Living Bhagavad Gita 023: Journey to the East

A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.

[Continued from the previous post.]

The name given to the first chapter of the Gita is Arjuna Vishada Yoga – the Yoga of Arjuna’s Vishada. The word vishada is translated variously as melancholy, sorrow, grief, depression, despondency, sadness, misery and so on.  

We just saw in the last article how Arjuna surrendered to melancholy, dropped his bow and arrows and collapsed into his chariot telling Krishna he will not fight, he finds no point in fighting and killing, no point in winning the kingdom, no point in pleasures or even in life itself. Kim no rajyena govinda, kim bhogair jeevitena vaa, he asks: “What good is the kingdom, Krishna, and what good are pleasures or life itself?”

All over the world today there is a lot of discussion about depression which is fast spreading and assuming the form of a wild fire that can consume everything. I was part of the faculty team giving an intensive training programme for doctors at XLRI School of Business and Human Resources and we were having a pre-programme dinner when the topic of depression came up. Several professors felt depression is fast becoming the most dangerous problem the world is facing today with a large number of lives claimed every day. This was of course in the days before the covid-19 pandemic.  

Bright young people seem to be particularly susceptible to depression. In his bestselling book The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology, Shawn Achor speaks about depression in Harvard University where happiness was the subject of his research for several years. Achor says “despite all its magnificent facilities, a wonderful faculty, and a student body made up of some of America’s (and the world’s) best and brightest, it is home to many chronically unhappy young men and women. In 2004, for instance, a Harvard Crimson poll found that as many as 4 in 5 Harvard students suffer from depression at least once during the school year, and nearly half of all students suffer from depression so debilitating they can’t function.” Shawn Achor then goes on to say that “This unhappiness epidemic is not unique to Harvard. A Conference Board survey released in January of 2010 found that only 45 percent of workers surveyed were happy at their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling. Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960. Every year the age threshold of unhappiness sinks lower, not just at universities but across the nation. Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old.”

Speaking about depression, the Himalayan monk Om Swami says in his book When All Is Not Well: Depression and Sadness: “Depression isn’t just sadness. It is emptiness, it is misery. It is pain and nothingness at once. When you are truly depressed, you lack the ability or will to cheer yourself up. No one just ‘has depression’. You suffer from it.”

Continuing, Om Swami explains what depression feels like. “You will wake at 5, 6, maybe 7 a.m., feeling as though you had only just fallen asleep... If you don’t have to be somewhere, you could lie in bed for another three hours; too tired, too miserable and pathetic to crawl out of your bed. Or maybe you will sleep until 1 p.m., because it’s so much easier to sleep through most of the day than actually live it, and you’re so unbelievably tired anyway. You will push through the day, knowing that every hour will be a struggle and not knowing how you will feel tomorrow. People will ask what is wrong, and you will simply smile and say, ‘Nothing, I’m just tired.’ ...You will spend your days not only lost in the haze of depression, but your mind will be so consumed with these thoughts of escaping and self-destruction that you think you could explode…”

But the important question is why so many people are feeling depressed today. Why is depression spreading across the world like a deadly epidemic today?

The reasons are not too difficult to find. For one thing, our life has become too fast. We are obsessed with speed – in real life as well as in virtual life. We have become intolerant of slowness. And stillness? Of course, we have grown strangers to it. We have forgotten that all that is beautiful in life comes from stillness. Creativity comes from stillness. Intuition comes from stillness. Art and music come from stillness. The essence of dance is not movement but the stillness that is its substratum, from which arises and into which it goes back. All inventions and discoveries are made in moments of stillness. Intuition comes from stillness, insights come from stillness, healing comes from stillness. Medical professionals have long recognized that silence plays an important part in healing. For instance, the experience of even a little real silence can produce physiological changes that neutralize the effects of stress.“When you are still, you find that your perception of life is at its purest,” says Ron Rothbun in his book The Way Is Within.

We are all familiar with the story of Archimedes who ran through the streets of Athens shouting eureka, eureka. The Athenian ruler had given him an assignment. Someone had gifted the ruler a crown and he wanted to find out if the crown was of pure gold or some alloy had been mixed with the gold. The specific gravity of gold was known then, but no one knew how to measure the mass of an irregular object like the crown. Archimedes was the best scientist of the day and he struggled for weeks to find a solution to the problem. If only there was a way to measure the mass of the crown! Then you could decide whether the crown was pure gold or not.

Eventually Archimedes gave up his struggles admitting defeat and sank into a tub for a relaxed bath. It was then, in that moment when there were not struggles in his mind and the mind had become still with his acceptance of defeat, that he noticed water spilling over from the tub as his body sank into the tub. That very instant insight was born, a great discovery happened: the mass of water that spilled out was equal to the mass of his body that had submerged in the water. The quantity of water that flows out when a substance is immersed in a vessel full of water is equal to the mass of the substance.

In that still moment, his problem had been solved and climbing out of the tub he ran through the streets of Athens shouting that word that has now become part of every language in the world: eureka, eureka!

We all have had the experience of something, a name, we had forgotten coming back to us the moment we give up the struggles and the mind becomes still.

All science and all technology is the product of still moments. All that is precious to humanity are products of inner stillness, of the mind is that is empty of restless thoughts. The saying that the empty mind is the devil’s workshop is completely wrong. The empty mind is God’s workshop!

Indian culture says the universe is born of God’s empty mind. The Taittiriya Upanishad says, “Sa tapo’tapyata. Sa tapas taptvaa idam sarvam asrjata. Yadidam kincha.” “He did tapas. Having done tapas, he created all this. He created all that exists.” It is from the mind of God that has become empty because of tapas that the universe comes into being.      

There is story told about the world famous painter Raphael and an unknown woodcutter. One morning as the woodcutter was going to the forest to cut wood, he saw Raphael sitting by a lake, lazily picking up pebbles and dropping them into the lake. The woodcutter shook his head in disapproval – what a waste of time! – and went on his way. As the woodcutter was returning home with his load of firewood, he saw Raphael still sitting there picking up pebbles and throwing them into the lake! What an idiot, he thought! I have done a whole day’s work and the moron is still sitting there and throwing pebbles into the lake!

We know today that such a woodcutter existed because of Raphael, one of the greatest painters the world has known.

In the ancient Indian tradition, in fact all over the world, we began everything with a few moments of silence, of mental stillness, of prayer. But today stillness, and even slowness, is looked down upon. It is one of the greatest casualties of the age of speed.      

The virtues of slowness are unlimited, says Carl Honore in his book In praise of slowness. In his book Slowing Down to the Speed of Life, Richard Carlson says more or less the same thing. And it is that slowness that we have rejected in favour of speed! Faster, faster, ever faster, says our culture!

Slowing down and experiencing stillness is one of our basic needs – it is as essential as breathing. Our brains go completely haywire unless we experience slowness and stillness on a regular basis. Which is exactly what is not happening today. And that is taking a heavy toll on young minds today, especially gifted young minds, leading to depression and all that depression leads to. The philosophy aaraam hai haraam has to go. Laziness is bad, sluggishness is bad, sloth and apathy are bad, but relaxation is not. It is the most healing thing most of us know, apart from sleep. In fact sleep is a form of relaxation too. The second highest form of relaxation, after meditation which is the highest form of relaxation in existence.

We need to spend more time ‘plucking daisies’, we need to spend more time climbing mountains, we need to spend more time unfocused and in ‘purposeless’ activities, like Raphael picking up pebbles and throwing them into the lake. We need to give our souls time to catch up with us. That is the medicine for fighting the insane obsession with speed that drives us away from our own calm inner centre.  

A European explorer was in the Amazon forests, exploring the flora and fauna there. He had hired a supervisor and the supervisor had hired native people to help him in his work. One day passed the explorer and the natives hurrying from one thing to another, then another day and then yet another day. On the fourth day when the explorer was ready to start he found not one native was ready. When enquired, the supervisor gave him an incredibly beautiful reply. He told the explorer: they are giving time for their souls to catch up with them!

We all need to give time for our souls to catch up with us.  

One of the most beautiful Chuang Tzu stories ever says:

The prince discovered when he returned from the top of the mountain that he had mislaid the Priceless Pearl up on the mountain.

He sent his generals and their armies to search for it, but they could not find it. He employed Huang-Ti, the vehement debater, to find the Pearl, but Huang-Ti was unable to find it. He sent his skilled gardeners and his artisans to find it, but they too came home empty-handed.

Finally, in despair, having tried everyone else, he sent Purposeless to the mountain, and Purposeless found the pearl immediately.

"How odd it is", mused the Prince, "that it was Purposeless who found it!"

We are all birds meant to fly in the open sky. Those who have known the truth, the Upanishad rishis for instance, call us amritasya putraah – children of the Immortal, each one of us a divine spark. The Mundaka Upanishad tells us: yathaa sudeeptaat paavakaad visphulingaah sahasrashah prabhavante saroopaah, tathaa aksharaad vividhaah somya bhaavaah prajaayante tatra chaivaapi yanti: Just as sparks in their thousands are born from a roaring fire, each of the same nature as the fire itself, so do, dear one, beings come forth from the Imperishable One and return to It. [Mu.Up.2.1]   

No, we are not meant to spend our lives hopping about on the ground searching for worms but to stretch out our wings, soar up and enjoy the bliss of the boundless skies – the boundless skies of consciousness. We are meant for the bhooma, the vast, and not for the alpa, the small. The owl will be satisfied with the rotting body of a mouse, but not the phoenix which will touch no food other than certain sacred fruits and drink only from the clearest springs. The chakora lives on moonbeams, says Indian mythology, and will touch nothing else. The way man lives today is like the phoenix being forced to live on rotten mice and the chakora being forced to live on the food that pigs eat.

By and large, man has forgotten the higher. We have become flotsams with no roots in our spiritual selves. We are living not the philosophy of the rising son as we did in the past but the philosophy of the setting sun. Frustration and depression are bound to be there.        

O0O

As we saw, the vishada that happened to Arjuna in the battlefield is called by different names such as melancholy, sorrow, grief, depression, despondency, sadness, misery and so on

But there is a different name for it. India calls it vairagya, dispassion, and considers it sacred. Vairagya is the first step in the journey to the east, the journey to the land where the sun rises, the journey to the source of all light. Light as bright as the light of a thousand suns, light before which all other lights pale.

There is mantra that is traditionally chanted when we do arati, ritually show burning lamps before a sacred idol. Na tatra sooryo bhaati na chandrataarakam nemaa vidyuto bhaanti kutoyam agnih; tam eva bhaantam anubhaaati saravam tasya bhaasaa sarvam idam vibhaati, says the mantra. “The sun does not shine there, nor the moon or the stars. How then will this fire? That alone shines and everything else shines after it, reflecting its light.” The journey to that source of all light begins with what Arjuna is experiencing now and that is why India considers vairagya sacred.   

This is something that happens only to sensitive people. Much of the time the kind of questions Arjuna asks, the feelings Arjuna feels, come to us from a great shower of blessing that descends upon us. It is ishwra-anugraha, the grace of God, says India.

The rishi of the Svetashvatara Upanishad declares boldly and unhesitatingly:

vedaaham etaṃ puruṣhaṃ mahaantam aaditya-varṇaṃ tamasaḥ parastaat;
tam eva viditvaa atimṛtyum eti naanyaḥ panthaa vidyate'yanaaya. Sv. Up. 3.8

“I know the Great Purusha, He who is luminous like the sun and beyond darkness. Only by knowing Him does one go beyond death. There is no other path worth travelling!” 

Vairagya is the invitation to begin our journey on the only path worth travelling.

It is not only Arjuna who has grace showered on him as he stands in the chariot driven by Krishna in the middle of the two armies in Kurukshertra, but all of us, the entire humanity. Because it is in response to this vairagya he felt that the Bhagavad Gita was born on a shukla paksha ekadashi day, on the eleventh day of the bright lunar fortnight in the month of Margashirsha, more than five thousand and one hundred years ago. 

A well known story from the Mahabharata says that both Arjuna and Duryodhana went to meet Krishna seeking his help before the war began. Duryodhana was the first to enter Krishna’s bed chamber and he went and took a seat by the head of the bed. A few moments later Arjuna entered the chamber and he too could have gone and taken a seat at the head of the bed as Duryodhana had done. Instead, he went and stood at Krishna’s feet. When Krishna opened his eyes a few moments later it was naturally Arjuna who was standing at the foot of the bed that he saw first. As we all know, it was on him that Krishna’s grace fell in the form of his presence with him during the war and as his driver.

Krishna is grace. The greatest possible grace! With Krishna on your side, the impossible becomes possible. With Krishna on your side miracles happen. Mookam karoti vaachaalam pangum landhayate girim, yat-kripaa tam aham vande parama-ananda-maadhavam, says one of the shlokas traditionally chanted before the study of the Gita: “I bow down to Krishna, who is supreme bliss itself, with whose grace the speechless become eloquent and the lame crosses over mountains.”

The choice that Arjuna made in Krishna’s bedchamber, rejecting the Narayani Sena, rejecting the power of a mighty army and choosing just Krishna, Krishna’s grace, it is that choice that is now showering on him in the form of the Bhagavad Gita. All we have to do is to make that choice, everything else happens by itself. That is why Krishna concludes his teachings in the Gita by saying:

sarvadharmaan parityajya maam ekam sharanam vraja; aham twaa sarvapaapebhyo mokshayishyaami maa shuchah BG 18.66

“Abandoning all dharmas, take refuge in me alone; I will liberate you from all sins. Have no grief.”   

Duryodhana missed Krishna’s grace throughout his life. After the war was over, Gandhari curses Krishna saying he could have and should have helped her son but did not. But grace can shower on you only when you are open to it. If a pot remains upside down when the sky showers rains, not a drop will go inside even if an entire season passes. In fact, the only thing you need to deserve grace is openness to it, receptivity to it, which is what Duryodhana did not have.  There were a thousand occasions in his life when he could have taken refuge in Krishna, but rejects every single one of them.

There is a famous Indian story about a beggar who was crossing a bridge, walking with a stick in hand. The story says that Goddess Parvati takes pity on the poor beggar and requests Shiva to bless him with wealth. Shiva says there is no point because even if he gives wealth to him, he will not get it because he is not open to his blessing. But the heart of the goddess is the heart of a mother and she insists that the man be given wealth. Shiva agrees and a treasure chest appears on the bridge. The moment the chest appears on the bridge, the beggar has a thought: “I am young now and I can see well, but what will happen to me when I grow old and lose my eyesight? I must practice walking blind right from now.”  With that thought, he closes he eyes and walking with the help of the stick crosses the rest of the bridge, missing the treasure completely!

Throughout his life Duryodhana behaved like that beggar.

Whereas Arjuna chose Krishna lifetimes ago. The Mahabharata tells us they have been friends across lifetimes, meditating in the Himalayas together.

There is a mantra in the Mundaka Upanishad that my teacher Swami Dayananda Saraswati was very fond of. During the years when I was in the Sandeepany Gurukula and learning timeless Indian wisdom from him, he must have quoted this mantra hundreds of times.

pareekshya lokaan karmachitaan braahmano nirvedam aayaan naastyakrtah krtena tadvijnanartham sa gurum evabhigacched samitpaanih shrotriyam brahmanishtham. Mu.Up.1.2.12 

“Having examined all in the world that is gained through actions, after attaining nirveda and realizing that the uncreated cannot be achieved through actions, let [him who has thus become] a brahmana, approach with samit in hand a guru who is learned [in the traditional spiritual lore] and rooted in the Brahman.”

The soul of the entire Indian spiritual culture could be found in that one mantra. Before approaching the guru and being qualified for his grace, we must developed nirveda towards all that can be attained through our own power, through our actions. Nirveda means vairagya – what Arjuna is experiencing at the moment. It is when this vairagya is born in your heart that you become a brahmana – one whose entire focus is on  attaining the Brahman, one whose concentration now is only on attaining the spiritual goal. And then he should go to his guru with samit in hand. Samit is kindling used in sacrificial fire. Carrying that to your guru is the symbol of your joyful willingness to serve the master.

Duryodhana is still far from the nirveda the Upanishad talks about. He is not willing to surrender to Krishna and therefore is not ready for the grace. He has not yet developed what makes you a brahmana ­– the all consuming urge to abandon everything else and walk the path of shreyas to reach the land of the ultimate good, the land of light, having reached which you never return – yad gatvaa na nivartante. He is still very much with the loka of wealth, power, position, sensual pleasures and so on.

Arjuna has developed that urge and he is ready. That is why he is asking, “What good is the kingdom, Krishna, and what good are pleasures or life itself?” The vishada he is experiencing at the moment is the clear sign of that.

All vishadas, depressions, are not bad, some are good. Some can take you to the higher. They come to you from divine grace. With them begins our journey to the east, the greatest journey we will ever make.

O0O

To Meditators: Practical Suggestions for Achieving Inner Silence

Dharamshala,
India: Photo by Anagha M.

I teach a course called Zen and the Executive Mind in one of the top business schools in India. Zen means meditation and meditation is something to be practiced rather than discussed; and naturally, practice of meditation is central to the course. A common difficulty practitioners of meditation run into is their inability to achieve inner silence – not just my students, but all meditators all over the world face this problem. It is for this reason that one of the most frequently asked questions about meditation is about the difficulty to control the mind, to control the thoughts in the mind during meditation. In fact, as you move into meditation, the mind appears to become more restless, more chaotic.  It is only partly true though; the other part is that normally we are not aware of the chaos in the mind, but in meditation we become aware of it. In this short article, we are going to take a look at how we can achieve inner silence in meditation and retain that inner silence throughout the day.

One of the first mistakes we make is to believe that the moment we sit down to meditate the mind will immediately become quiet, still. Stillness of the mind is the end of meditation, not its starting point. In the journey of meditation, thoughts are going to be with us for a long, long time. In fact, even when we reach the highest peaks of meditation, which happens only to deeply committed meditators, thoughts will still be there in the mind. Meditation literature speaks of two kinds of samadhi, the highest peak of meditation – savikalpa samadhi and nirvikalpa samadhi. Even at the stage of savikalpa samadhi, vikalpas will be there in the mind. That is what the word savikalpa samadhi means – samadhi with vikalpas. In this state there still are thoughts, ideas, and so on in the mind, though they do not disturb the meditator.  It is only in nirvikalpa samadhi that the mind becomes completely still, silent. There are no more thoughts, no ideas, nothing, except pure awareness itself. In that state, in the words of my parama guru, Swami Sivananda Saraswati, “the mind loses its own consciousness and becomes identical with the object of meditation”.

So if even in the lower samadhi the mind has thoughts and ideas in it, how can we expect the mind to become still with a few days or weeks of sitting in meditation, a few minutes a day? Our expectations become our enemy, the enemy of our achieving meditative stillness.

For meditation is not something that we can rush into, but something we gently float into, something that happens to us – and happens on its own, like sleep that comes on its own. There is nothing we can do to make it happen, except let it happen and surrender to it when it happens. The more we struggle to make sleep happen to us, the more we try to force sleep to come to us, the more it evades us. It happens when we relax, when we let go of all struggles, all efforts. Exactly in the same way, meditation happens when we let go of all efforts, all struggles, and do not even wait for it, but just let go. There is no other way for meditation to happen to us.

Yam esha vrinute tasya sa vivrunute tanum svam – says the Up0anishad. It reveals itself only to the one whom it chooses, even as a shy bride reveals her body only to the one whom she chooses for herself. And the requirement to be chosen is to let go – let go of thoughts, of worries, of plans, of the list of things to do, the deadlines.

And above all, to let go of the need to be in control, for the time being at least. My years of experience with meditation tells me that people who have a need to be always in control are the ones that have the hardest time getting into meditation. 

But what happens if you want to let go but are not able to do it because thoughts keep coming into your mind? What happens when you sit in meditation and try to let go of your worries, your thoughts, your problems, all that keep you away from inner silence but instead of inner silence, what you have is a mad, chaotic rush of thoughts and images, madder and more chaotic than before you sat down to meditate?

Struggling to stop the thoughts is useless because the struggle itself becomes another obstruction. Worrying about it is useless, because the very worry becomes an obstruction. The only thing we can do really is develop what masters call the witness attitude, sakshi bhava.  

A book that influenced me deeply and changed my life forever when I was in my early teens is Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the story of a boy in ancient India, at the time of the Buddha, with the same name Buddha had when he was a prince. Young Siddhartha joins numerous spiritual traditions that flourished in India at that time, including that of Buddha, meets Buddha personally, but he is not able to reach inner stillness. Eventually, as an old man, towards the end of his life, while working as a ferry man taking people across a river, it is by watching the river flowing by that he finds inner silence.

That is exactly what we have to do. Thoughts will be there when we sit down to meditate, there will worries, plans, deadlines, all kinds of things. Rather than fighting them, just become a watcher, a witness. You become Siddhartha and let your mind become the flowing river. You become the sky and let your mind become the clouds floating by.

This can do wonders for you.

Yes, it will take time, but slowly you will find the thoughts in your mind are losing their feverishness, a kind of serenity is coming to them. It is like a torrent becoming a serene flow. From then on the journey is smoother. And when you discover inner silence, you will find there is nothing in existence more beautiful than that.

The Mundaka Upanishad has this hauntingly beautiful mantra:

Dwa suparna sayuja sakhaya

Samanam vriksham parishaswajate;

Tayor anyah pippalam swadu atti

Anashnan anyo abhijakashiti.

There are two birds perched on a tree, friends, always together; of these two, one keeps eating the sweet fruits of the tree, the other keeps watching on.

As the Upanishad says, we are the bird that keeps eating the fruits of the tree – the pleasant and unpleasant experiences of life – and at the same time we are the bird that keeps on watching, uninvolved, just witnessing. What is to be done in meditation is to become the bird that watches on, at least for the duration of sitting in meditation.

Another help is to cultivate the daivi sampad that the sixteenth chapter of the Gita speaks of – positive virtues such as fearlessness, purity of mind, self-mastery, uprightness and so on. The Gita advises us to develop samata – equanimity – in success and failure, while dealing with pleasant and unpleasant people, with enemies and friends. That too helps a lot. Patanjali speaks of the need to begin meditation by cultivating the five yamas and the five niyamas – non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, abstinence from over-indulgence, non-possessiveness, cleanliness, contentment, discipline, self-study and surrender to existence.

What Inner Silence Can Do For Us 

“When you are still, you find that your perception of life is at its purest,” says Ron Rothbun, in The Way Is Within. One of the first things inner stillness does for us is to make our perceptions keener and clearer. This is true about mental perceptions as well as about physical perceptions.  I do not think it needs to be explained that when our mind is disturbed, our perceptions are distorted. The mind is like a mirror and everything we see, we see through it, in it. Just as the distorted mirrors you find a village fair elongates or flattens out or in other ways distort your image falling in them, when the mind is restless, not at peace, all our perceptions are distorted. A case in point is what one of my students did on a pilgrimage to Kailas-Manas Sarovar. He was upset because he had to stay back at Manas and couldn’t proceed to Kailas and when the tent in which he was staying at Manas caught fire, instead of pouring water to douse it, he emptied a can of kerosene oil over it. Many of us have made terrible road accidents because our mind was not still while driving. Under pressure even great executives take wrong decisions. It has been known for airport traffic control personnel to become the cause of airplane accidents because their minds were upset under stress. The timeless Vedantic metaphor of rajju-sarpa-bhranti is a beautiful example for how our perceptions are distorted when the mind is not still. In semi-darkness, we see a piece of rope lying on the floor and because we are afraid, the mind has lost its stillness, we mistake it for a snake and scream in terror.

When your mind is still, it becomes easier to get into what modern psychology calls the flow state. And similarly, when you get into the flow state, your mind becomes still. In a way we can say flow is a state of still mind. Flow is what sportsmen frequently speak of as the zone. In flow your efficiencies increase manifold, you are ccompletely involved in what you are doing, totally focused, entirely concentrated. Your mind experiences no distractions, even when highly distracting events happen right next to you as in the case of a neurosurgeon who remained focused on the brain surgery he was doing in spite of the roof collapsing behind him. You have great inner clarity. There are no confusions, no doubts. In flow you know exactly what needs to be done, your perceptions attain absolute clarity.  You feel absolutely challenged, fully engaged and you experience a feeling of ecstasy, a sense of rapture, so that the work itself becomes self-motivating, without a need for other rewards, as happens to a mountaineer, for instance, when he tackles a dangerous cliff.

George Leonard, author of The Ultimate Athlete, speaks of a sportsman’s experience of being in the zone, in the flow state: “Long distance runner Michael Spino was training one rainy day along dirt and asphalt. After the first mile, he realized something extraordinary was happening; he had run the mile in four and a half minutes with no sense of pain or exertion whatever. He ran on, carried by a huge momentum. It was as if the wet roads, the oncoming cars, the honking horns did not exist. Gradually, his body lost all weight and resistance. He became the wind itself. Daydreams and fantasies disappeared. All that remained to remind him of his own existence was “a feeling of guilt for being able to do this.”

What Spino is speaking about is the experience of countless people engaged in all kinds of activities: an executive in the boardroom, a salesman dealing with a customer, a teacher in the classroom, a cook in the kitchen, a woodcutter splitting wood, a gardener mowing grass, people doing a million other things. Because flow is a state available to us all, if only we can make our mind still, have inner silence, while engaged in the activities of our life.

Tibetan psychology, deep, profound, based on the insights of countless yogis over millennia, speaks of our two minds: the lower mind that it calls sem and the higher mind, rig. In the words of Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, sem is “the discursive, dualistic, thinking mind…that thinks, plots, desires, manipulates, that flares up in anger, that creates and indulges in waves of negative emotions and thoughts, that has to go on and on asserting, validating, and confirming its existence by fragmenting, conceptualizing, and solidifying experience.” Sem is the mind as we know it, the mind that masters liken to a candle flame in an open doorway, constantly flickering, subject to every passing external influence.

Apart from this mind, we also have what is called rig, the higher mind, what Indian spiritual psychology calls prajna, chit, chiti – “the primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake.”

   

The wisdom of yoga, the wisdom of the east, teaches us that sem has no intelligence and all intelligence belongs to rig. The intelligence of the ordinary mind, the lower mind, of sem, is the intelligence of rig reflected on it. And just as the reflection of the sky in a lake will be clear when the water is clear and disturbed when the water is disturbed, when sem is still, it can reflect the intelligence of rig beautifully and when it is disturbed, we have either very little intelligence or confused intelligence. Inner stillness is the state where our sem is still and reflects intelligence perfectly, giving us keen perceptions, great imagination, superb creativity and sound memory.

Just one more thing. Life becomes beautiful, the world is beautiful, only when our mind is still. When your mind is upset, say because you have just received the pink slip, the beautiful sunset is no more beautiful, the delightful movie is no more delightful, nor is the grand concert in the best hall in the city any good. And when your mind is still, the entire world is beautiful – a simple walk on grass becomes an unforgettable experience, sipping coffee from a cup becomes wonderful and you are mesmerized by the calls of a bird from a distant tree and the chirping of a cricket at night – which I can hear at this moment!

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