The little I have learnt about spiritualism in this lifetime is that you must begin by going through the steps listed below:
Accept that pain, loss, failure, sickness,
disillusionment, frustration and death are inevitable – for everybody (The Buddha’s First Noble
Truth was ‘Life is suffering’. Anyone who claims otherwise is a
fool or a charlatan).
Accept that they cannot be ‘cured’, ‘solved’ or
avoided by any sane worldly means. The wisest and kindest man can at best show
you how to lessen that suffering.
Accept that the more you confuse ‘having fun’ or being
‘successful’ with joy or happiness (in the Sanskrit sense of ananda, bliss, which absolutely insists
on a lot of resignation, acceptance, self-control, moderation in all things, tolerance
of things you consider ‘bad’ and quietness of mind/spirit/soul), the more
desperately you chase wealth/power/social status and fame in the hope that
these things will save you from unhappiness, the more frantically you try to
lengthen life and therefore fear death above all things, the more unhappy you
will become.
Realize that you are much more a mind than a body,
even if you do not understand (or refuse to accept) that you are something even
higher and less explainable in material terms – a spirit or soul. You feel everything, even pleasure and pain,
ultimately with your mind, not any part of your body (when the body-mind
connection is turned off, as under anesthesia, you feel no pain even if your
hand is amputated!). Being spiritual does not have to be learned from priests,
monks and gurus – ask any great sportsman and s/he will tell you that the
wonders they achieve is ultimately with their minds; they have only trained
their bodies with endless hard work and patience and discipline to do what the
mind tells the body to do. Being spiritual is an experience that can come from
doing anything you do with love and respect and attention – whether it be
cooking or surgery or gardening or mathematics or teaching; it is understanding
that the mind appreciates beautiful
music or lovely scenery, the gadgets you use to access them hardly matter, the
money you have spent on your widescreen TV or home theatre or DSLR camera is a
trivial and inconsequential thing, essentially money wasted. Newton did not
have an electronic calculator, Michelangelo and Mozart did not have Meta or
Gemini at their elbows to help them create immortal masterpieces; Wordsworth
needed only an appreciative mind to exult in the beauty of the bank of
daffodils.
The Great Masters of Living (E.F. Schumacher’s phrase)
both in the east and west were always right – as one of our holy books pithily
puts it, trying to achieve satisfaction by indulging your sense pleasures more
and more is just as stupid and futile as trying to douse a fire by pouring ghee
on it. Human greed knows no limits: give a single man the entire planet, and
all he will say is ‘Only one planet?’
Check with Elon Musk. Of course poverty is bad, but cultivation of self-control
and learning to be happy as soon as our most basic material needs are satisfied
is absolutely essential for everyone to find a modicum of contentment with life
and the planet to continue to be liveable for long (everyone needs and deserves
a decent roof overhead, no one needs a palace; everyone needs to eat, no one
needs to gorge at five star eateries; a bicycle may be a need as a luxury
limousine is not; limitless uncontrolled growth in any part of the body is a cancer,
and so is the chimera of perpetual economic
growth). As soon as the basic needs are satisfied – and to do that one
needs to exert one’s fullest efforts to curb the seven deadly sins inside his
mind – one must, if one wants to survive with the least possible unhappiness,
turn to satisfying more and more the cravings of the spirit, and even to do
that, one must consciously and assiduously cultivate (to use Buddhist teaching
again, though I have read the very same injunctions in every major religion)
the virtues of karuna, maitri, upeksha
and mudita: compassion, friendship, equanimity and joy in the joy of
others.
Most people, even those who are not poor and sincerely
looking for directions to a better life, will throw up their hands in despair
already at this point: ‘It’s too much, too different from everything we have
been taught, too hard, we just can’t do it!’ See what I meant in the last post
about our basic philosophical orientation having gone seriously wrong since at
least five hundred years ago? In the middle ages – at least in Europe, and
Europe has been teaching the rest of the world everything for many centuries now
– they tilted too far in the other direction: religion got a vice like grip on
the human mind, and taught that everything about life on this earth was sick
and bad and transient, so we should wallow in the muck while we live and wait
for all our rewards in ‘heaven’. And then we decided to create ‘heaven on earth’
with war weapons, large industries, advertising, global trade and big government
along with democratic and socialistic ideals steadily being turned into laws to
make a better world. I shall insist once again at this point that much good has
certainly been achieved by such means – I most definitely do not want to go
back and live in the world of a thousand years ago in any country. But now we
have reached a critical juncture; as a 20th century philosopher put
it, we have a choice only between the Buddha and the Bomb. If we in the mass
cannot learn to become at least a little more spiritual, I frankly think we are
doomed.
And yet I have hope, if only very slight. It arises when
I see and hear about so many people searching and asking questions, even after
having a lot of conventional fun and achieving a lot of worldly success, when I
see attendance at meditation classes swelling, when I hear of the minimalist
movement attracting more and more experimenters in many countries, when I learn
about people backpacking and travelling around the world on shoestring budgets
and greatly enjoying the experience, when I read about very big businessmen and
politicians acknowledging in rare candid moments that things are going badly
wrong in every sphere of life, when I see the technocratic approach spawning a
hundred new problems as it solves ten old ones, when I meet reasonably happy
people much more often among the relatively poor than in my own social class…
Turn inwards. I shall end this part of the continuing
series by quoting some of my favourite lines from a very revered Hindu text,
Adi Shankaracharya’s Mohmudgar:
Satsangatwe nissangatwam/ nissangatwe
nirmohatwam/ nirmohatwe nishchalatatwam/ nishchalatatwe jivan mukti.
From associating with good people you learn to be glad
with solitude/ from solitude you learn to lose illusions/ from losing illusions
you become still* inside/ from stillness comes true freedom.
*A footnote: In early (Hinayana) Buddhism, a
spiritually enlightened person was called ‘Thera’, derived from the Sanskrit ‘sthira’,
meaning still.