Surge Sixty Six
STAY ALERT
Staying alert is the essence of spirituality. The man who is vigilant lives rightly while the scholar slips and falls. Organized religion gives false and temporary sense of security. Only a personal discovery of truth sets a man free. Much thinking cannot help you take right decisions but you will come out with right action when you can stay quiet and perceive the given situation without coming under the sway of likes and dislikes. Attachments and aversions are the undesirable gifts of the dead past. When you are alert, you are in the living present. The light of pure intelligence acts through you and you are not overpowered by the forces of old habit. You stand on the firm ground of freedom.
Fear and desire are the outcome of memories. When you remember some painful event, you fear its repetition. You do not want it to happen again. Similarly you desire the recurrence of some pleasant experience and want to go through it once more. So both these are rooted in memory. The fact meanwhile is that memories are very limited in their scope and they are unreal. A picture of an apple cannot satisfy your appetite as a real fruit can do. When you are carried away by fear and desire, you are, to a great extent, guided by the false and directed by the unreal. When you stand on guard, you are face to face with the true and the real.
An ancient text1 observes, “Lack of alertness is death.” The death that the scriptures warn you of is not the clinical death of the body, but the terrible situation where you are trapped in ego and egoistic tendencies. It is the psychological prison, worse than death, where you deny to yourself the beautiful freedom of your true nature, of the Self. More than harming anybody around you, you do a great disservice to yourself when thoughts that separate you from others rule the roost. Enslaved by pride or prejudice, you live in self-created insecurity and the consequent misery. You are caught in the maze of thoughts and the light of pure awareness barely gets in.
“The sense organs have likes and dislikes towards various sense objects. An intelligent person would not let them gain control over him,” says2 the Geeta (3.34). Though a translation like, “One should not come under their control,” is broadly acceptable, the meaning is better conveyed when you say, “If you are alert and intelligent, you would not let them rule you.” The language of “should and should not” has the smell of exercising will power; action proceeding from right understanding has a different fragrance. When you know there is fire in front of you, you do not exercise will power. Your perception does everything. There is no need to think, argue or weigh the pros and cons of touching the shooting flames. Alertness, right perception and seeing with a quiet mind are all about an operation above the plane of thought, memory and habit.
“Desire, anger and greed are three thieves that have made your body their home. They are all set to steal the jewel of wisdom from you. Therefore be alert; be on guard,” says3 Shri Shankaracharya in one of his compositions. What are these thieves but mechanical repetitions of old thought waves? Every one of us has enough common sense to recognize these as undesirable but the problem is – they become very powerful when they arise. We become helpless drivers of cars the headlights of which have suddenly turned off and the road before us is dark. Should it really be so? Is it possible that, to stretch the illustration a little further, we knew some defects were coming up with our front lights and we had ignored them for the last two weeks or so? In like manner, is it possible that we live our daily life with some amount of casualness, letting many influences frequently condition us, and then, at a testing moment, we are just unable to handle an emerging emotion?
No wonder Krishnamurti remarked, “Attention is the way to attention.” Not rituals, not reading and not repetition of sacred mantras is the way to this waking up. All of them can be seen to cause compartments in your life. They cause the division of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde4. You become a split personality: within you there are a good person and an evil person too. What is worse, you keep struggling with this division and you carry ideas (judgements) of who you are. Your life swings between the so-called good deeds and the so-called immoral acts. The pendulum goes from one extreme to the other. (In physics we learn: as the pendulum reaches zero kinetic energy and has stopped moving for a moment, it has gathered the maximum potential energy and is all set to move again.) You move from guilt and shame at one end to a repeat act at the other. At one end you have so many ideas of how you should be; and remorse over how you are not yet so. At the other end, you throw everything to the winds and let sheer habit take over.
Do not get carried away by judgements – good or bad. Be passively aware of how your mind works. Be intensely aware of your indulgence in both pleasure and pain. Small victories lead to big victories, they say. Be attentive to the tiny wave of pleasure that rises in you when you see your name or picture in a magazine or newspaper, with some importance attached to it. Watch the little disappointment within you also, when somebody forgot to mention your name in her speech. Being aware of all these crests and troughs of the emotional movement, you learn about yourself. In this learning there is the undoing of the ego.
It is well said in an old couplet5, “Do not do what should not be done even if your life is at risk. Please do only that which should be done, even at the cost of life.” Our society has always praised such righteous behaviour and has urged children especially to cultivate sterling values, follow some glorious role model and so on. The difficulty is as simple as this: without understanding what you are, your adoring ideas of what you should be will cause a lot of psychological complications. In seeing who (and what) you are, there is the elimination of falsehood. That alone clears the ground and facilitates true transformation.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
Monday, July 27, 2009
Notes: 1 pramado vai mrityuh – Shri Sanat-kumara in Sanat-sujateeya.
2 tayor-na vasham-agacchet
3 tasmad jagrata jagrata
4 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and first published in 1886. The work is known for its vivid portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from the other.
5 akartavyam na kartavyam pranaih kantha-gatair-api