It is love that is important – the harmony of your home, the harmony of your workplace, the harmony of your life.
That is why I say, be patient with your partner, your co-workers, and your friends. Give plenty of time to your children. If they take up valuable time narrating some after-school adventure, what does it matter? If your partner forgets to inform you that she will be coming home late from work, or is late in picking you up at the airport, your mind needn’t race out of control. It is love that is more important – the harmony of the home, the harmony of the workplace, the harmony of your life.
Everywhere, take your time, so that you do not give the mind an opportunity to speed up and get out of control. When you keep going faster and faster, you can’t even be aware that your mind is racing or that you are being insensitive to the needs of others.
Do you remember the scene in My Fair Lady when Eliza accuses Professor Higgins of being insensitive? He reacts with utter amazement. “Insensitive?” he replies. “Me? I am the soul of sensitiveness. Consideration is my middle name. Kindness and I are never parted.” This is the self-image most of us have: “I couldn’t possibly be selfish or insensitive or unkind.” And, in a sense, it is true. Most of us are not unkind people; the problem is the racing, speeded-up mind. To be sensitive, we have to place the highest priority on slowing down and giving full attention to what we do and to everyone we live and work with.
As the mind slows down from sixty thoughts per minute to fifty, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, we begin to see people more and more clearly. Even in many intimate relationships, people don’t really see each other. That is why they act insensitively: they hurt each other, not willfully, but because they simply don’t see. In order to see those around us, to understand their needs and reflect on how we can contribute to their welfare, we need to slow down the furious activity of the mind.
Learning to love comes easily when we remember the needs of the whole. We simply have to ask: What will benefit my family most? What will benefit our children most? What will help us to make a contribution to life? If we ask these questions, we shall find we are learning to love naturally – and that our welfare, too, is included in the welfare of the whole.
Ideas and Suggestions
Cultivate personal relationships in all your activities. It will help to reverse the depersonalization of our world.
Dwelling on yourself builds a wall between you and others. When you find yourself dwelling on your own needs, your own wants, your own plans, your own ideas, turn your attention to the needs of others.
When you find you are getting impatient and want to get your own way in some little matter of convenience, try putting the other person’s comfort and convenience first. You can begin within the circle of your family and friends, where there is already a basis of love and respect on which to build.
Make a game of finding ways to remember the needs of the other person: let him choose dinner for both of you, for example, or go to the film she wants to see.
Share activities with your children. Enjoy their enjoyment.
Don’t compete in any relationship. Look for ways to complete each other instead.
When differences arise, remember that to disagree, it is not necessary to be disagreeable.
Take time to listen with complete attention and respect – there may be less to disagree about than you think.
Share your times of entertainment with others. Relaxation is an important part of learning to slow down.
CHAPTER 7
A Higher Image
Body and mind are like a car that carries us through life. But they shouldn’t be driving us – we are the driver.
It is said that Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, was walking about one night plunged in thought when a policeman, naturally suspicious, approached and asked him, “May I know who you are?” Schopenhauer paused for a long time before he replied, “I wish I could tell you.”
This is the central dilemma of our civilization: we are born, go to school, get jobs, get married, have children, grow old, and pass away without ever knowing who we are. And the question we should ask is: “If I don’t know who I am, what is the use of anything I do? If I don’t know who is doing it, if I don’t know who is enjoying life, what earthly use is it?” That is why the Upanishads say that the joy that comes when we discover who we are is a million times greater than all the pleasures the most advanced material civilization could offer.
Every problem we have today, from stress and difficulties in personal relationships to the devastation we are causing to our environment, can be traced to this fundamental lack of understanding of who we are. For this is what is at the root of our lack of a higher purpose. As long as we believe that we are physical creatures – which is what the mass media are dinning into our ears day in and day out – we cannot help trying to satisfy all our needs in physical ways.
As long as I look upon myself as no more than physical, I have an incomplete idea of who I am. This inadequacy is even more fraught with danger than in earlier times because the media reinforce it every day. Almost every movie we see, every book we read, every advertiser we listen to says, “You are incomplete; you will always be incomplete.” And then they offer us some ephemeral object or transitory experience that promises to satisfy us temporarily. Only rarely does someone arise to remind us that we are not incomplete but whole – not imperfect physical creatures, but essentially spiritual beings whose greatest need is simply to discover our real nature.
“All that we are,” the Buddha says, “is the result of what we have thought.” Our health is to a great measure the result of what we think of ourselves. Our environment is the outcome of what we think we need as human beings. Virtually every aspect of our lives is directly affected by the image we have of the human being. And today, to put it simply, we look upon ourselves as the body. We try to satisfy ourselves by satisfying the body, and the more acute our inner hunger grows, the more desperately we seek. It never occurs to us that the body is only a house and we are the tenants – or, to use a different metaphor, that the body is a kind of car and we are the driver.
The manager of the bank in a small town near us once told me that if people don’t see his car in the front of the bank, they think he isn’t there. On the following day they ask him, “Why didn’t you come in yesterday?” They identify him with his car.
This happens to me, too. My wife and I used to walk regularly at a nearby beach that is privately owned. In the early days, the teenagers who check the passes never recognized us; they recognized our car. As long as we were in our own car they would wave us through, but if we came in a friend’s car, we would have to show our pass. I wanted to tell them, “Please look inside. It’s not the car that has the pass. We have the pass. We’re not our car.”
Today it is different. Once we got to know them, they stopped looking at the car. Instead they look at us, smile, and say, “Enjoy your walk!”
In the same way, when our relationships become personal, we don’t identify people by the body they happen to drive. We get to know the person inside.
Unfortunately, if we think of ourselves as physical, we may never get even a glimpse of the person inside. We will see only the outer image. To me it has always been a matter of grief that even an intelligent person may not see parents or partner, children or friends, after living with them for years.
We are not imperfect physical creatures. Our essence is spiritual, and our greatest need is simply to discover our real nature.
Many people would agree intellectually that the human being is more than physical. But if you look at the way we live – at work, at play, in the shopping center, at home, in the theater, on the playground – you will see what our real self-image is. We don’t have a high image of the human being. In fact, we have such a low image that books often become best-sellers by telling us what a low type we are. Countless movies and plays becom
e popular by reaffirming this idea that we are no more than physical, only slightly removed from our evolutionary forebears in the animal kingdom.
We are so set in this belief that I find it difficult to convince people of anything else. If I say, “You are an exalted creature, with a spark of the divine within you that nothing you do can extinguish; and you have been granted life in order to give, because it is in giving that we receive,” they find it hard to believe. Today, amidst all this conditioning to the contrary, we need constant reminders of our higher nature, and that is why I recommend spiritual reading as one of the points in my Eight Point Program.
There is no more absorbing reading than the great mystics and scriptures of the world’s spiritual traditions, which offer a vast selection from which to choose. We needn’t limit ourselves to just one tradition, either. Every religious tradition has inspiring literature, and by reading widely we see that, as one of India’s most ancient scriptures puts it, “Truth is one, though we call it by many names.”
My advice is to set aside a particular time every day, perhaps fifteen minutes to half an hour, to read from an uplifting book of spiritual instruction or inspiration. First thing in the morning and last thing at night are both very good times. Even a short period of quiet inspiration in the morning will anchor the rest of your day; and at night, particularly after a hectic day, there can be no better preparation for sleep.
The events of the day follow us into our dreams, and when we watch television at night or read agitating material, we carry those images and that agitation with us into our sleep along with the rest of our problems. Millions of people read popular fiction at night to get their mind off whatever is agitating them, but these stories only add to the images left over from the day. The techniques presented in this chapter offer a much more effective way to fall asleep with a calm mind, so that we sleep refreshed and awake with spirit renewed.
A short period of quiet inspiration in the morning will anchor the rest of your day.
We are so physically oriented that only seldom do we glimpse the pulsating world within us – the world of thoughts, feelings, urges, and desires. This is a world unto itself, a world that never sleeps, never rests. It is the world of the mind.
Physically, at least, we are able to rest a little every night. But mentally we are seldom at rest. The body sleeps but the mind never. This has enormous practical consequences, for a great deal of our vital energy is consumed by the mind. The faster the mind races, the more gas it consumes. When we wake up feeling that we do not have enough vitality, enough drive, enough joy of living to make it through the day, we are probably victims of an energy shortage. This happens to millions of us because we don’t know how to minimize the continuing energy consumption of the mind – not only while we are awake, but while we sleep as well.
The most practical and immediate tool we can use to slow down the mind is what in India is called a mantram or mantra: a name or phrase with spiritual meaning and power. All the world’s great spiritual traditions recommend this practice, though of course by different names: in the West, for example, it is sometimes called “the prayer word.” The mantram has immense power to slow down the speed of the mind and lift its attention from any problem that is troubling us. At the same time, it helps to fill our consciousness with a higher image of who we are. The mantram is a living symbol of the profoundest reality we can conceive of, the highest power we can aspire to and love. When we use a mantram, we remind ourselves of our true nature and hold before our mind’s eye this highest image of ourselves.
The mantram is an effective brake on the speed of the mind. When the mind is racing in anger, anxiety, worry, or greed, we can use the mantram to slow it down – a skill that is every bit as essential for secure living as good brakes are for safe driving.
In India we had an official called the brake inspector, who was authorized to stop any car on the road and demand to see how well the brakes worked. If you did not prove to him that you could stop your car in a reasonable distance, you would have to have your brakes repaired.
With the mind, too, we need some kind of inner inspector to see whether there is any brake on our anger. Usually he will be forced to say, “You don’t have any brakes at all! How do you manage to drive?” Then he will give a citation, because a mind without a brake is a source of danger to us and to those around us too.
If you have power brakes, when you encounter a dangerous situation while driving you have only to touch the pedal to stop the car. Similarly, when your mind is beginning to race – beginning to get angry, to get afraid, to get greedy – you are entering a danger zone where you need some kind of power brake to get your mind under control. That is what the mantram can do.
Repetition of a mantram is a dynamic discipline that gives access to inner reserves of strength and peace of mind. Every one of us has these deep inner reserves; we simply do not know how to tap them. The mantram gives us a way to regain our natural energy, confidence, and balance.
The mantram has immense power to free attention and flood our consciousness with a higher image of who we are.
There are two basic tools for mastering the thinking process. One is repetition of the mantram; the other is meditation. Half an hour of meditation every morning slows down the thinking process. Then, during the day, the mantram keeps the mind from speeding up again.
It is important to distinguish these two. As I teach it, meditation involves sustained concentration on the words of a scripture or great mystic. No matter what one’s religious affiliation, the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi is a perfect example:
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O divine master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.
By contrast, the mantram is not a passage, but a word or short phrase with spiritual meaning and power. The mantram can be repeated anywhere at any time, while meditation requires a quiet place and a set period of time. And the mantram can be used by anyone, while meditation requires discipline and dedication.
In short, these two complement each other beautifully in several ways, as you will discover yourself when you try them.
I have great sympathy with people who find it hard to meditate. It is hard. In the Indian scriptures, taming the restless mind is compared with trying to tame the wind. Nevertheless, I know of nothing on earth that can remotely compare with the benefit that even a little practice of this powerful discipline brings.
Over the years, I have learned a great deal about how to present meditation so that it can have maximum benefit in our modern way of life. My instructions are based on my personal experience and addressed to people who have tasted what life has to offer and long for something more. Meditation is the basis of a life of splendid health, untiring energy, unfailing love, and abiding wisdom. It is the very foundation of that deep inner peace for which every one of us longs. No human being can ever find lasting satisfaction in money or success or prestige or anything else the world can offer. What we are really searching for is not something that satisfies us temporarily, but a permanent state of joy.
This word meditation is used today in many different ways. The method I teach is the one I have followed in my own life, which I have presented to thousands of Americans over the years. It has two important aspects. First, it slows down the mind, making it increasingly calm,
steady, and clear. It does this by sustained attention on a single focus: the words of an inspiring passage that embodies a lofty ideal.
The second aspect is less obvious: since we are what we think, we become what we meditate on. The sustained attention we give to our meditation passage drives it deep into our consciousness, so that the ideals it embodies gradually become part of our character and conduct.
Obviously, it is important to choose such passages with care. They must be positive, practical, universal, and inspiring. They should reflect authentic spiritual experience. And they should present the highest possible image of the human being.
All the passages I recommend for meditation are chosen from the world’s great religious traditions, and they are universal as well. They embody the conviction that God is to be found within us and a spark of the divine is present in every human heart.
Because this conviction is found in every major spiritual tradition, using passages from different sources is like looking at Mount Everest from many different perspectives. You get one view of the Himalayas from India, another from China, a third from Pakistan, a fourth from Bangladesh, a fifth from Tibet. But these towering peaks are always the same, like the power that is present in each of us as our real Self.
I learned to meditate in the midst of an extremely busy life at a large university in India, where I had many cultural interests and responsibilities from early morning until late at night. That is why, when somebody comes up after one of my talks to say, “I would like to learn to meditate, but I don’t have time,” I don’t take it too seriously. I know from personal experience that everyone can find half an hour a day, especially for something so rewarding.
Meditation on inspired words drives them deep into consciousness. The ideals they embody gradually become part of our character and conduct.
Take Your Time Page 11
