Yesterday in my Contemplation group, there was a question requesting a clarification of my statement ‘Greater love brings greater responsibility’. How, they asked.Does it mean responsibility in relationships? But I wasn’t talking about external responsibilities at all.
I have maintained for a long time, that the reason we are not better, bigger, happier individuals is because we don’t want to take on the responsibility that comes with being that better person. What responsibility am I talking about?
Do you want to be healthier? If you overeat, eat junk food, don’t exercise properly, you haven’t taken responsibility for your body.
Do you want to be happier? If you indulge in negative thinking, gossiping, social media addiction and news watching, you haven’t taken responsibility for your mind.
Do you want to be more emotionally stable? If you allow crap relationships into your life, you haven’t taken the responsibility for your emotional well-being.
Do you want to be more present? If you waste time, you haven’t taken responsibility for your existence.
Do you want to ‘have’ more? If you ignore things that need fixing, you haven’t taken responsibility for what you possess.
Do you want to be more free, spacious and expanded? If your spiritual practice is not strong, then you haven’t taken responsibility for your spiritual well-being.
Greatness lies on the other side of that responsibility we’ve been avoiding till now.
I’ve had discussions with young as well as old people in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve found one disturbing trend that I want to talk about.
I’m finding that people imagine they’ll live until 60ish. Now, unless you die an accidental death or you came here with a really short life plan, chances are high that you’ll cross 100. Right now the average life span of the wealthy Indian is easily 80-90. What do you think that number will be in another 50 years? We’re likely to hit 120 easily. The only question is, are you going to spend the second half of your life healthy or sick.
If you live as if you’re going to die at 60, you will still energetically die – you age faster, you’re more careless with your body, and you’re going to have a lot less energy. And when you hit 60, ‘life’ is over. So you’re essentially living as a corpse.
If you want to be healthy till you die, wake up. You’ve got to approach life asking yourself, how would I treat my body if I had another 80 years to live? Because you likely do. You’ll leave your body only when the time comes, regardless of how badly you want to die. But you might stop living many years before that happens, if you are not careful and sincere about your journey.
Here’s a question I received on my student group recently – I’m curious about if astrology can be used to recommend certain types of sadhana to people. What would be a framework for that?
Also about consistency in sadhana. Whether a single path should be followed or a combination of things depending on one’s nature and situation. What does commitment to a sadhana entail?
Sadhana can be of many types -even atheists are often on a spiritual pathway, following karma yoga (when they are sincere in believing work is worship and doing their best to grow as a person, they are on the spiritual pathway even though they may say I don’t believe in God). At the same time the most ‘devout’ sadhak might be completely off-track because he has relinquished all responsibility and thinks the sadhana is enough and that his own personal effort on a day to day basis is not needed.
So if you want to know whether raja yoga, bhakti yoga, karma yoga or jnana yoga is the best path for you, astrology can help, but if you need astrology for this kind of guidance, then maybe you are not really ready for a spiritual pathway because it would indicate a very poor knowledge of oneself. It should be obvious by this age which one you are most drawn to, based on your temperament. Most of us use a combination, but one might be predominant.
What you are probably referring to as sadhana is probably a raja yoga or a bhakti yoga practice. This, yes an astrologer can help you especially if it is a Bhakti yoga practice, because you would have a pre-disposition towards certain deities and will progress faster if you are turning to them for help. But there again, if you are ready for a serious practice, you will already be praying to them because you’ll just feel drawn.
Consistency is highly essential. Regardless of whether you are following a single path or a combination, you would still need a strong daily consistent practice. Doing one thing today and something else tomorrow is not going to take you anywhere, doing new things all the time, again pretty useless. Pick one thing and stick with it. It is possible that you might find new tools that you might use for a short while and then discard, but you’ll need to have a level of awareness to be able to tell the difference between distraction and enhancement. That would need brutal honesty with the self, something I see as a very critical element of one’s spiritual practice, without which one is going to really get mis-led.
Yesterday my yoga teacher compared Dhritarashtra with the blind mind, and Gandhari, the intellect, blinds itself in service to a stupidly blind mind. This is how most of us live. The pathway involves opening our eyes and what we start to see is not pretty at all, it is frequently depressing for most of us and many times the truth is just going to make you realise what a horrible person you can sometimes be. So willing to be honest with yourself regardless of the consequences is the most important element along with a strong daily practice, in my opinion. The rest will fall into place.
You can be drawn to something on account of your nature but need a balancing counterpoint you aren’t drawn to. What to do about this?
Yeah that’s where I find a guru to be the most valuable. It’s not just a counter-point, it is also little things we forget. In my experience a guru/ teacher is needed more than anything else to simply remind you of the basics over and over again. I remember for the first 2 years every time I reached out to Jacqueline (my spiritual teacher), she would say the same thing. ‘Don’t mistake the weather for the sky of your being’, ‘everything that comes and goes is not who you are’. That’s it. I felt so ashamed after 6-7 times, that you value this woman so much and yet you cannot even remember the ONE thing she teaches. But I’d still forget. My students forget too, ultimately I’m saying the same thing to people over and over again.
The second thing that a teacher can do is to correct you when needed. There will be times when you go off-track and a good tight slap (metaphorically speaking) in those circumstances is a significant boon. This is what I loved about her the most – that she’d very easily very non-judgmentally and yet very firmly point out my nonsense.
So I think it is not so much on account of the sadhana – because we can always find a way to work around things and make them more ‘pleasant’, but a teacher who’s there to kick you back on to the track when you’re going astray. If you keep your eyes on the goal (brutal honesty) then sooner or later you’ll find your way back. If you’re more dedicated to defending your demons, then sooner or later, even with the best teachers, you will find your way back to blindness.
Q: We keep hearing that everything that comes our way – be it people, a phone call or anything, has a purpose for us, a place in our journey. Are these things always for our good?
Yeah I think of it like this – are you zooming in or zooming out when looking at the ‘picture’ of life. When you zoom out completely – look at all of life in totality, across all time and all space, nothing matters. Everything is perfect exactly as it is, in complete balance.
The more you zoom in, the more things change. Spiritual growth is the journey of learning to zoom out more. Your capacity for maximum zooming out is your.. let’s say.. spiritual quotient. If you’re living life very zoomed in, your vision is very narrow and you can end up suffering a lot. However, you cannot live ‘zoomed out’. Because if you really zoom out, it doesn’t matter if there is no salt in your food. It doesn’t matter if you go to work in your pyjamas. It doesn’t matter if you lose your job, get divorced, lose a loved one, etc. Even if we are stuck in 50 cycles of repeating the same painful story, it’s all fine in the larger picture. But when we zoom in, there is always a possibility to improve and learn faster.
Zooming out, we are learning, we are experiencing. Zooming in, we want to make things as comfortable as we can. It is between these two that the balance lies. This is why I love the proverb ‘Grant us the courage to change what we can, the serenity to accept what we can’t, and the wisdom to tell the difference’.
So… this is something I’ve been I’ve been chewing on for quite a while and I got clarity today.
ANGER
When you’re fuming, are you angry or are you outraged? I’ve had a tough time explaining the difference, but I’ve also known they’re very different. Here’s my understanding of it.
Anger is the energy of change. Something is happening that makes you uncomfortable; you want to trigger a change, you get angry. Of course if you can witness that anger and come from a space of peace, you get much better results, but this is the energy that suggests that change is needed, and comes up with the energy needed to facilitate it. Anger is sharp, light, hot, and fades quickly. Like fire.
RAGE
Rage is heavy, intense, hot and long lasting. Like molten lava. When you have been allowed to express anger as a child, you learn that anger is enough to facilitate change. You get angry – some even make this a habit because they’re erroneously learned that anger is the only possible agent of change. But when your anger as a child was suppressed – if you were punished for your anger or not allowed to feel or express your anger, then that anger turns to rage. You learn that there are only two choices – to suffer or to make the other person suffer. So your anger does not abate when you have your way, you need to see the other person in pain in order to feel safe. You might have fantasies of hurting other people if this is what you experience. Rage happens when your power was significantly taken away as a child and you have not yet reintegrated it.
You can experience a combination of both, experiencing rage in certain aspects of your life while expressing anger in other aspects. Both parts can benefit from healing, but the approach needs to be slightly different. Look at power issues for healing rage, and look at healing violation/ helplessness/ humiliation. For healing anger, look at feelings of injustice, discomfort and irritation.
