Podcards

Śaucam (Sanskrit: शौच) is the quality of having a clean and pure body and mind. It does not imply sterility of thought and action, but rather a conscious effort to disassociate from anger and hate in all its various forms. Science has shown that words and images laden with hate and anger are literally vitriol in the mind, destroying healthy neural circuits and priming the body’s defence mechanisms. Even expressing or listening to angry thoughts can disturb the normal neural functioning of the brain. On the other hand, simply focussing on an image of peace and happiness, either a person or a place, builds new neural circuits of compassion and empathy—the two qualities vital for you to allow yourself to love and be loved.

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In strong feelings and emotions like lust, anger, or fear, there is always a part of the mind that is enjoying it and another part that is suffering. A strong feeling is destructive in intent because it seek to subjugate whatever free-flowing libido is not bound by the rules of its reason or out of reach of its desire and, as such, it is exerted at cost to another living creature. Merely thinking such thoughts sends a rush of adrenaline and cortisol through your system, preparing your body to attack or defend itself, should the need arise. The heightened blood pressure and glandular activation continues for a long time after the thought has receded, keeping your body in its aroused state and fooling you into thinking that you’re still angry or fearful. Yet, you wouldn’t have such thoughts if there wasn’t a part of you that invited them in. When you practice thinking that is imbued with lust, antipathy, malice, and delusion, you habituate the mind in that way and catalyse all the actions that follow in their suit. So instead of paying heed to the loud, obnoxious voice of hate, try to give voice to the part of you that is suffering and sees the pain being caused within and without.

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Asaktih (आसक्ति) is the absence of the desire to own things. According to the ancient traditions, ownership is a fallacy. You cannot own anything because all things by their very nature are transitory. Your house, all kinds of property, your knowledge and faculties, and even your own body are not immutable. Life gives you a chance to possess these things for a while, to enjoy their presence, facility, and security. But when social status itself is a commodity that can be purchased by acquiring things of value or exclusivity, you must constantly acquire new objects of desire to stay ahead of the competition. Buddhism tells us that suffering arises when we try to tenaciously hold on to things. While you can plainly see that all material things, including your physical body, are subject to the ravages of time and circumstance, it is not so obvious that this frailty extends to your thoughts and what you consider to be the very essence of your true self. The image that you have of yourself is only a rough precis of your past experiences and inculcated beliefs. Your personal identity was always meant to be a subtle tempering of your true nature with time and circumstance. More suffering ensues when you try to hold on to a fixed notion of your self; try to always “keep your composure” and never act “out of character”. Instead, experiment with new ways of being and allow yourself to be surprised and even elated occasionally. Freedom is won when you set things free, starting with yourself.

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In the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara says to Shariputra with sudden deep insight that “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form”. By this he means that all things are the same; not this or that; not good or bad; not ugly or beautiful. The quest for beauty is central to western culture and thinking. All your life you have been brought up to discern between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which is not. It is a means of escapism and another way that ego distorts reality in favour of the things it finds more preferable. All sorts of philosophical posturing are also part of the distortion process. After all, when you judge things as ugly or worthless to you, it is easy to dismiss them and ignore their existence. And the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy—like the Amazon rainforest that has been systematically decimated for decades or the four interconnected oceans around us that are at levels of toxicity surpassing the last ice age. Besides the sociological and ecological impacts that this type of thinking entails, the quest for a pretty little world brings with it all kinds of suffering. Śūnyatā (शून्यता) is the state of mind in which you deliberately refrain from fitting concepts or labels to ordinary things. But even when you divest these things of their names and associations, there’s the empty space left behind—don’t label that either. When you make no distinction between this and that, you’ll accept all things simply as they are as part of a continuum, each caused by and causing the other.

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Your values are literally what’s valuable to you. Human beings are inherently goal-oriented and we tend to act in ways that get us to the things we want. Even at our noblest, we want to achieve something or get somewhere; whether to God, or love, or strength, or self-esteem, or security, or any of the other commodities that social order deems valuable and necessary. We want these these things for us and we want others to treat us in a ways that facilitate our goals, for evolution has made us social animals and there is a certain amount give-and-take and “playing by the rules”. But all the while, these ethical and moral norms of good social behaviour are what you more stringently hold others to while the same rules are more flexible when applied to yourself, so as to accommodate your own highly desired personal goals. You expect others to be truthful, kind, compassionate, humble, charitable, and so on towards you so that you can be comfortable and secure. But as you think and act within loosely constrained ethical and moral codes, conflicts inevitably develop as it is in our human nature to constantly align thought with action. Action that is contrary to thought diminishes your own self-confidence over time. If on the other hand, you were to give up your personal goals and uncompromisingly accept ethical values, you will no longer be conflicted by your personal half-values.

It is said that the bodhisattva (बोधिसत्त्व) has assimilated moral and ethical values to the point where they simply act. They do so not because they have resigned themselves to the rules, but because they embrace a spirit of openness. They already love, feel loved, are able to love, feel respected and have self-respect so they are not desperately grasping for the things of this world. They ask themselves questions like: What are the moments which give me the greatest satisfaction? … What are the most rewarding moments in my work and in my life, moments that make my life worthwhile? When you’re in the presence of such people it’s like entering another realm. They always appear to act correctly, always seem to do the right thing at the right time. So like the bodhisattva, when you give up wanting ordinary things and look for the simple things that you really need, life as a whole becomes simpler.

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Sthairyam (स्थैर्यम्) means perseverance and steadfast effort towards a goal that you have committed yourself to. Buddhism’s warning to the curious is "Better not to start, once begun better to finish." This simply means that half-work is just a dangerous as half-knowledge and there is no place for dilettantism when it comes to the serious work of putting your life in order. You can master any skill if you work persistently in simple and small steps, emphasising the positive and gently edging yourself forward. Practice precision, practice getting skilful in doing mundane tasks that you’d usually zone out of and instead, really be present. As you choose to give yourself completely to this work, there is the element of loss, of giving up the distractions and diversions that hitherto pulled you into into the easy flow of life. If you lament these things that you have to leave behind, the time you have had to give and give up for this work, and the still long road with its sacrifices ahead, you’ll hardly have the peace of mind to persevere. If instead, you focus on the next small step, the work seems less insurmountable, and lesser still thereafter.

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Your brain attempts to predict the outcome of every action and experience as it unfolds before you, from moment to moment. Millions of neurons talk to one another and try to anticipate what you will see, hear, smell, taste, and feel and the entire sequence of actions that you will take in a given situation. Experience now is “constructed” from the reference data and known facts already assimilated from your past experiences. So your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions can really be considered to be a fabrication—constructed not only from a myriad different sensations and revived images of sensations, but also the subtle faiths, fears, anticipations, instincts, superstitions, and blind impulses that plague the soul. As you chew on that first morsel of lunch, your brain is busy predicting the next sequence of actions you’ll take as you reach for that next spoonful and before you are consciously aware of the intention. To maintain a reasonable probability of success in any event, your brain must necessarily limit the variables of experience to those that are most familiar to you and hence, ipso facto, “good” for you. Problems arise when your brain makes broad associations and excludes entire categories of things from experience.

Whenever you agonize over what you should or should not do, you are really compartmentalising your experiences into categories, one pitted against the other. That this is good for you and this is bad. So instead of direct encounters with the real, moving world, the natural ebb and flow of life is stymied by judgements about whether you should be doing this or you should avoid doing that. In the process you add unnecessary complication to the basic simplicity of what you are. You don’t need to impose injunctions on your mind, but you must also ensure that it is sufficiently grounded so that it doesn’t wander. Meditation gives you the space to just experience the freewheeling movement of ego without avoidance, while enabling you to gently nudge the mind towards more skilful ways of working. Through this simplicity and straightforwardness, though fear and anger may arise they dissipate of their own accord and you actually have a chance to learn from your actions instead. When you attempt to direct your consciousness with injunctions, there is no learning—only petulant rebellion that eventually manifests itself in fear and tension.

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Duḥkha (दुःख) means all forms of pain, from the stubbing of your little toe to your grief over the loss of a loved one. Society teaches us to use any means necessary to get what we want, but excelling in personal fulfilment does not prepare us for the impermanence of life, the grief of loneliness, and the inevitability of death. Pain is part of the finite continuity of your life and cannot be avoided, but suffering can. Sorrow, anger, grief, or hurt cannot exist in isolation, they are brought on by some one, some experience, or some feeling. Beneath your fragile sense of personal identity, your real self can only exist as as a disconnected, fragmented, and dispersed set of characteristics that coalesce in myriad different ways from moment to moment. Even when you deny the transitory nature of your self, there is always the pain of awareness between the gaps of ego-consciousness. And since you cannot be what you wish to be, at least not always, your actions, thoughts, and feelings as they arise from moment to moment seem alien to you, causing you pain or the perpetual fear that results from repressed knowledge of pain. But if you keep running away from the things that are painful to contemplate, you paradoxically end up inviting more pain into your life as you try to stem every avenue by which pain my seep back into your life. And when memory is so deeply intertwined with language, words themselves seem to conjure up painful memories. Certain trigger words bring up entire sets of images and feelings from the past that were associated with pain, humiliation, or shame. The words—specifically the labels—that you give to the thing that is “pain” characterise it a certain way: a thing to be shunned and avoided. Similarly, pleasure becomes the thing to be coveted and pursued. It is perception that brings on these feelings and characterisations, but they are all mental fabrications or citta saṅkhāra (चित्त संस्कार), the labels that the mind gives to things—pleasure or pain, good or bad, liked or disliked, loved or feared. If there were no labels for these things that occur naturally in the psyche, then they would merely exist equally, as facts. You are not separate from your pain and it cannot be the thing that causes you to suffer. You are the pain, you cause the suffering. You cannot brush it aside. Making space for pain allows you to overcome it, not by vanquishing it, but by accepting it as part of yourself. When you include pain in your life, it no longer has such a hold over you. Instead of running away from pain, if you turn to face it, it reveals itself as a reflection of your own naked vulnerability, bereft of the stories that you previously used as diversions and the judgements that suppressed your own raw emotions.

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Vairāgyam (Sanskrit: वैराग्यम्) is the absence of any desire for material objects and sensual pleasures. Your mind has an insatiable desire for material things because they are firm and solid—things that you can hold on to in a world that is seemingly out of your control. You believe that you are irresistibly drawn to pleasure when you are actually running away from pain. The five skandhas (Sanskrit: स्कन्ध) in Buddhism are the physical and mental factors that compel you to cling tightly to the things of this world. First and foremost among the skandhas is form, or your appetite for the physical; then there are the sensations and feelings that form gives rise to, long after the physical experience has passed away, for perceptions continue to distort and transform direct experience by reframing it within your familiar mental constructs; then come the plentitude of associated thoughts that perception fosters accompanied by a proliferation of utilitarian explanations, which further distance you from the reality of the experience; finally you strive to maintain these states of consciousness so that you may continue to have all of the above, as if letting go would mean the loss of life itself. Suffering arises when you try to hold on to things that are gradually evolving and changing—like your character and your identity. Things that are meant to be a flexible summary of your experiential aggregates, ever-changing and capable of always being updated. When you contrive to be and act a certain way so as to be and have the things that you desire, your life is governed by a series of injunctions that you struggle to conform to. So learn to discern between your needs and desires; between what would help you grow and evolve and what would keep you entrenched in suffering.

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Ruminating is the act of reliving stressful events uncontrollably in your consciousness. It is a form of destructive contemplation where you hold on to things that make you frightened or angry. Why does your mind do this? Well, part of its natural instinct for survival is to take apart stressful experiences so that you can prepare for them in future, notwithstanding the total improbability that you will be exposed to the same set of experiential factors again. The mind is constantly trying to ward off feelings of guilt, anger, and loneliness and is ever-vigilant to the experiences that may trigger them. Ironically, it is this heightened state of awareness that leaves you more vulnerable to pain as the mind gradually increases the radius of known threats to your ego. Soon you can have any number of fearful memories that play off each other in succession. Since there is no way to suppress memories, you can learn to stay with them instead of running away from them. In meditation, you create a safe place to leisurely explore the dormant and underlying thoughts surrounding these fears without a pressing need to resolve them or get to their roots. In time, you will learn to simply let them go when they are found to be baseless or to gently take them apart when they point to something more meaningful.

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