Stop the pursuit of happiness. Life is a challenge, not a buffet.

Life is not here to entertain you or amuse you or please you or give you something. It’s only function is to challenge you. The metric it challenges you on is consciousness.

There’s nothing to get. Nothing to keep. You’re not judged by how much you’ve won, got, made… Or how talented you are. You are judged by how conscious you are at each adversity.

How do you know if you are doing well? By the amount of peace you feel. If you lose your calm, become irritated or vicious or suffer unnecessary by angry or punishing thoughts, you fail. If you are conscious and at peace, feeling joy and sense of aliveness, you pass.

That’s the primary metric that you are judged on. There are secondary ones too if you want to take it up a notch.

Be courageous. Don’t let fear stop you. Explore what you are afraid of. Slay the dragon.

You have to be conscientious. By conscientious I mean industrious and orderly. Be consistent. Let your potential be realized for the good of humankind.

You have to take responsibility for what happens to you. Accept the incompleteness, the emptiness, the suffering of life voluntarily and do your best.

If you still believe life is here for your pleasure, you’ve lost touch with your mortality. You’ve lost touch with how ugly and unforgiving life can be. You’ve failed to realize that, accomplishments, pleasures and everything that you think will make you complete, are like layers of an onion. They feel good for a second but then you need more. Soon You seek something different. And soon you suffer because of what you cling to/ want/ don’t want/can’t get. Why is that? Because we are incomplete mortals. We are not all powerful. We are vulnerable. Life can’t help but be a challenge for us. It’s fundamentally designed that way.

 

Mystics say, you are emptyness, yet you are one with the world. Here’s the rationale behind that claim.

Some mystics say that you can’t find yourself in the world, that whatever you think is you, is not you.

Whereas, some others might say (often the same ones) that, you are one with everything. Everything is you. There is no divide.

Well both of those viewpoints are right.

It all depends on the lens you use to see everything.

You see, we often see the world with an objective lens, while using a subjective one to experience the inner realm. That is where the ‘illusion of division’ starts. See the world with an objective lens, and there is no difference betweens things that happen inside your body, and the things that happen outside of your body. It’s all objects, atoms, particles, reactions and energy.

Well, use a subjective lens and everything is now just another object in the ocean of your consciousness. Your thoughts, the walls in your room, the sensations of your breath, the sound of water dropping… Where’s the divide?

Again, only when you say that your thoughts and senses are your subjective experience whereas the walls in your room are objects, you start seeing a division. But that is like using Celsius scale to measure the temperature of one thing and then using Farenhite to measure the temperature of another thing of the same temperature, and saying that they have different temperatures because the readings in different scales don’t match. Not a very sane way of deduction, is it?

So next time you open your eyes after some meditative moments, try to keep the subjective view of things as you take in the outside world. See how similar your experience is for both your inner realm and the world outside you. Is there any difference in the way you experience the voice inside your head and the voice of someone else?

‘Waking Up’ app by Sam Harris is free until 2020

There are few meditation apps as good as ‘Waking Up’. You definitely want to check it out. Right now, I am enjoying the ‘Metta Meditations’ inside the app.

This app also provides access to various theories and lectures on mindfulness. It’s completely free until 2020 as a gift from the developers.

Other Updates:

I just watched this video by Max Joseph. He’s a master video editor and an amazing film maker. Many of you may know him from the show ‘Catfish’.

This video will show you how to find time for reading, how to read faster and comprehend more, beautiful libraries across South America and Europe and a lot more.

I learned about two amazing blogs from here. Wait But Why and Barking up the Wrong Tree

Check them out!

Did Keto Diet give me a Spiritual Experience?

The short answer: No.

This is not to say that there were no mental benefits of going through keto diet. There’s plenty. Here’s how I illustrated the benefits in an earlier post:

The results were drastic. I found both physical and mental benefits. I lost 3-4 pounds every week. My body felt lighter and I was less lethargic. My sleep cycle was better and I woke up early in the morning with no sleepiness. I enjoyed this benefit the most. Usually it takes me a lot of time to truly wake up. But, when on ketosis, I seemed to wake up instantly. I felt fresh and focused.

 

Naturally one should ask next if this induced a spiritual experience or not. Because, many spiritual teachers have played with their diet. Some went through gruesome fasting whereas others chose to be vegan.

Well, in my case, it didn’t. I don’t know of anyone else who experienced it either. So, I guess if you want to try keto diet, you should only expect the physical and mental benefits. Which are a lot in the first place. Here’s my experience with keto diet- How I lost 24 pounds in 60 days (Keto Diet)

Here’s some ways to boost your brain (including ketosis) – This is how to increase your brain power

For spiritual experiences, I guess meditation remains the best tool overall. Doing ‘The Work’ with Byron Katie, listening to ‘The Power of Now’ audiobook, watching a river flow or just wandering alone in the city street at night could be other very potent ways of inducing a strong spiritual experience.

Who am I?

I was watching Shelly Kagan’s lectures on Death. It raised questions in my mind about who I really am.

Am I a soul? my brain? My personality?

I can feel 3 kinds of things existing inside me. First, I see my current thoughts and feelings.Then I see my memories. beliefs, attitude etc which are the building blocks of my personality.

There’s something else of course. The witness/ watcher.

Without this entity in me, I wouldn’t even be aware of my current thoughts and feelings.

I guess this is what Eckhart Tolle calls presence and other teachers call consciousness.

My first inclination is to regard this ‘watcher’ in me as the real me.

This part after all, has been the single most consistent thing that exists withing me.

My thoughts are random and often contradict each other. Same characteristics apply to my feelings. My personality on the other hand has changed at least 3 times since I have been alive. Only the watcher is untouched.

But, what differentiates my awareness with your one? We all have this awareness but isn’t it the same for all of us?

If I have a head trauma and lose the continuity of my experience, the watcher is still there.

But, my thoughts, feelings and personality will be drastically different. In that case, is it still me?

I am unable to answer that yet. I seem to feel like my awareness is me as long as there is continuity of experience. If my brain loses all of its memories then that will be the death of me. The watcher that used to identify with me will now serve someone else’s experiences.

But even that explanation sounds wrong. How can my awareness ever be someone else? If all about me is my personality then I could be extracted as data and uploaded to the cloud. But, is all that data (memories, beliefs etc) me? That doesn’t sound right!

7 subtle ways Meditation helps Students

There are things that help you directly. Then there are things that spills over positive effects on your life indirectly. Meditation falls in the second category. In this post, I want to explore this phenomenon from a student’s perspective.

Here are 7 subtle ways regular meditation can help us during our student life:

1. Awareness:

Often, we get lost in our feelings and in our thoughts. We go somewhere, but we’re not truly there. We see something, but we miss all the details. We stop listening to all the sounds around us. We filter out how our body is reacting to each event.

When you get out of your head, you come back to the world. For a student, this is extremely valuable. Learning the nuances of a craft, studying books properly and taking nonverbal cues from the professors demand a certain level of awareness.

Meditation, through enough practice, sparks a light of awareness inside you. It teaches you to stop and listen. To truly experience a moment instead of just barely skimming through it.

2. Mindfulness:

We let the chatter in our head go unexamined. This has terrible consequences. This creates a false sense of self in you that has no business inside your head. Its sole purpose is to survive and it will do that at your peril. Thus, students often get involved in activities that we know are bad for us.

When you start being more mindful about your thoughts, you start seeing unhelpful patterns. You start to understand yourself. You learn why you procrastinate and how to beat it. You understand why you like or hate the things you do.

3. Clarity

Most of us waste time doing the trivial. We watch TV, we binge on Netflix and we wage twitter wars. These are counter productive habits that do us way more harm than good.

As discussed in the first two points, meditation increases introspection. Thus, you get to know what is important to you and what is trivial. This knowledge is immensely helpful for young people at the start of their adult lives.

4. Focus

Lack of focus makes you unproductive. For peak productivity a student needs to incorporate intense focus in their studies and personal projects.

When you know what matters to you, you have the freedom to eliminate everything else. You can let go of the things that robs you of your precious time. Meditation aids in that process.

On top of that, meditation helps you to practice detachment. Thus, it becomes easier to let go the things you need to. Therefore, you become laser focused on the things you truly care about.

5. Integrity

When what you think matches what you do, you develop integrity. Without that you can never be truly yourself.

Meditation lets you observe your thoughts and thus facilitates integrity. Therefore, you start to embody what you stand for. You build character. You attract the right people in your life. You get opportunities that wouldn’t have come to you otherwise.

6. Patience

Patience is key for people who want to be a self-made success. Unless you inherited a fortune, your life is going to suck for quite a while. Getting through these times of hardship without quitting is crucial for success.

Sitting down and doing nothing for an extended period can be extremely boring. Yet, that is exactly what we do when we meditate. What better way is there to learn patience!

7. Self- Control

He who can not control his inner demon, is bound to suffer in the long run. Self-control is necessary to keep yourself from unwanted troubles.

The main theme of this whole article has been ‘choice’. Meditation, through building awareness into your internal world, replaces your ego from the driving sit and puts you in charge.

Thus, you develop the art of self-control which is crucial for your success as a student.

Self Image: Just Let it Go

I’ve been pondering about this thing in my mind recently. It’s self image. I think there’s two types of self image.

1. What I think of myself &
2. What I think that others may think of myself.

Pursuit of an ego-less state

Since I read The Power of Now, I’ve been in a pursuit of an ego-less state. Wait, the previous statement is wrong. I’ve been in the pursuit of an ego-less state at least 2 years before that. But I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. The Power of Now let me put my thoughts in the right perspective.

I have had this book with me since I was 17 years old. Yet, I never read any of it until my 18th birthday. I don’t know why. I thought it was not something for me. I used to think that even without reading a line from the book. I thought I needed a book more like- the power of the future. Or at least something like- how to accept your past.

I intuitively knew The Power of Now was a good book though. Something inside me kept telling me that the power indeed is in the now. But I ignored that voice, up until my 18th birthday. After that, I finally read it. And I must say, It’s been the most influential book of my life.

One day I fell severely sick. This was after my 21st birthday. I had to stay on bed for almost 2 months. That is when I really started listening to Eckhart Tolle on YouTube. I also read his other book- A New Earth. Then, I watched all his interviews with Oprah. I also downloaded the audio version of his retreat called Journey into yourself.

All this made me come to terms with the first kind of self image. I started to really get transparent in this area.

But the second type kept creeping in. In my behavior, actions and decisions. I always knew it was there. But somehow I’d rationalize its existence. I’d say to myself things like- I need to know what others may think of me. Or something like, I have to keep a good image in front of others, it’s useful. This has been a burden that is too heavy to bear. But I kept bearing it anyway, in hopes of getting approval from others.

At last, I let it go

Last week, I started noticing this in me again. But this time it was different. This time I didn’t rationalize it anymore. I just let it go. And I’ve never felt lighter.

Why have I been successful to push it away now though? I don’t know the answer. But, maybe my daily meditation practice is the reason.

What I’m realizing now is, all my insecurities were based on false assumptions. Once I let go of ‘pretending’ to be someone I’m not, I’ve been better at social occasions. I’m spontaneous and genuine and I respect myself more for that.

Let me know if you ever struggled with any of this! I’d also like to know how you overcame your struggles.