Human Mind and the Power to Will

"If I had my life to live over again, I would devote it to Psychic Research." – Sigmund Freud

Recently, during one of my lectures on the powers of the mind in a business school, someone from the audience, a young man from Denmark, asked me: “What are the limits of the powers of the mind?” I took a moment before answering and then said, “None.” And then, to support my statement, I quoted the Yoga Vasishtha, that voluminous Indian classic on the human mind, believed to be written by the sage-poet Valmiki in an era when much of the world was not yet civilized.

Indeed, there are no limits to the powers of the mind.

My lecture was more specifically focused on the power of belief and how belief alters our biology itself. Speaking of the power of the mind to alter biology, Dr Herbert Benson, MD, for instance, quotes in his celebrated book Timeless Healing Dr Stewart Wolf’s 1950 study of women who experienced persistent nausea and vomiting during pregnancy.

“These patients,” says Dr Benson, “swallowed small, balloon-tipped tubes that, once positioned in their stomachs, allowed researchers to record the contractions associated with waves of nausea and vomiting. Then the women were given a drug they were told would cure the problem. In fact, they were given the opposite – syrup of ipecac – a substance that causes vomiting.

“Remarkably, the patients’ nausea and vomiting ceased entirely and their stomach contractions, as measured through the balloons, returned to normal. Because they believed they received antinausea medicine, the women reversed the proven action of a powerful drug. Even though many of us stock our medicine cabinets and first aid kits with ipecac to bring about vomiting in case of poisoning, these pregnant women with documented stomach distress thwarted the action of a drug that should have made them even sicker. With belief alone, they cured themselves.”

Belief and will can work miracles.

One of my favourite examples for this is firewalking – particularly the case of firewalking by Chittiravel, a Tamil-speaking Sri Lankan.

It was on 4th July, 1991, while the U.S. was celebrating Independence Day, that Chittiravel was arrested as a suspected LTTE supporter in his hometown and taken away by the Sri Lankan police.

When he was first taken to the camp, he was forced to enter a large water tank, in which he was questioned and repeatedly dunked under water throughout the night. Finally he was stabbed in the thigh and removed from the tank. Then his torturers packed the large knife wound with salt and chilli powder and tied his thigh tightly. He was hung from a beam during continuing interrogation while his torturers burned the skin of his legs in many places with cigarettes. They had been drinking and repeatedly demanded, ‘You tell the names of the Tigers.’ Later, while his legs and arms were chained, one of the men knocked out four upper front teeth with a single blow of his fist. He also sustained a large wound on the left side of his skull.

Chittiravel’s woes do not end here, but only begin with these. His “thumbs were then tied together behind his back and he was hoisted high off the floor, hanging from the rafters. While suspended, he was severely beaten with a large akappai [a wooden utensil for stirring large pots of rice]. As the beatings continued for a long time, the rope frayed and he fell to the floor.

Chittiravel suffered bilateral hip fractures. In the course of continuing years of detention, scarring of the fractured hip joints, which never healed properly, resulted in a chronically frozen pelvic girdle. After six months, Chittiravel was transferred several times, and in the third year of incarceration, he was released from a fifth place of imprisonment.”

Years ago, like many other devotees of Veeramma Kali [Mother Kali in the heroic form], the presiding deity of his hometown, he had taken a vow to walk on burning coals every year, firewalk being a fairly common vow that devotees of the Mother Goddess took wherever Tamil people are to be found. He had done it several years successively before his arrest. However, the bilateral fractures of both hips he had suffered as a result of the tortures in the detention camps had resulted in a permanently frozen pelvic girdle, crippling him for life. Chittiravel could not walk now – he could only move sideways, stretching out one leg at a time, and that too with great pain and discomfort. But this did not stop him from keeping up with his vow and performing a feat the very thought of which scares most of us.

Remember when we are talking of firewalking, we are not talking of a man quickly running over a tiny bed of dying or dead embers, his feet and legs wet, actually stepping over the coals once or twice – though even this is not something most of us would dare to do. Firewalkers actually walk at normal speed through a long bed of burning embers to fulfil their vows.

The firebed on which they walk barefoot is often more than five meters long, more than a metre wide and a full metre deep, as in the famous Uduppawa firewalking festival. The embers are prepared from tamarind wood, which burns slowly, producing fierce heat. A huge amount of tamarind wood is cut down and gathered in advance, and for hours fire builders heave logs into the massive fire built up, making flames leap to the skies. By evening even approaching the firebed becomes a daunting task, so hot is the whole place where the massive bonfire has been burning for hours. The bed of embers is, of course, pure fire, pulsing red, looking like a crouching vengeful fire dragon, as someone put it. Each piece of coal in the metre-thick bed of live coals is the size of a large potato. The bed smoulders furiously, every now and then sending up sparks and flames leaping out. It is over this that people serenely walk, to the accompaniment of fiercely beaten drums and loud, intoxicated chanting of mantras. The walker often balances a ritually sanctified pot on his head.

Like hundreds of other men, women and children, Chittiravel continues to walk over this scorching trench every year, to keep his vow to Veeramma Kali. The deformed man, bent from the waist, his legs not fully in his control, steps onto the fire with one foot, pulls his other leg near the first one, then stretches out the first leg as far as it would go sideways, pulls up the second leg near it, moves again the first leg, thus slowly moving across the entire length of the five meter-long, one metre-thick inferno as the entire population of his village shouts the name of the goddess in intoxicated ecstasy.

Chittiravel, like other firewalkers in his village, emerges from his firewalking completely unscathed by the fire.

He believes Mother Kali guards him through the firewalk and he is guarded.

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What we find here is the amazing power of belief and the miraculous things the human will can achieve.

A man from the western world who demonstrated repeatedly the amazing power of the human will is Wolf Messing. His life exemplifies the power of the human will as few other modern examples do.

Messing was a Polish Jew who lived in Germany and later fled Germany to escape persecution there under Hitler. As a child, Messing was enrolled in a religious school but ran away from there. He travelled by train to Berlin and since he did not have a ticket, he hid under the seat when he heard the ticket examiner approaching. But the ticket examiner saw him and demanded his ticket. What Wolf did was to pick up a piece of paper that was lying on the floor and give it to the man and, looking deeply into the man’s eyes, will with all his power that he should take it for the ticket. And that is precisely what happened. The man looked at the piece of paper and handed it back to the child, nodding okay. And then he asked, “Why do you hide under the seat when you have a genuine ticket?”

Wolf Messing had for the first time in his young life realized the enormous powers of his mind.

He sought work in Berlin and found one. But so poor was the pay he received that he did not have enough to eat. Once he fainted from hunger and was taken to a morgue, since people thought he was dead. Here however, his future benefactor and teacher found him – Professor Abel, who was both a psychologist and a neurologist. Professor Abel rescued him from the morgue and then, realizing the special powers the boy had, began training him.

Professor Abel realized the boy had unbelievable control over his body. He could become cataleptic at will, for instance, and enter a trancelike state. In this trancelike state, Messing could receive mental commands from the professor and execute them precisely. If Messing could read his mind in his trance, deduced Abel, then he should be able to read other people’s minds too. The professor sent him out to the market and asked him to read the minds of the vendors there. And Messing was a complete success in this.

Messing also learned to turn off feelings of physical pain and gave displays of this in order to make money for himself and for his family in Poland. He now began his tour across Germany, displaying his many remarkable powers to earn a livelihood. During his exhibitions, Messing asked members of the audience to give him mental orders to do things and he did these. He could also tell total strangers details of their past and also find things the audience had hidden.

Wolf Messing was now sixteen years old.

Hearing of the boy’s powers, Albert Einstein invited him to his home. On that visit, he met another celebrity there: Sigmund Freud, the greatest psychologist of the twentieth century. To prove Wolf Messing’s powers to receive mental orders, Freud ordered the boy to go get a pair of tweezers and with them, pull out three whiskers from Einstein’s celebrated moustache. The young man was a little embarrassed at the playfully irreverent command, but executed it all the same.

The Soviet Dictator Stalin now learnt of Messing, and he was taken to the leader. Stalin set up a test to prove Messing’s will power. The young man should go to a bank, hand over a blank piece of paper to the clerk at the counter and ask for ten thousand roubles. If the clerk took the blank paper for a check for ten thousand roubles and gave him the money, that would prove Messing’s power to influence others through his will.

Accompanied by two guards, Messing went to the bank and did exactly what he was told to do. And the clerk counted ten thousand roubles and gave it to him. Messing took the money and went out where the guards counted the money and satisfied themselves. He then came back a few minutes later and returned the money to the clerk, explaining the clerk’s mistake. Such was the shock of the clerk that he fell down in a dead faint on the spot. [Later Messing was relieved to learn that the man did not die, but survived.]

Stalin was impressed, but not convinced yet. He set up another test. This time what Messing had to do was break Stalin’s own heavy security and enter his office. He left instructions to his guards to be on the alert – Messing might try to fool them. The guards were on the alert, but a few minutes later Messing stood before Stalin in his office. Asked how he managed the feat, Messing told the Soviet dictator that he had sent out a powerful thought all around: that he was Lavrenti Beria, the feared head of Soviet secret police. When he entered Stalin’s place, it was Beria that the guards saw entering and not Messing. They saluted the police chief and stood at attention, allowing him to go into Stalin’s office.

Before allowing himself to be fully convinced, the dictator wanted him to do a third thing: leave the Kremlin without a pass, something impossible. Messing got up and walked out of Stalin’s room without a word, and a secretary followed him, to keep an eye on him. In a few minutes Messing was waving to Stalin from the streets. Questioned, the guards swore that it was Stalin himself who had walked out of the building, followed by a secretary!

We must remember that these proofs were given in communist Russia which philosophically could not accept that a thought could exist outside the human brain because Marxism-Leninism did not support such ideas. What he was doing was against communist ideologies and their materialistic beliefs. The Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, for instance, refused to accept Messing’s powers for what they were – psychic powers – and sought materialistic explanations for them. They made public announcements that Messing’s powers were based on his power of observation – he could just read the thoughts of others from their involuntary muscle movements. To them, telepathy did not exist. And yet they failed every time in stopping Messing from succeeding in what he did.

One last example of Messing’s amazing powers of will. Messing was a Jew now working with the Soviet Union and Hitler had declared him an enemy of the state and put a reward of 200,000 Reichsmarks on him. There were pamphlets everywhere with his photographs and the promise of the reward. And it so happened that one day Messing wandered carelessly into Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He was caught and taken into custody and beaten mercilessly. When the guards went away, he decided to use his mind powers to save himself – the other options were either death or joining Hitler. Wolf Messing willed the guards to open his cell and to come to him. They walked into the cell in a trancelike state. Messing locked them in the cell and escaped. In an adventure that reminds us of the hunchback Quasimodo of Victor Hugo, he left Warsaw walking through the sewers. Later he travelled hiding in a hay cart and eventually reached the Soviet Union travelling only at night and hiding during the days.

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In India we have known this amazing power of the mind for ages, and we called this iccha-shakti, literally, will power. We had not only known this power, but developed a scientific method to cultivate it. This method is known as tapas and tapas is one of the foundations of Indian culture. We find tapas mentioned throughout ancient Indian literature, be it the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Epics, the Puranas or any other branch of ancient Indian literature. One of the most beautiful descriptions ever of tapas is found in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava where he thrillingly describes Uma’s fierce tapas to win Shiva as her husband after her beauty failed to win him over. Eventually Shiva appears before her in a scene that Kalidasa describes in rapturous poetry of unsurpassed beauty, and the timeless lovers are united once again for all eternity. The Mahabharata mentions Krishna performing tapas for twelve years in the Himalayas.

All our ancient sages are great tapasvins – practitioners of tapas – and had developed enormous powers through it. Such was their power cultivated through tapas that what they willed, and what they uttered, happened, good or bad.

Thus we have the story of the sage Vasishtha – to quote just one from maybe ten thousand such stories – cursing the arrogant Ikshwaku king Kalmashapada and changing him into a rakshasa surviving on human flesh. Helplessly Kalmashapada becomes a rakshasa while still retaining his memory and falls into a life he hates. When Kalmashapada loses his arrogance and apologises, the sage converts him back into the noble king he was. There are innumerable stories of the impossible becoming possible under the blessing of a sage. In fact, the power of a tapasvin to bless and curse is a living belief in India even today.

Such was the power acquired through tapas by Sage Vishwamitra that he created an alternate universe from his mind.

Even if we do not go to such extremes, will power is something everyone of needs and can easily cultivate by taking simple decisions and then sticking to them in spite of difficulties. A simple once a month or once a fortnight fasting is an example for an exercise meant to cultivate will power.

While ascetics in ancient India practiced their own numerous forms of tapas – Uma’s tapas involved such extreme steps as living only on leaves that had fallen from trees, standing in neck-deep water in winter, and remaining seated beneath the burning sun, surrounded by fires on all four sides – grishastas, family men and women, had their own forms of tapas. One of the most famous of such forms of tapas is the chandrayana vrata, in which one ate a full meal on the full moon day, reduced it by one-fifteenth the next day, by two-fifteenth the next day, and so on, until one reached a full fast on the new moon day. Asidhara vrata was a form of tapas based on sexual control. In its simplest form, a young man and a young woman slept with a sharp sword placed between them.

In our world today, driven by market forces and advertising, where men and women are easy prey to so many temptations, an exercise that develops will power through some simple form of tapas could be of immense value to everyone. And of course, for those who want to go on the exploration of the inner world, the greatest adventure man has ever undertaken, tapas offers an exciting challenge.

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Buddha in the Business World: 1

In Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, when young Siddhartha meets the beautiful courtesan Kamala, he is not yet an enlightened man but is on the way to enlightenment, not a Buddha yet, but is soon to become one. They become friends instantly and later fall in love with each other. One day Kamala speaks to Siddhartha of the rich merchant Kamaswami.

“Things are working out well,” she tells him. “They are expecting you at Kamaswami’s, he is the richest merchant of the city. If he’ll like you, he’ll accept you into his service. Be smart, brown Samana. I had others tell him about you. Be polite towards him, he is very powerful. But don’t be too modest! I do not want you to become his servant, you shall become his equal, or else I won’t be satisfied with you. Kamaswami is starting to get old and lazy. If he’ll like you, he’ll entrust you with a lot.”

“You’ve been lucky,” she adds, “I’m opening one door after another for you. How come? Do you have a spell?”

Though he has not yet attained enlightenment, Siddhartha is already a man who has learnt to flow with life, go where life takes him. He has stopped fighting with existence, with life. He is no more the accidental man, but has become the essential man. Doors open on their own for such people. But Kamala, the courtesan, the woman of the world, does not understand that. She takes credit for what is happening. She tells Siddhartha, “Where would you be without me? What would you be, if Kamala wasn’t helping you?”

“Dear Kamala,” said Siddhartha and straightened up to his full height, “when I came to you in your grove, I did the first step. It was my resolution to learn love from this most beautiful woman. From that moment on when I had made this resolution, I also knew that I would carry it out. I knew that you would help me, at your first glance at the entrance of the grove I already knew it.”

“But what if I hadn’t been willing?”

“You were willing. Look, Kamala: When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the daemons. Nothing is effected by daemons, there are no daemons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.”

Siddhartha is not being ungrateful. I am sure he is grateful to Kamala for all that she has done for him and loves her for that. But going beyond gratefulness, he is speaking the truth.

Siddhartha’s words here contain immense wisdom. The human mind is a powerhouse. It is the greatest power there is in the universe. All other powers in the world are but faint reflections of the power of the mind.

The Yoga Vasishtha, that ancient classic whose observations about the powers of the mind are unsurpassed, says that as minds, we have limitless powers at our command. Thought in the forms of desire, imagination, effort and will is the most potent force in the world. Mind is endowed with creative power. In its creative activity mind is absolutely free. We all attain to what we aspire after. All that we intensely desire come to us sooner or later.

The mind loses its power when it is disturbed, agitated, crowded with thoughts and worries. The quieter the mind becomes, the more powerful it becomes. A single thought held in a still mind is like the will of the universe itself. There is no power in the universe like a mind that has become still. We all have access to the boundless powers of the mind to the extent we are close to stillness.

I have written elsewhere of an experiment a researcher named Duane Elgin conducted at Stanford Research Institute. His attempts were to influence a magnetometer, which measured magnetic power, using his intentions alone. In his initial attempts, Elgin focused on the magnetometer willing to make its needle move. He continued his efforts, concentrating on the meter with all his will power for twenty to thirty minute stretches at a time. Nothing happened. And then he gave up in despair – and the moment he gave up, the needle moved. The movements were not slight, but unbelievably powerful – in some cases, as powerful as one thousand times the strength of the earth’s magnetic field! He soon learnt that to influence the magnetometer he did not have to be near it – he could do it from his home, miles away!

Eventually Elgin mastered his technique and this is what he did: “I’d spend twenty to thirty minutes doing the best I could to establish a sense of rapport and connectedness with the instrument, and with great will and concentration I would coalesce that sense of connectedness into a field of palpable energy. I’d feel myself coming into a magnetic field and pulsing it to respond. Then, when there would be a moment of total surrender, the response would occur.”

The power of a mind that has learnt to surrender is unlimited. In surrender, the mind becomes still and in that stillness, all its boundless powers are at its command.

In its days of glory, Tibet had an education programme that lasted for twelve years. This was an esoteric programme for selected young lamas and children of the nobility, and a central aim of the programme was to transform people into what was called wang thangs – centres of power. Through meditations and other allied exercises, stillness was achieved and the stillness unleashed the powers of the mind that were normally not accessible to the agitated mind.

When a still mind makes a resolution, that resolution becomes a reality. That’s why in Indian culture we say that whatever thought is born in the mind of the great ascetics rich in tapas becomes reality. We say they have the power to bless and to curse, make all kinds of things happen in the world around them.

When a resolution enters the mind of someone like Siddhartha, it becomes a reality. People become instrumental in turning the resolutions into realities – that does not mean they cause it. The events are caused by the power of the resolution itself. Kamala may believe that she is doing favours to Siddhartha, but the fact is that Kamala has no choice but to do them. To use the metaphor that Siddhartha himself uses, every resolution in his mind is like a stone thrown into water. It will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water.

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Two more important things.

Kamala tells Siddhartha: “I do not want you to become his servant, you shall become his equal, or else I won’t be satisfied with you.” I love what she says.

Years ago I used to live with my guru in his ashram, as his student and disciple. In all, there were some hundred and twenty of us young people there – around sixty of us from India and the other sixty from across the world, mostly from the US and Europe. We had our regular classes on the Upanishads and the Gita and a few other texts. The classes were held either in the large lecture hall, or in our beautiful temple hall. The evening lectures were mostly in the temple hall. Memories of the glorious evenings spent listening to Swamiji lecture to us there are still as fresh in my mind as though they are happening now. One such evening, sitting majestically in his teacher’s seat in the temple, his entire body charged with spiritual power, his face glowing, Swamiji told us in his booming, commanding voice: “Never be a slave to the world. Serve the world like a master and walk off like a king.”

There is something about the theory of servant leadership that makes me uncomfortable. I like most of the things about it. Like, I like the idea that a leader need not necessarily hold formal leadership positions. Gandhi, easily the most influential and effective Indian leader in modern times, did not hold a formal leadership position throughout most of his later life. The all-time greatest leader India has seen, Krishna, never held any formal positions in his life. In Mathura, where his wicked uncle whom he killed was king, he could easily have become king. But he refused that position. Throughout his long life, he disposes off many evil kings, but never accepts the kingdoms for himself. Instead, he always places the son of the dead king on the throne and refuses all positions for himself. In the Mahabharata war, he could easily have become the commander-in-chief of the Pandava army. In every way he was the most competent person for that position and yet he chose to be Arjuna’s driver, instead.

Similarly, I like the idea that a leader should encourage collaboration and trust. I like the idea that a leader should use his power ethically and should empower his followers. I like the idea that a leader should be a good listener, should strive to understand and empathise with others and accept them as unique individuals. I love the idea that a leader should be able to touch his people and through his touch transform them, heal them. I appreciate the need for a leader to be awareful – have self-awareness, other-awareness and general awareness. I totally agree with the servant leadership stand that a good leader uses persuasion rather than his positional authority; that he should be a dreamer of great dreams and see into the future, that he should have the ability to understand the lessons from the past, the realities of the present, and likely consequences of a decision for the future; that he should be committed to building community, helping his people grow as persons, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and evolve into leaders themselves.

That’s liking almost everything about servant leadership, for this is what servant leadership is all about. What then makes me uncomfortable about the concept?

Perhaps it is the idea that the servant leader is a servant first.

No, it is not that I do not believe that a leader should serve and serve first. But I believe he never really becomes a servant even when he serves – he is always a master. In fact, I believe it is only as a master that you can really serve. As a servant you really cannot serve. As a servant you can obey, take orders and carry them out, but you cannot guide, you cannot transform people, you can empower them.

Scholars writing about servant leadership in the Indian context often quote Krishna’s example for servant leadership. Didn’t he serve Arjuna as his charioteer? But I do not see Krishna serving Arjuna as a servant. Even when serving Arjuna, Krishna is the master. Krishna cannot be anything but a master. The only way he can serve is as a master.

The Journey to the East, yet another classic by Hermann Hesse, is considered seminal to the understanding of the concept of servant leadership – in fact it is the book that inspired Robert K. Greenleaf to evolve his theory of servant leadership. In the first essay in his Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power & Greatness, Greenleaf says, “The idea of the servant as leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey, probably also Hesse’s own journey. The central figure of the story is Leo, who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.”

To make sure about what I am writing, I just read The Journey to the East, a book that I have been intending to read for years, since Hesse is among my all time favourite authors. True, Leo serves the group, but he never becomes a servant in the book. He remains a master even when he serves. It is with the full awareness that he is the master that he serves the travelers. And he never once loses his dignity as a master even when he serves.

The wise Mahabharata says: “A good king [leader] should always behave in such a manner as to avoid what is dear to him, for the sake of doing that which would benefit his people.” The Mahabharata wants a leader to serve his people, but it does not want him to be their servant.

Nor does Chanakya mean the leader should become the servant of his followers when he says that the leader should always do what is dear to his people and not what is dear to himself. Chanakya’s leader remains the swami even when he serves.

And I do not mean, either in the case of Krishna or in any other case, that one should be a master of others. By the word master I mean a self-master. That is what the Sanskrit word swami means – a master, a master of oneself, a self-master.

Neither a master of others, nor a servant to others, but a master of oneself.

That is what the courtesan Kamala tells Siddhartha: “I do not want you to become his servant.” Kamaswami is wealth. How can wisdom be the servant of wealth? Can there be anything more demeaning than a man like Siddhartha becoming Kamaswami’s servant?

Kamala wants Siddhartha to remain Kamaswami’s equal: “You shall become his equal.”

And Kamala adds, “Or else I won’t be satisfied with you.”

A woman like Kamala cannot respect a servant, a slave. She is a mistress of herself in spite of being a courtesan and she can respect only a master.

This is not arrogance. This is dignity.

The Tibetan Shambhala tradition talks about the four dignities to be cultivated on the road to perfection, and the first of these dignities is meekness. And the tradition explains: Meekness is not being feeble, but resting in a state of simplicity, being uncomplicated and approachable. It is being true and genuine, being completely comfortable with yourself and at ease in the world.

For the Shambhala tradition, the analogy for meekness is a tiger – a tiger in its prime, who moves slowly and heedfully through the jungle, mindfully, relaxed, liking his body and his bounciness and sense of rhythm.

That is how I see all self-masters. That is how Kamala wants Siddhartha to be with Kamaswami. That is how every man should be.

One should not compromise on human dignity while serving.

Well, perhaps all I have against servant leadership is a quarrel with one word.

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That’s one thing. The other thing I want to comment about is what Siddhartha tells about his goal, his resolution. He says once he has set his goal, once he has made his resolution, “he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal.” Most of our resolutions fail because of our inner conflicts, inner contradictions. We do not have the singlemindedness to make our resolutions come true. Doubts arise in our minds, questions arise, and our own mind works against our resolutions and defeats them.

As Krishna puts it in the Bhagavad Gita: vyavasāyatmikā buddhir ekeha kurunandana; bahuśākhā hi anantāh ca buddhayo’vyavasāyinām. “Those who are resolute sustain a single thought in their mind, but the thoughts of the irresolute are endless and many-branched, O Arjuna.”

We are never defeated by the world outside. We are always defeated by ourselves. By our own minds. By our doubts and inner conflicts. By our irresoluteness.

Miracles happen when your mind is resolute.

Your mere desires then get transformed into realities.

It is for that reason that the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad asks us to be careful about what we desire. For our desires shape us: atha u khalu āhuh. kāmamaya evāyam purusha iti. “Therefore it is indeed said: you are what your desire is.”

To be continued….

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Note: For those who are not familiar with Hermann Hesse’s book, Siddhartha here is not the historical Buddha, though he too is a character in the book. This Siddhartha is a Brahmin youth who leaves home in search of the truth, as the Buddha himself did.

Mind Power: Can It Move Machines?

We have all heard about people bending spoons and stopping clocks using their power of concentration. But does it really work? Can mind power really influence mechanical things?

I was recently reading The Life We Are Given by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, my review of which appears elsewhere on this blog. While reading the book, I came across something interesting about mind power there. Here is the short passage from the book that speaks about it:

From 1973 through 1975…a researcher named Duane Elgin conducted a remarkable series of exercises at Stanford Research institute, attempting to influence a sensitive, heavily shielded magnetometer by his intentionality alone. The magnetometer measures changes in a magnetic field and records these changes on a moving sheet of paper.

The first few exercises generally followed the same course. Elgin would sit or stand a few feet from the magnetometer, where he could see the recording device, and would focus all the force of his will on the instrument, trying to influence it and thus make the needle move. He could continue this concentrated effort for twenty to thirty minutes, watching the needle tracing an almost straight line – but with no results. Finally, exhausted and exasperated, he would say to himself, “I give up.” At that moment, the needle would start indicating a change in the magnetic field. These changes were by no means insignificant. In some of Elgin’s exercises, the needle went entirely off the scale; to get such results by normal means would take a force estimated to be one thousand times stronger than that of the earth’s magnetic field. Nor did physical distance lessen Elgin’s effectiveness. In one instance, he was able to affect the magnetometer strongly from his home several miles away.

Later, Elgin learned to refine his technique. “I’d spend twenty to thirty minutes doing the best I could to establish a sense of rapport and connectedness with the instrument, and with great will and concentration I would coalesce that sense of connectedness into a field of palpable energy. I’d feel myself coming into a magnetic field and pulsing it to respond. Then, when there would be a moment of total surrender, the response would occur.”[1]

The power of the mind is enormous. The Yoga Vasishtha, a classic text of Vedanta that discusses the nature and powers of the mind in great details, says that as minds we have limitless power at our command. “Thought in the forms of desire, imagination, effort, and will is the most potent force in the world. Mind is endowed with creative power. In its creative activity mind is absolutely free. We all attain to what we aspire after. All that we intensely desire and make efforts for comes to us sooner or later. In fact, our own efforts guided by our aspirations are the warp and woof of our destiny. Our lives are what we make them by our thoughts. The world around us changes in accordance with our own thoughts.”[2]

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[1] The Life We Are Given, by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, Editions India, an imprint of Stone Hill Foundation Publishing, Kochi, Kerala, India.

[2] The Philosophy of Yoga Vasishtha, by Bhikhan Lal Atreya in The Cultural Heritage of India, Vol. III, The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata.