Meditation

Yes, there are oodles of articles written about Rumi. But there’s a reason for that: His combination of wisdom and eloquence is unmatched — at least in this writer’s opinion.

The inspiration for today’s Rumi piece comes from a loyal and wise reader of mine whose Medium name is…Rumi Quoter! At the bottom of their Medium profile is this wonderful Rumi quote:

“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi

One could look at this from the macro viewpoint as seeking love from friends, family and romantic partners — in other words, seeking love from the world, writ large.

Romantic love best exemplifies this

I’m going to focus this piece on only one of those areas — romantic love. Why? Because I think Rumi’s quote applies especially strongly there. It’s also mega-relatable to the 21st century world we live in.

In my experience, most people, unconsciously, seek love to remedy what ails them inside. General examples that apply to many of us would be:

– “I’m lonely. I want a partner who will fill that loneliness.”

– “I have low self-esteem. I want a partner who makes me feel confident about myself.”

– “I have a fragile ego and need my partner to constantly build me up and tell me how great I am.”

Then there are more specific examples, like:

– Your dad left the family when you were twelve and you barely saw him again. Anytime you get into a relationship, you become scared to death of your partner breaking up with you.

– Your mom was distant and aloof and didn’t listen to you. You get into a relationship, and you absolutely lose it on your partner if you feel they’ve drifted off while you’re talking.

– You were an only child who was doted on and spoiled by your parents. As an adult, you demand, again unconsciously, that your partners place you front and center in their lives, or else…

All of the above are examples of the barriers to love we have built inside ourselves that Rumi is referring to. The key is that so many of us look outside ourselves for love.

WE need to fix what ails us

What Rumi is saying is that we should go inside and fix what is preventing us from experiencing love. And make no mistake: Those inner ailments need to be fixed if we are going to receive the love we seek.

That adult whose dad left the family when they were twelve? That person is going to struggle mightily and likely never have a successful relationship unless they dig deep and let go of all the emotional trauma dad’s abandonment caused them.

Ditto for the lonely one, the one with low self-esteem and on down the line. We can’t expect our partners to fix us.

They can, however, help US remove the barriers for ourselves. What would it take for our partners to be able to do that? To be helpful to us in this regard?

Awareness is everything

One main thing: Before they can help us, WE have to become aware of what is going on inside us. We have to do the hard work of diving inside ourselves to understand the reality of why we are the way we are.

Some inner maladies need to be fixed before even entering a relationship. That fearful twelve year old whose dad left but who is now 35 can never get beyond a third date. He or she may say it’s because “there’s just no chemistry” or “I need a guy to be at least four inches taller than me.” But the reality is that, deep down, they can’t get past their fear of being abandoned.

In other cases, our partners can help us remove our barriers; again, as long as we’re aware of those barriers. Like the person whose mom didn’t listen to them. The partner can be cognizant of this history and do their best to tune in when the other is talking.

Or, if they can’t listen for some reason, they make a point of telling them so. “I’m sorry, I got my ass kicked at work today and I’m exhausted and don’t feel like talking. Nothing to do with you whatsoever.”

Therapy can help tremendously

How can we become aware of what ails us inside? One obvious option is psychotherapy. I did it for years and it did me a world of good. The way I’ve always described what therapy is all about is this: It’s about helping us understand why we are the way we are.

There is, however, a second half of the “what to do” equation. And that is, once we’ve figured out what our inner baggage/emotional traumas are, we need to let them go.

This is where I think the therapy world sometimes falls short. We can’t just realize our reality and then let it stay there. That can lead to interminable wallowing. “Woe is me. X happened thirty years ago. I’ll never get over it.”

Mickey Singer’s emphasis on letting go

This is the main reason I like Mickey Singer so much. He’s into getting quiet and doing all kinds of spiritual practices, but his bottom line is that if we don’t let go of our “stuff,” it isn’t going to go anywhere. It’s just going to torment us until our last days.

So, with great deference to the wonderful Rumi, I would add four words to the end of his sublime quote.

“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it AND LET THEM GO.”

Well Rumi Quoter, I hope I’ve done justice to the beautiful quote on your profile page. One way or the other, I’m sure you’ll let me know…

You’re probably wondering why anybody would write a piece about how to handle good times. Shouldn’t we focus solely on dealing with adversity?

No. There’s lots to learn and lots to gain here.

What are ‘good times?’

First, what do I mean by ‘good times?’ I hesitate to put too fine a definition on this because I think most of you get what I mean.

Maybe you get a raise at work. Or you’re in a groove with your boyfriend. Or your kid just got into Harvard.

Things like this can put us in a place where we think, ‘I’m doing really well right now.’ Of course, the caveat here is that all of these ‘I’m in a good place’ examples are highly egoic so, in a perfect world, they wouldn’t have this effect on us. But most of us aren’t at the end of the spiritual path just yet, so I’m trying to use real-life examples.

Winning some cheddar

I had one of these happen to me about a month ago. Playing in a big senior tennis event here in Southern California, I beat a good player in the semifinals. That was really cool. Even cooler was that the winner and finalist each received prize money, so I had just guaranteed I’d win some cheddar.

I’d had some bad losses over the past year so this result was welcomed. By the way, I lost in the finals to a Swedish guy who didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. No fair! But I digress…

Granted, doing well in a tennis tournament is not some life-altering “good” thing. But I did find myself in a bit of a groove in the ensuing days. I’ll tell you how I handled that in a bit.

Clinging during good times

But first, let’s talk about what most of us do when we hit a “good patch.” We do something that the Buddhists strongly advise against: We cling. We try to grab hold of the experience in the hopes that it will stay with us.

The biggest reason we do that is we fear what will happen when life returns to “normal.” We fear the normal times because we think we can’t handle them. So we cling to the good.

But clinging results in two things. First, it diminishes the ‘good’ of those good phases. And second, it shortens those phases.

What to do

What’s a healthier approach to the good times? It occurred to me after I hit my mini-groove last month.

I was thinking to myself, “This is cool. I played well. Had a good win. Won some money. And just have a really good vibe from it.” I told myself to run with it. To enjoy it.

But this is the critical part. I also told myself that my little groove would end at some point, but that that was fine.

Why? Because the ‘normal’ times are fine, too. I can handle them.

I owe it to spiritual work

In fact, all this spiritual work I’ve done these past ten years has gotten me to a place where the normal times are great. People ask me how I’m doing and I say, “Really well.” Not because of some great thing going on, but just because I enjoy my everyday ‘normal’ life.

That spiritual work has also given me another valuable benefit: I know I can handle anything. That doesn’t mean I will like every experience I go through. It just means I can handle them, as Mickey Singer would say.

Flow with life

What that does is allow me to enjoy the good times without clinging to them. It allows me to flow with the cycles of life.

Good times. Medium times. Tough times. Normal times. They’re all part of life. And we’re just conscious beings experiencing all of those cycles.

The key is to honor that fact and not resist it. It’s about not fighting with reality. Not fighting life.

But rather, as the Taoists would say, flowing with it. Accepting our place in nature rather than resisting it.

The takeaway

So do the inner work of getting quiet and letting go. Then when good times come, enjoy them. Groove with them. But don’t cling to them.

Know that when ‘normal’ times return, you’ll be fine. And hopefully even great.

I just checked how many articles I’ve written about the Tao te Ching. Nine. I’d thought I’d written many more than that.

Why? Because the Tao is my favorite book of wisdom.

Legend has it that the Tao was written in the 6th century BC by Lao Tzu, a scholar who worked for the royal court in the Zhou Dynasty. After growing disillusioned by the decline in morality he’d witnessed, Lao Tzu chose to embark on a life as a hermit.

Lao Tzu writes it down, then disappears

When he reached the edge of the kingdom, a guard, Yinxi, recognized him and requested that Lao Tzu write down the wisdom he had accumulated. The result was the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu left the text with Yinxi and was never seen again.

One of my favorite of the many beautiful teachings of the Tao appears in Chapter 22:

“If you want to be given everything, give everything up.”

There are two halves to this profound passage. One is about what we need to do, and the other is about what happens when we do that.

Let’s start with what Lao Tzu suggests we do — ‘give everything up.’ What does he mean by that?

At first reading, one might think it’s mostly the Christ-like teaching of giving away everything we own, like clothes, homes and the like. I don’t think that’s the thrust of this teaching.

I think it’s more about giving up ourselves. It’s about giving up all of the egoic attachments we all carry around. Giving up identifying as rich or poor, strong or weak, successful or unsuccessful, smart or stupid.

Harmonizing with nature

What would Lao Tzu have us identify as if not those worldly things? Mostly as a conscious being whose only purpose is to live in harmony with nature, something we can’t do when we are stuffed to the gills with baggage.

I think it also means surrendering to the universe, AKA giving up on trying to control everything. In short, ‘giving everything up’ means letting go.

And what happens when we do this? When we let go of ourselves and our attachments and surrender to our natural place in the universe? We are ‘given everything.’

It’s not about getting stuff

What does that look like? Let’s start with what that doesn’t look like. It’s not being given a nice car or a beautiful house. It’s not even getting a wonderful life partner or fantastic kids, though being given everything could include all of those things.

Getting everything in this case means having a calm, peaceful center. It means living from a place of lightness and stillness. It means being cleared of the emotional, egoic baggage we carry in our lower selves. It means being given the ability to live life from a place of conscious presence, rather than being at the mercy of our fearful, sensitive, backward and forward-looking egos.

I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like getting everything in my book. Light. Aware. Present. Fearless. Clear-headed.

The takeaway

This piece of wisdom reminds us that the path to ‘getting everything’ is not about addition. It’s not about adding to our lives. More food. More clothes. More spiritual books. More anything.

The path to life’s riches is about subtraction. It’s about letting go of the baggage that psychically weighs us down. Letting go of the slights, the grievances, the traumas…Letting go of all of it.

If we do that; if we give everything up, we will, as Lao Tzu so wisely wrote, be given everything.

One reason I love the great 20th century Indian saint Yogananda is that he is the favorite teacher of my favorite teacher, Mickey Singer. Mickey brings up Yogananda’s teachings often and more than any other of the great beings.

One exchange I’ve heard Mickey reference several times is the following. One of Yogananda’s devotees asked how he could find God.

Yogananda replied:

“He dwells right behind your every thought.”

First, let’s dispense with the obligatory G-word caveats. GOD means different things to different people. Some believe there is no God. Others that there is only one God and that he/she/it exists only through their religion — I’m thinking Islam, Christianity and Judaism here.

So yeah, it’s complicated. For the purposes of this article, I’m asserting that God is the creator of the universe and life here on Earth. For all of us.

And, as Yogananda implies, God is in every one of us. How, and in what fashion?

The Brahman and Atman one-two punch

On this, I like the Hindu teaching of Brahman and Atman. Brahman is the Supreme Being. In layman’s terms, he/it is the head honcho of the Universe. The One source of all consciousness.

Atman is the entity that is within all of us. I like to refer to the Atman as everybody’s tiny slice of God/Brahman. And we all have it. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that that little slice of God gets obscured by our egos, largely manifesting as thoughts. We mortals walk around all day thinking, thinking, thinking.

About what? Our weight. Our daughter barely acknowledging us on Father’s Day. The passive-aggressive comment your boss made just as you walked out the door for the weekend. Our too-long to-do list. And on and on.

And all the while, as we think, think, think those thoughts, that God-consciousness lurks, as Yogananda so eloquently says, behind those thoughts.

As another high being, Meher Baba, put it:

“Man minus mind equals God.”

We don’t have to quiet all of the mind. Just what I’d call the personal mind, aka, the ego.

We still use our brilliant minds to help us in myriad areas. From the complex, like writing a book, to the simple, like figuring out what we need from the grocery store.

The work of our lives

So the work of our lives is to still our minds of ruminative, useless, noisy thoughts. Why? So that the Atman/Soul/God that is always there can then come through us into the world.

What does that manifestation look like? There are zillions of examples, but I’ll give a few from my life.

Sometimes when playing tennis, I enter what many call “The Zone.” It’s a state where my mind shuts down. There are no thoughts. Just pure presence. When I’m in that state, I hit shots I never knew I was capable of hitting.

It was from this place that Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Chris Evert worked their genius. It’s God working from that place of no-thought.

Getting in the writing zone

Even in the work I’m doing now, I often look back on articles and have no recollection about writing them. I, in the iconic words of Nike, “Just do it.” Not a ton of thinking. Just getting into “The Zone,” and “doing it.”

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to write this stuff ten or twenty years ago. Why? That brings us to the “How do I still my thoughts so I can experience God coming through me,” part of this piece.

The reason is that I’ve done a lot of meditating and practicing mindfulness these past ten years. That work has gone a long way in helping to still my wacky, active mind.

The takeaway

So, yet again, the takeaway is this: If you want to still your mind, start practicing regular meditation and practicing mindfulness.

Those practices will help still the thoughts that block your tiny slice of God from shining through you.

Ram Dass unknowingly took a page from Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water when he related what it’s like toward the end of the spiritual path.

What do I mean by ‘the end of the spiritual path’? It’s the state we reach when we’ve quieted our minds and let go of our attachments, also known as letting go of ourselves. Or our egos.

A less ‘woo-wooey’ way of putting it would be letting go of all the garbage we’ve held onto that has prevented us from achieving sustained happiness.

Mickey Singer related in a talk last week how Ram Dass described that awakened state. Ram Dass said:

“It’s like I’m standing on the bridge and there’s turmoil in the water below me. Every once in a while, a spray comes up, and I can feel it. And my mind says, ‘You know, I used to live down there. I used to be in that.’”

How beautiful and cool is that?

Most of humanity is trapped in the roiling waters of our egos. Those waters thrash us around like clothes in a washing machine. It’s destabilizing and prevents us from holding our center.

What is the substance of these roiling waters?

-You call someone and two days later they still haven’t called you back.

-Your friend’s kid wins an award that you believe should have gone to your kid.

-Your wife gets a little too comfy and giggly talking to a guy friend of yours at a party.

All of these manifest as little swirls of water in our lower selves. They’re disturbances.

What doing the work yields

But what happens when you put in the kind of inner work Ram Dass did? Doing the daily sadhana of, as he called it, chopping wood and carrying water.

Meditating every day. For years on end. And letting go.

Like when your friend’s kid wins the award, you notice the disturbed swirl of water forming and you lean away. You don’t dive into it by thinking, “That is bullshit! Hank totally deserved to win that!”

Don’t touch it!

No. You don’t get involved with the feeling. You don’t touch it, as Mickey Singer teaches. You just relax around the disturbed feeling and let it pass…like a cloud in the sky.

You do this every day. In multitudes of situations. Every month. Every year. For decades, if that’s what it takes.

Making it to the bridge

And then, you find yourself on the bridge, where you are now an observer of the maelstrom of ego water rather than a prisoner of it. Those waters no longer envelop you to the point that you can’t see anything else, like your conscious, true self, because you have liberated that true self.

And every now and then a spray of water reaches you on the bridge. And you feel it.

For Ram Dass, maybe that light spray came in the form of a crazy person in the audience flipping out on him. Or his father calling him Rum Dumb (which he did). Or hitting a red light when he was late for an appointment.

The difference for him was that in all those cases, the strength of the effect was a mere wisp of water he could barely feel.

But he, like any of us who get there, must have felt tremendous ease and relief knowing that he ‘used to live down there,’ but no longer did.

The takeaway

Extricating ourselves from the agitated waters of our lower selves is the central work of our lives. That work involves getting quiet inside and letting go of ourselves.

It’s hard work. But with enough commitment and persistence, we’ll rise up from our egoic whirlpool and stand on that bridge.

And experience life from a place of peace and ease…

Thirty years ago, in my bachelor days in Washington, D.C., I became interested in wine. My buddy Bob insisted my motive was purely to impress the women. He was wrong. Mostly.

My first move was reading wine books. What did I expect to find? I figured in a 200-page book, about 150 of them would be about how to taste wine and the rest would be about the varietals (cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, syrah, et al) and where they’re grown (France, Napa, et al).

That wasn’t the case. In every single book I perused, they spent no more than 5–10 pages on tasting and the rest on the varietals and wine regions of the world.

Wine is about tasting, right?

I was flummoxed. Shouldn’t the how-to of tasting be everything? No. Turns out that wine education is mostly about learning the characteristics of the various varietals and where they’re produced.

What the hell does any of this have to do with my usual area of trekking the spiritual path? Well, the same thing happened when I first dove into that arena.

As I waded deeper and deeper and read and listened to the greatest of the spiritual greats, a surprising topic kept coming up front and center. It was the equivalent of learning about the varietals and the regions.

Who are we?

What was that topic? Who we identify as. Specifically, do we identify as the personal/egoic self or as our conscious awareness. That’s it. Huh?

I’ll explain by using an example many of you know, Eckhart Tolle’s groundbreaking book The Power of Now. The main point of that book is that we are not our thoughts. We are the consciousness that is aware of those thoughts. Our thoughts are mostly just products of our egos and our egos are not who we are.

That’s the whole ballgame

Those last few sentences sum up most of the spiritual path. It’s about identifying as the consciousness within us rather than the kooky creations of our egos.

Absorbing that concept is difficult for many people. So the job of someone like me, who tries to express this stuff in ways that make sense to people, is to express this particular concept in a way that makes sense to people!

The way that best illuminates this identifying-as-consciousness idea for me is the following simple, boring sentence:

“You are the subject, not the object.”

Think of it in terms of basic grammar. In the sentence “I watched the elephant,” I is the subject, watched is the verb and elephant is the object. That I is our consciousness. It’s who we are. Everything we experience in life is experienced by that I/consciousness.

People get this part of it. In the example above, you wouldn’t consider yourself the elephant just because you’re watching it, would you? No. You’re the subject watching that object.

Similarly, if you are listening to an eagle screeching in the sky above, you are not the screeching sound. You’re the consciousness listening to that sound.

When you eat a roasted brussels sprout, you’re not the brussels sprout. You’re the consciousness that tastes the brussels sprout. And on and on, ad infinitum.

Identifying as our thoughts and feelings

Where people get into trouble, and I mean virtually all of humankind, is when it comes to our thoughts and emotions. We get so wrapped up in what we’re thinking and feeling that we conclude, falsely, that we are those thoughts and emotions.

But those thoughts and emotions are no different than elephants, screeching eagles and brussels sprouts. They’re just objects of our consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle’s dark night of the soul

The most poignant and significant example I know of that illustrates this is something I wrote an entire article about (link here). It’s about the life-altering thought Eckhart Tolle had one night in 1977 when he was depressed and suicidal. That thought was:

“I don’t think I can live with myself any longer.”

It him like a ton of bricks: Who is this ‘I’ that can’t live with ‘myself?’ In that moment, he realized that he was the I/consciousness/subject and the ‘myself’ he couldn’t live with any longer was just an object of that consciousness.

That ‘myself’ was his ego, in the form of painful and omnipresent thoughts and feelings that he couldn’t live with any longer. And in those moments his ego dissolved, ushering in a multiyear period of near-total bliss. It was as if a lightbulb went off in his head that said,

“This ‘myself’ that I can’t live with anymore is no more me than the plant I’m looking at or the Debussy symphony I’m listening to on the radio.”

So that, my friends, is what we’re shooting for. The internalization of the fact that we are the subject/consciousness and not ANY of the objects that our consciousness focuses on.

Most of the great Indian saints called it realization of the self. In fact, Yogananda’s extant organization is called the Self-Realization Fellowship.

And the wonderful yogi Ramana Maharshi’s main teaching was simply to get quiet inside, for however many years it takes, until you realize that the essence of who you are is that deep ‘I’ consciousness within you.

The takeaway

Who we are, our identity, is always the subject, in the form of our consciousness; 24/7, for the entirety of our lives. Anything and everything we experience is merely an object that our consciousness has seen, tasted, smelled, heard, touched, thought or felt.

Give this subject/object thing a test drive. See if it can make it through to your core.

Sorry for repeating myself, but I love Ram Dass. Unconditionally and wholeheartedly. What a beautiful man.

For those who haven’t heard of him, Ram Dass was an American spiritual teacher for roughly fifty years, beginning in the late 1960s until his death in 2019. As Richard Alpert, he partnered with Timothy Leary to study the effects of psychedelics, mostly psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms) and LSD, when both taught at Harvard in the early 1960s.

Their focus was not on the recreational aspect of these drugs, but rather on exploring the limits of human consciousness. For their efforts, they were both summarily fired by Harvard in 1963.

After diving further into psychedelics and consciousness for the next several years, he reached a crossroads: While these substances brought him to deep spiritual states, it was always temporary. He always came back to “normal,” i.e., the state where his ego ran the show.

Ram Dass heads to India

So what did Dick Alpert do about this metaphysical conundrum? Like many Westerners, he went to India, in 1967, in search of substance-less states of higher consciousness.

And he found his path, in the person of Neem Karoli Baba, the guru who renamed him Ram Dass, Sanskrit for ‘servant of God.’ After meeting Baba, Ram Dass devoted the rest of his life to spiritual teaching in some form or another. [For more about Ram Dass and the amazing Neem Karoli Baba, check out these three articles I’ve written featuring them — article 1, article 2, article 3.]

What separated Ram Dass from all the others? In brief, he was better than anyone at conveying to Westerners the deep teachings of yoga in language they not only understood but could absorb.

What separated Ram Dass from the rest

He made it fun. And emotional. And dramatic. Put all that together and the result was scads of Westerners, mostly Americans, absorbing this stuff at the deepest level. And benefitting profoundly.

I include myself among the millions of beneficiaries, as I’m sure many of you do as well. That was the monumental, enduring contribution of Ram Dass.

[By the way, I’d put Mickey Singer number two on that list of teachers whose language and manner most resonate with Westerners.]

And what did the great Ram Dass have to say about stillness? This:

“Be still. The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

Simple. Powerful. And, most important, true.

Getting quiet inside is the game, as Ram Dass would say. When we’re still, i.e., when the mind becomes quiet, it’s in that silence that we find ourselves.

When he says, “…the more you can hear,” what we’re hearing is us. Eckhart Tolle puts it like this:

“You are never more essentially, more deeply, yourself than when you are still.”

The converse is also the case: What we are NOT is the sum of all the disparate, chattery thoughts flying around our heads. Absorbing the truth of that last sentence, it could be said, is the most important step on the path to liberation.

I’d also add a wrinkle to Ram Dass’s teaching. He says that when we become still, the more we can hear.

It’s about receiving more than hearing

I would change the word hear to receive. Why? To me, hearing connotes an action we partake in. It’s something we do.

But I don’t believe we need to actively do anything after we get quiet. Yoga is much subtler than that.

I say all we need to do, if you want to call it that, is get quiet and sit there. And do nothing other than receive the divine, mysterious nature of our true selves.

The cosmic car radio analogy

We’re like car radios. Our racing thoughts create static that prevents us from hearing the divine music that K Universe-FM 101 is broadcasting to us through the airwaves. When we quiet down, the static is eliminated, allowing that transcendent music to be received by our car radio.

Staying with the music motif, I know I sound like a broken record on this ‘getting quiet inside’ thing. I write about it frequently.

Why? Because it is unbelievably important! To your, and humanity’s, overall well-being.

The takeaway

I hope you’ll get in the game by getting quiet inside. Meditate. Pray. Practice mindfulness. Do breath-work. Whatever stills your mind. Make that your number one priority.

Doing so will allow that divine music from K Universe 101 to make it through, which will blow you and your ego away…

I was listening to another amazing Mickey Singer talk yesterday (at tou.org) when he brought up the great 19th century Indian saint, Ramakrishna. This guy was the real deal.

How so? Rather than chronicle his life and teachings, of which many thousands of pages have been written, I’ll relate a few important points.

Ramakrishna’s notable fans

First is that he was revered in his own time. Living in the Bengal area in Northeastern India from 1836 until his death in 1886, Ramakrishna’s teachings were extolled by none other than the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, a contemporary.

Gandhi called him “a living embodiment of godliness.”

And Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964 claimed that Ramakrishna, “…drew our attention to the higher things of life and of the spirit.”

High praise from, arguably, the two most influential Indians of the last 100 years.

Perhaps most important was Ramakrishna’s claim that the world’s sundry religions, including Christianity and Islam, were “so many paths to reach one and the same goal.” This endorsement of the basic unity of religions was remarkable at the time, and still is over 150 years later.

For a full account of his life, I recommend Sri Ramakrishna, The Face Of Silence.

Ramakrishna’s prayer

So, what about this prayer Mickey brought up in his talk? Someone asked Ramakrishna if there was a meaningful prayer. This was his response:

“Yes, there is.Give me the strength to let go of myself so every single moment of my life I can get closer to you.”

What does Ramakrishna mean by this? The most basic reading is he’s saying that if we let go of ourselves, we’ll get closer to God.

What would Ramakrishna’s version of ‘letting go of ourselves’ be? Letting go of our desires, our fears, petty jealousies, feelings of superiority, or inferiority, needing to prove ourselves right and others wrong, and the like.

But if this were so easy, we wouldn’t need to pray for it. Nor would we ask for the ‘strength’ that is required to let go of ourselves. Why do we need strength to accomplish this?

BECAUSE IT’S UNBELIEVABLY HARD!

We all know this. Stopping ourselves from walking around all day, every day, asking “What do I want now? What do I want now? What do I want now?” is not easy. Nor is keeping our cool when somebody talks about what a great guy Donald Trump is — or Joe Biden, if you’re on the other side on that one.

But letting go, according to this great sage, brings the highest reward there is: Closeness to God. What’s so great about getting closer to God?

Without diving into all of the complexities the G-word carries with it, let’s go with closeness to God means closeness to our true selves. This gets real deep real quick, but most spiritual traditions, one way or another, profess that the true self/consciousness within all of us is God.

As Meher Baba, another great Indian saint, said:

“Man minus mind equals God.”

The mind being that illusory self that Ramakrishna urges us to let go of.

Pinpointing the absolute truth of any of this is impossible for we mortals living on the earthly plane. Which is fine with me.

The takeaway

So I say we put our energies toward something we can effect. That something is the biggest takeaway for me in all of my perusing and musing on the profound matters of spirituality. It’s what Ramakrishna, Meher Baba, Mickey Singer and the great sages of humanity have taught.

And it is this:

Letting go of ourselves is the paramount work of a human life.

Very few people would claim that they don’t at least try to achieve happiness. But most would also say that sustained happiness eludes them.

Yes, it was easy to be happy the first few months of that awesome, head-over-heels-in-love relationship. Or that day your first child was born. Or when you got the promotion at work.

But day after day? Month after month? Year after year? Most people think that that is impossible. That inherent in the nature of humans is the inability to feel good most of the time.

Feeling good inside

We need to drive down on two words in that last sentence: feel good. That phrase could encompass many things. Feeling good after two margaritas. Feeling good after you win a big tennis match. And yes, feeling good after getting the promotion. But none of those bring sustained good feelings.

Feeling good most of the time is how I would describe happiness. And not feeling good in the excitement sense of “I got an A+ on my AP Physics final exam! I feel awesome!”

I mean the feeling of peace inside. [Check out this article I wrote on Thich Nhat Hanh’s assertion that happiness is about inner peace, not excitement.]

The obstacle to happiness

This is where things get interesting. Because here is the big obstacle to happiness: People lead their lives pursuing endeavors they believe will make them feel good most of the time. But it doesn’t work. Anything we pursue in the external world — job promotions, relationships, home renovation, food, drink, etc. — CANNOT bring sustained happiness.

The Buddhists would tell you that that is because all of those things spring from desire and desire lies at the core of suffering. For our purposes, let’s just stick with: Pursuing those things doesn’t work.

I hope it’s clear now why this is so important: Just about everybody out there focuses their life on pursuing an end (happiness) in a way that is impossible to achieve.

Before getting to how we should respond to this, let’s tackle some who may have an opposing view. Some, especially here in America, may hold the position of:

“My life is not about pursuing happiness/feeling good/feeling peaceful. I want my life to be about achieving big things. Becoming powerful and leaving my legacy in the form of my name on buildings. If that means feeling uptight and lousy most of the time, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

Or:

“I want to squeeze every last cool experience I can out of life. Visit exciting places. Drink the best wines. Eat the best food. Have sex with as many people as possible…Feeling peaceful inside doesn’t interest me.”

Fair enough. But if either of those life paths appeals to you, recognize that both emanate from the ego. Your true, conscious self doesn’t care one bit about having your name sculpted onto a university medical building, nor does it need wine, women and song.

And by the way, we can be peaceful/happy AND work hard in the world, to the point of having buildings named after us and drink Romanee Conti, climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and pay $20 million to hitch a ride to the International Space Station.

The caveat is that we need to achieve the peace part first. Because those cool things will not bring sustained happiness.

Fine, what do we do with this information?

The first thing to take away from all this is critical: Just being aware of it. Take stock of how you live your life and if your actions center mostly on satisfying external desires (most of us do this), at least acknowledge that reality.

By doing so, you can at least give yourself a choice — keep pursuing something that doesn’t work OR try something that does work. Which leads us to…

The obvious $64,000 question: If pursuing wine, women and fame won’t make us happy, what will? Any of you who have been reading my articles have a good idea of what I’m about to say.

What can make us happy

The short answer is that instead of looking to the external world to help us feel good inside, we simplify things and go inside to help us feel better inside.

How do we do that? First, we need to know why we look outside ourselves for happiness in the first place: Because we don’t feel good inside.

Mickey Singer would ask us, “How are you doing in there? Not too great, right?”

Why we don’t feel good inside

And the reason we’re not doing well “in there” is we’ve held onto a bunch of psychic baggage that sits inside us. Every day. All day. That stuff is made up of things we experienced that we held onto instead of letting it go when it happened.

Example: Your dad was an abusive jerk and your parents’ marriage was a hot mess. Those myriad, troubling experiences that reality wrought on your childhood stayed inside you and led you to decide to never marry or have kids. That’s what I mean by psychic baggage.

We need to let go

So the first thing we need to do to help us feel good inside is to let go of that emotional baggage.

When it gets stirred — a good guy you’ve been seeing asks you to move in with him — you don’t push it down and resist it as you usually do:

“No way! I’m outta here. I’m not going down that route.”

Instead, you let it come up. You relax with it as best you can. And then let it go.

And we keep doing this every day. Clearing out our insides of all the emotional baggage that has plagued and tormented us our entire lives.

We need to get quiet

The second thing we do is get quiet inside. Why? Because the quieter it is, the easier it is to let go of the baggage.

How do we get quiet? For the umpteenth time, we meditate, practice mindfulness and do anything else that enhances inner quietude.

So those are the two main ways we go directly inside to help us feel better inside — get quiet and let go.

The takeaway

What do we do with this information? We reorient our lives in a way that emphasizes getting quiet and letting go.

Which doesn’t mean you need to move to a monastery and meditate eight hours a day. You still do your job, workout at the gym, drink margaritas…

But you put your inner work at the top of your priority list.

It’s the only path to sustained happiness.

Let’s face it, most of the time we feel we have as much control over our lives as a pinball being flicked around a pinball machine. Bing, bing, bing. Click, click. Off we go again, the vicissitudes of life constantly interrupting any sense of sustained centeredness.

That feeling of general instability ruling the roost in our inner worlds isn’t fun. That’s the bad news.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. Practices like meditation and mindfulness can, if performed regularly, go a long way toward stabilizing our insides.

The maestro of mindfulness

Today, I want to focus on the simplest of simple mindfulness techniques that can help with this. It comes from the maestro of mindfulness himself, the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Here is how the great master described his technique for staying centered:

“Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

Yes, that sounds utterly basic, to the point that you might dismiss it as meaningless. Hear me out.

First, what does he mean by ‘anchor?’ Well, the function of an anchor is to hold something in place, usually a boat. If you want to fish in a certain place and not drift away, you throw an anchor in the water and let it drop to the bottom.

A personal anchor is something that keeps our psyche, our being, in place, in the moment. It keeps us centered.

Thoughts unmoor us

If the wind or currents are what cause the boat to drift, thoughts and feelings are what cause our personal center to become unmoored, leaving us feeling unstable and anxious.

How about Thich Nhat Hanh’s use of ‘conscious breathing?’ We breathe all the time. If we don’t, we’re done for.

But it’s not often that we’re aware of our breathing. Conscious breathing is when we place all of our attention/awareness on it.

So why is this important? Why should any of us care about using ‘conscious breathing’ as an ‘anchor?’

Why this is so useful

Because it is life-alteringly useful. How? To answer that I’m going to reference an interview I saw years ago that made an imprint on me. It’s the inspiration for writing this piece.

It was Oprah interviewing Thich Nhat Hanh. It had the feel of two beautiful souls interacting.

And Oprah being Oprah, she had to satisfy her curiosity about how this world-famous Buddhist monk handled basic things in life. She asked him something to the effect of:

“So you must have some stress in your life, maybe with people wanting you to do certain things or feeling overwhelmed with commitments or what have you. So how does someone so spiritually advanced like you handle stress?”

His answer, which won’t surprise you, was:

“I simply come back to my breathing.”

That was it. Not a lot of embellishment. None required.

Oprah’s response was something akin to, “Oh. Okay. That makes sense.”

No big deal, right? Just return to your breathing.

It is a big deal in the sense of how powerful a tool we have right in front of us, at all times!

The stresses of modern life

We 21st century Earthlings constantly battle with the stresses of everyday life. Dealing with our kids, our spouses, significant others, coworkers, bosses, other drivers, Costco madness, and on down the line.

These are what I mean by the vicissitudes of life. It comes with the territory of living in the modern world.

And too often we let these mostly little stresses knock us off center. Well, we don’t have to let that happen!

Use your conscious breathing to anchor you. Your boss says something shitty, go back to your office and take several conscious breaths. Ditto if that’s your husband, teenage kid or the airline that keeps you on hold for two hours.

Breathe…

Here’s another way Thich Nhat Hanh expressed it:

“Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.”

This is so doable. Use it. It’s there all the time. Literally.

The takeaway

If you find yourself upset, a little or a lot, go to your breathing.

It will relieve a boatload of stress.

Finally, to Thich Nhat Hanh, wherever you are in the mystery of the afterlife, thank you for all of the beautiful, useful wisdom you bestowed on all of us during your 95-year stint on our tiny orb, floating around in the middle of black space.