Category: Spiritual

Enough and more has been written about attachment being the primary source of human suffering – attachment to money, fame, power, relationships and so on. Buddhism has strong grounding in it, Hinduism talks at length about it. Simultaneously, most spiritual scriptures also talk about the journey of self-awareness, leading to gaining knowledge about the ultimate truth about one self.

One of the things I have been lately wondering about is the sequencing of what comes first – detachment or self-knowledge? Does one lead to the other? Further, are the two related in some manner? What all does the context of detachment encompass – ambition, money, relationships?

My sense, based on coaching engagements with a wide diversity of individuals, coupled with my personal experiences, is that it’s the journey of self-awareness and gaining knowledge about the truth of our existence that is at the core of overcoming our daily frustrations, anxiety, regrets and suffering. As we embark on this journey, it allows us to get closer to our inner selves, the true selves. As we become aware of how our world is created by our perceptions, it moves us towards realizing that we are not our minds; even though we find it hard to not be controlled by our minds. As William Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. It initiates us into becoming an observer to our conditioned minds and witness the games the mind plays – how the mind stays focused (and anxious) of the imaginary future, or the regrets of the past, keeps us closed to several opportunities for love and sharing, loves to remind us what we don’t have rather than encourage us to feel grateful for what we have. This then leads to the question of who are we then? As we search for the answers and begin to appreciate the truth about our reality and the manifestation of that reality in multiple forms, including our current existence, we move significantly forward…

Must be their karma? Many a time when we are faced with an unusually challenging situation or get a windfall, we tell ourselves, “Oh, this must be our karma”. In India, where the word karma and its related concepts originated around 5th century BC, often times the contentment on the faces of the financially poor people is explained as their reconciliation with their karma. It appears the word karma is often used to describe the correlation between one’s past deeds and one’s current or future circumstances. While that’s a fairly accurate expression of the concept of karma, here are some additional insights into the subtleties of what it is and how we can better apply it to our lives.

The ancient Indian literature on karma brings it forth as the notion of a cyclic process of our every action or intention leading to lasting impressions on our psyche, that in turn impact our future behavior (action or intention), leading to new lasting impressions being formed. As Chip Hartranft explains in his book on the teachings of Patanjali (an Indian sage who lived in the 6th century BC), any kind of volitional body or mind movement, physical or mental, constitutes a kind of karma. Each action, or even intent, leaves an impression in the deepest part of our psyche and comes up in the future at the time of a related thought or action. This is how our childhood impressions of relationships, role of parents, money, success, social conformity etc. create an inner perceptual map that shows up to determine our response in relation to similar issues in the future. The outcome of that behavior, in turn, creates new inner impressions, thus continuing the cycle of latent impressions and activation. As Eckhart Tolle illustrates in his recent book “A new Earth”, this cycle can also be explained through a scientific principle. As Newton’s third law of motion states, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Since this law applies to all types of energy forces, it must apply…

We live in a world dominated by our senses. The five senses are our window to the external world; and eventually, the way we perceive the world through our senses becomes our internal reality. The greatest pleasures in our lives seemingly come from experiences derived from these senses – as eyes admire the beauty, the taste buds relish the gourmet food, the sense of a lovers’ touch makes the heart sing, and so on.

As we begin to experience these pleasures, we tend to want more of them; we desire to increase the frequency of such experiences and also want them to ideally last longer. However, simultaneously, we also experience situations that seem not to go per our desire and make us uncomfortable and unhappy. We hate to go through those experiences, wishing we could somehow totally eliminate them from our lives. This desire to seek only the pleasant sensations and avoid the supposedly unpleasant ones is what sets us up for future suffering – either the excessive want for these pleasures or the feeling of lack of enough of these experiences in our lives then leads to frustration, anxiety and unhappiness.

If we include our mind, along with its conditioned thought forms and mental patterns, in the list of our sense organs, we totally and absolutely live by these senses. The mind adds the unique dimension of attaching judgments to every experience; with the sense of a separate self, the mind also adds the evaluation of whether the experience is good for us or not. The mind also adds the sense of time – making our thoughts (and resultant feelings) always wander in the past or the future. The mind then wants to cling to the pleasant experiences and makes us believe that as we seek out more such experiences, we would be happier on an ongoing basis.

Many of us eventually find our own ways of accepting and living with a mixture of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. While this provides some balance and calm in our lives, how do…

Most of us are so often driven by external evaluation and relative success. We tend to assess how we are doing based on external and visible parameters of evaluation – be it the career, job title, size of bank account or the car one drives. A lot of us also seem stuck in the idea of relative success – no matter how successful one is, there is an element of seeing it in relative terms to people around us – the guy driving the Mercedes c-class is watching the guy in e-class and the guy in e-class is thinking when’s he going to get the BMW 7-series and so on…as a result, we are living a poor man’s life because we are all the time thinking of what we don’t have rather than be thankful for all the wonderful blessings we do have.

It is this thought process that leaves a vacuum in people’s lives. No wonder the results on the happiness test for the very same “successful” individuals maybe substantially scattered**

Often, people are also consumed by the pursuit of money. However, does seeking money and other pleasures create sustainable happiness? There’s enough body of research to suggest that while there may be a positive correlation between annual income level and happiness until you reach a reasonable level of income (say, US$20,000), there is necessarily no correlation after the income level crosses that threshold. In 2002-2003, the New York Times reported that the real income in the US had risen over 16% during the previous 30 years, but the percentage of Americans who described themselves as “very happy” had actually fallen from 36% to 29% during the same period.

In a more spiritual sense, this constant struggle can be explained by the sense of duality and separation created by the human mind. Based on how the mind gets conditioned from all the past experiences, it forms perceptual maps to operate in the physical world. Over time, the mind’s identification with this map becomes so strong that it begins to see it…