To Have or to Be? The yogic approach

There are two modes of relating to friends, family, and self. One is the “Having” mode and the other is “Being” mode. The most prevalent and common mode in the current world is the “Having” mode. In this mode, the person is objectified as private property. The obvious fallout of this mode is the development of attachment to the person who is actually being related to as a thing who is yearned to be possessed, owned, devoured and consumed. What stands out in this mode is the personal ego, selfishness, and inflated sense of the self and its consumerist needs.

This attitude of “having” in a lesser paranoia is visible when someone plucks a beautiful flower from the garden and puts it on one’s hair, on one’s coat. There is this absolute apathy and recklessness towards the the form of life of the flower and her own right to live, flourish, prosper and lead her own life. Since the flower does not bleed or cry or oppose this agony is hidden and goes unnoticed.

The same thing applies when a lovelorn, selfish, self-obsessed lover proclaims his love and stifles and strangulates the other person of her freedom to choose, to live, to breathe, and to flourish. An attachment grows and makes the relationship unbearable for both the parties. Going literally an attachment is like attaching an object to one’s own body. The partner is actually objectified in totality. Her wishes, freedom, ideas, thoughts, desires, and ambitions are all maimed, and instead of the sadist just hears an echo of his biases and his needs out of that objectified attachment. He judges narrows down, and gets into a dark delusion. This is what Dhritarashtra went through along with his clan in the Mahabharata. This lack of empathy, perspective and insight have been symbolized in the story by making Dhritarashtra as a blind king.

There are an obvious revolt and conflict between the sadist who is objectifying the other and the victim. This conflict results in an infinitely more desires, which further re-affirms the attachment and hence the conflict. This endless source of conflict causes anger. Anger leads to delusion and destruction of all memories, perspectives, responsibilities, and morality. Ultimately it leads to absolute destruction of the human ethos leading to the destruction of the relationship and the people involved. The catastrophic flow goes as follows, and is poetically articulated in the Bhagavad Gita’s 62nd and 63rd verses of the 2nd chapter –

Addiction towards “Having” -> Objectification -> Attachment -> egoistic selfish desire to possess -> conflict -> Anger -> delusion -> destruction of all memories, perspectives, morality -> destruction of the relationship and the self

Being attached to someone is basically an objectification. It is about creating a human being like an object that someone likes to use for their own selfish desires. This objectification helps to find meaning, satisfying selfish needs (physical and emotional) and validation for the ego.

The origin of such attachment is the habit of satisfying one’s need through material sense objects.

The moment one does not get the habitual reciprocation and their needs are not fulfilled, immediately an uncontrollable fire of anger, jealousy, hatred erupts like a volcano. Then there are a series of judgment, rationalization, story-making, and a never-ending blame game. This never ends. Each argument flares up a new argument, and the once peaceful heaven becomes a cauldron of unbearable pain.

The whole thing is symbolized by that man who plucked that rose and put her on his coat. He does not care of the cries and pain of the rose. He is even oblivious that there was a desire of the rose that she would not want to be on his coat today, but would have liked to be placed on the feet of a God! No one cares about her wishes. What is seen and is important is that man, his coat and that red rose to adorn it. One life is killed and the other flourishes. That is what a sadist does. He violates his lover’s sanctity, freedom, lightness, and that urge to explore, grow, and flourish. For him, there is not much difference between private property and a human being.

What is the way out of this vicious cycle? The solution lies in a deeper experience of the problem itself. One gets attached to a thing. In this case, the human was objectified to be a thing. But there are aspects of life that cannot be objectified by definition. Like for example the process of learning music, or writing, or painting, or for that matter, any spontaneous selfless engagement with an activity cannot be objectified.

No wonder people do not complain about being addicted or attached to the act of learning to play guitar, or for that matter attached to Physics, or attached to any other domain of study. This is because such engagements are not a noun. But they are a verb. They are a process of active engagement. A person learns a new thing, experiments it, falters, stumbles, corrects himself, practices more, and becomes an expert in that process. As they become an expert on one level, another harder level opens up. Again the progression of upward spiral continues. This upward spiral keeps the protagonist busy actively engaging his creative power and exploring newer heights of beauty. The novelty is maintained, the mind keeps getting opened and the person evolves. The same phenomenon can be observed in sports or any other engaging activity. For they have something to be actively engaged with, which is not even possible to objectify.

The pursuit of knowing God is another such domain that works as an antidote to the addiction of attachment. In this scheme, a person gets attached to God. And by definition, God cannot be objectified as He is omnipresent and infinite, and not a localized noun. And that comes up as an easy to practice hack to escape from objectification to start with. One, instead of getting attached to any human being, starts entering into a systematic approach towards developing their relationship and attachment with God. More they get attached to God, obviously, other attachments wither off. And the attachment to God pushes him further to explore more and more the nature of God. The positive never-ending chain reaching kicks off. More he experiences God, more new horizons show up. It is a never-ending journey. The person gets into that life long (and beyond life) romantic relationship with the idea of God.

The human mind by definition attaches itself with an object. God becomes a beautiful possibility to attach to. Hence religion gets its name. Dr. Wagle in his podcast series – Gita: A memoir of a psychiatrist, puts it pretty clearly. He points out that religion comes from two words: re + ligate. Ligate means to tie up, to align, to attach. So, now the person re-wires his soul and attaches to God. That empty solitude is taken up by the idea of God, to develop the pure experience and understanding of God. Going further, as per Gita, the duties and responsibilities are termed as “Swadharma”, which is considered as a worship of God. Through selfless actions one offers himself to God.

So, here develops a robust 3 fold life-affirming framework –

1. Unite one’s mind and emotions to one-pointed devotion to God (Bhakti Yoga)
2. Unite one’s actions to one-pointed offering to God selflessly, without obsession towards ego-centric selfish fruits of the action (Karma Yoga)
3. Unite one’s intellect to the pursuit of knowing God intellectually (Gnana Yoga)

This framework is known as the Yoga framework in Hindu Philosophy. Yoga in Sanskrit means addition. It is all about re-ligating, re-attaching, being centered, being added to the right point of attachment to the mind. This yogic discipline is orthogonally opposite to the previous selfish desire trip. That selfish pleasure trip is known as Bhoga in Sankrit. Bhoga takes one to that eternal fire of sorrow. There is no end in that scheme of things. The desires keep feeding upon the sense objects as the fire eats the fuel and flares up even more. But the Yoga transforms the soul to be the happy, productive, positive, light, free, fulfilled and energetic source!

The bottom line is to sanctify every activity of life – thoughts, and actions, with devotion to God, as an offering to God, to serve God. That is all. This attitude is termed in Sanskrit as “Sattva”. Leading a Sattvik life leads to happiness, peace and the ability to realize one’s goals in life. It helps to dawn in peace in the heart. And the best aspect of this stance is that it is totally independent of the changing world, life, and circumstances.

Gita – Theme 2 – Endless cycle of rebirth

The following is the illustration of my understanding of chapter 2 of the book – MyGita by Devdutt Pattanaik, and synthesis from watching the videos from Dr. Sharad Wagle’s Facebook page – Gita : Memoirs of a psychiatrist. This fantastic series is also available in all podcast platforms!

https://www.facebook.com/hypnosisdr/

I am just following Dr Wagle and Dr. Devdutt’s suggestion to apply their Gita in my own life to figure out my own Gita. This is my first baby step to do so! I highly recommend my readers to read this book and watch/listen to the series from Dr. Wagle. These are one of the best synthesis of Gita I have read/heard. The novelty of this book and the podcast is that they focus on the synthesis of 18 main themes of the Gita, instead of the traditional sequential analysis of the verses one after another. Dr. Wagle has gone even further to list down 35 virtues of a spiritual person before delving into the 18 themes!

A fundamental tenet Krishna introduces in chapter 2 of Gita is Re-birth. The idea is about the eternity of life as such. Here he differentiates between form and non-form. The form perishes. The hidden driving force of that form remains, and it just changes the garb of the form that it wears to experience life. The world of form is limited and filled with maladies. Rather the same world of form can be lived in peace, efficiently, productively and inspiringly by identifying with the world of non-form.

I have tried to depict my understanding of the differences between the world of form – the mortal zone and the world of the non-form – the immortal zone after reading the first page of the Devdutt’s book – MyGita, in the slide-show below –

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https://1drv.ms/p/s!AtRNziOnlGfJviXamr94lOCoG5FB

The Connection Remains

We love and hate. And then hate and love. We have liked that husky voice and that dark deep eyes; many times, in many beings – men, women, deer, dog, horse, elephant, mouse and squirrel. We take birth and die. And again take birth and die. And in this churn, over an over again, we go deeper, know more, feel more, fear more, thirst more, huger more, crave more, hate more, love more, jealous more – Over and over again – for the same!

The forms change. The names change. The settings change. Lives change. But then the connection remains! A deep mark in the soul engraved indelibly for eternity remains! Sometimes in that slumber of ignorance, we mistake That to be limited, and we hoard, are attached, and possessive. We possess, devour, hoard, lose, and then hoard again. And the churn goes on. In this entire process of birth, blossom, death, and re-birth, we see a glimpse of the same pristine purity again in re-dawning in different contexts and forms.

To that source of the unchanging flow of reverent Life, to that primordial source, the soul yearns to be in touch. Somehow shattering all the boundaries of the body, mind, and intellect, the soul cruises out from one body to the other, from one context to the other, just to experience that Beauty, that love, that inspiration! That God! It is a journey to be in touch with Thee – through the meanderings of the poetry, the song, the melody, the chirping of the crickets, the twittering of the birds, the flowing of the pure river from the glaciers, the winnowing of the wind, the pattering of the rain, the scent of the moist soil, the meditation of the earthworm curling within more and more deep into the soil, softness and the fragrance of the rose petal, the lightness of the feather, and the purity of the ice flake!

All the means and the medium, take birth, blossom, and perish. They come and go. But beautifully they relay from one hand to the other the same constant connection! The connection to that non-judging, limitless, constant, omnipresent pulsating intelligence! The Intelligence that is ever imminent, all-pervading, throbbing as a vital life force, in flora and fauna, in the sky, dusk, dawn, the ocean, mountains, valleys, buds, trees, and flowers!

With heart surging with gratitude, bowing down on my knees, in front of you, Krishna, here I bow down to Thee! Your connection with me remains – across “births” and “deaths”!

The trap of selfish desires

There is no reprieve from selfish desire. So says Krishna in Gita. Each work that is done with the constricted selfish motive is going to take us to a deep downward spiral of melancholy. This trap is depicted by the following state machine diagram. I got this insight after watching to the videos from Dr. Sharad Wagle’s Facebook page – Gita : Memoirs of a psychiatrist. This fantastic series is also available in all podcast platforms!

 https://www.facebook.com/hypnosisdr/

This state machine diagram was a great solace for me. There are times when we get into that deep-seated sense of loss. Something that we are unable to erase out from our soul. Something that we are unable to let go! This realization that even if that selfish desire would have met, I would have been equally if not more miserable, was a great relief! Also, it opened my awareness to the fact how selfish I had been, and there might be other ways of being which is little less polarized and charged up with a constricted outlook of what I think is right!

Being a Raavana [Gita Theme 1 – Darshan]

The king of Lanka – Raavana was powerful, rich, smart, knowledgeable, well connected to Gods, and also in the good books of the great Lord Shiva.

Something, however, was very wrong in him, which obviously he didn’t know. Otherwise, he was intelligent enough to fix it. And that blindspot of his was that he was extremely arrogant. And the immediate fallout of being arrogant is lack of empathy.

Once, Raavana tasted the food made by Sita that was taken to him by a crow who took it from her kitchen at Ayodhya to the Lanka. Finding the food so tasty and enlivening to his soul, the immediate desire to “have” Sita in his own golden kingdom spawned in him. He wanted to have Sita as his wife. He wanted to devour that extreme sensual pleasure. He wanted to achieve that bliss.

And rest is the portion of the Epic Ramayana which talks about the consequences of this desire. It led to the total demolishment of the golden city of Lanka, and the eradication of Raavana and his family’s existence from the world.

These Puranic tails are timeless and metaphorical. It invites us to see within us their protagonist and be self-aware. There is a Raavana hidden within all of us. There are desires, wishes, dreams, whims, fancies, ambitions, aspirations, etc that take birth within us. And we choose whether to follow them or not. The choice is the key. These mythologies and metaphors help us to exercise this choice.

It appears easy to choose, as we all have an internal compass of morality. And we make decisions based on that. We also are aware of the consequences and weigh them and make the choice. But with power, money, success, at times the ground becomes slippery. And we become the Raavana. There we screw up the interpersonal relationships.

In the wave of anger, jealousy, rage, and emotional baggage of the past, we at times become reckless of other’s freedom of choice, their say, their consent, their own desires, and changed perspectives. Every human mind changes. As they live life and get exposed to different situations and experiences, they evolve and morph. Our likes and dislikes change. We are all stories unfolding in the canvas of our respective lives. But at times, when we are attached to people or have immense hatred for them (which most of the times comes through immense attachment. Obsessive attachment and hatred are basically two sides of the same coin. Probably due to that, we are hurt the most from people whom we love the most. Probably due to the same, most of the acid attacks are done between once ardent lovers..well this would be a topic of some other article later).

Mind with all its emotions are considered part of nature and named Prakriti in Sanskrit, in Yoga Sutra, Sankhya Philosophy, Vedanta and of course The Bhagavad Gita. As the weather changes, so do the mind and emotions. Preferences of people change. So, it is very common for friends to turn to foes and vice versa. So, being able to empathize with the other of their changed stance is something very important. That is exactly what Raavana lacked. In his blindness of arrogance due to his power, fame, and wealth, he never paused to understand what were the wishes of Sita, before abducting her. He was unable to differentiate between an object of possession and a human being!

Each person who is in that struggle to impose themselves on the other is somewhere taking the form of Raavana. There are different ways this forcing of the self on the other shows up. Sometimes it is the boss who is saying, ‘my way or the highway!’,  or sometimes it is about the tragedy between lovers where one between them has fallen out of love, or between colleagues and peers, who tend to always get their ego clashed. There is somewhere a deep-seated lack of empathy. There are somewhere huge arrogance and deep blindness of seeing the big picture, seeing all the dimensions of the problem.

In Puranas such a sight or perspective is known as “Darshan”. This is a Sanskrit word that means to see. This is also known as “Garur Dhristi”. Like the eagle (Garur) who sees the big picture, the Puranas asks us to take the perspective –  “Darshan” and have a Garur Dhristi. Instead, we have the deeply constricted way of looking at things – “Sarpa Dristi” – like a serpent crawling on the floor.

Symbolically, for a serpent to become an eagle difficult! There are deep-seated beliefs, habits, limitations, ignorances, lethargy, weaknesses, lack of will, etc, that keeps a serpent always continue its older ways, and not come out of its comfort zone. Well, that will be the subject of a different article. But here, I would like to remind myself about the awareness in my day to day life, and ask myself – “Am I becoming a Raavan?”