feel bad.
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With patience and love, you can learn to feel comfortable in your place so you return to it, tend it, nurture it, and make it your utopia. But to be still, to do nothing, to deal with the turbulence of the mind is challenging and perhaps not too pleasant at times. Cultivating the discipline to be still is not easy, it is difficult for everybody. Successful people manoeuvre around the mind’s apathy and laziness by creating a safe and stimulating space that they enjoy coming back to. But a happy place alone isn’t enough to placate the mind if it is primed to easy distraction and instant gratification. Break the habit of checking your messages and media streams each time you feel the urge to do so and take a step back to look at the neediness that triggers it. Successful people practice doing nothing. In their quiet moments, when they feel no desire to do anything, they don’t try to fill up that space with “good” or “bad” things, such as reading a book or doing something “constructive”. They stay with the emptiness; listening to the rustle of the wind outside, or the myriad other sounds of silence. Finally, aim for a goal; aim for progress towards insight or endurance or even happiness. With a purpose and focal point in sight, the mind naturally gravitates towards the source of its fruition.
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A judgement by definition involves a comparison of one thing with another. As you gauge the actions of yourself or others against some arbitrary bar of excellence, you will come up short when pitted against the innumerable, radically different beings in this rapidly moving world. And when you judge things that others say or do as bad, you are most likely reacting to slivers of that thought or deed within yourself. If you dig a little deeper, you will also notice that those things are linked to so-called negative emotions—be they anger, sadness, modes of depression, and so on. By judging them and dismissing them you suppress the vital insights they provide as to what is really going on and going wrong.
Ārjavam (आर्जवम) is the quality of integrity in thoughts, words and deeds. When your thoughts are at odds with what you do or say, you separate yourself as thinker and doer. And with this separation it is easy to eschew the need for any accountability of action. On the other hand, wisdom is a measure of how judiciously you choose between the things you like to do that give you bad results and the things you don’t like to do that give you good results. So, instead of being judgemental, instead of categorising things as good or bad, slow down, examine the outcome and try to use that insight to give you better results in your life.
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The things that you think you lack draw you into their pursuit and string you along in vain hope. In this age of rampant materialism, we are lured into a world of desires and made painfully aware of the limited time we have to acquire them. Even in pursuing your noblest intentions, such as seeking love and companionship, you take as much as you can for however long you can; for when you have made a thing of even the most sublime, you may pursue and collect it with reckless abandon. Learn to discern between what you need and what you want. It’s worth giving up the lesser for that which is more meaningful.
So, as much as it may pain you to close the door on those dreams, aspirations, and goals, the things you have pined for lord knows how many long, long years, you know that you must give up this struggle to have, give up this wanting. Objects of desire lose their hold on you and life finally slows up for you, giving you the chance to appreciate the little that you have that is truly meaningful.
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As you try you prevent. You want so badly to get to something, somewhere, and even in your most noble endeavours, like this humble practice, you seek to get to something; whether to love, or enlightenment, or peace. This getting is the paradoxical block in your work. You cannot cling to the things of life. When you try so desperately to hold on to something, you choke the life out of it. It is not yours to keep, but you may welcome it into your presence and receive its nourishment until it goes away. Even refreshing, life-giving breath is given to you. You cannot hold on to it, you must let it go to take in the next one, and one day, you will let go of it for the last time.
So, for now, give up this struggle to have and notice what already is.
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You do not have to hold on to your old karma—everything that people have done to you, everything that you have done to yourself, all the pains, illnesses, all the evil, all the good—because none of it exists in this moment. We imbue past experiences with too much meaning, when in reality they are, in fact, largely intellectual fabrications where the insignificant fragments are magnified out of proportion. But it is not always easy to let go, especially of the perceptually bad fragments, for the mind seems to cling tightly to experiences that have seemed threatening to it. Remind yourself that your actions are not as gravely consequential as you imagine them to be and that the only serious work is right here, in this moment, as you sit on the mat. You are here now and you have a chance to do good; to build something that lasts; to extend yourself. What matters now is the work you do on yourself and the insights you gain in the process.
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