Rare to be Aware (Steps to Awareness)

The first step in the spiritual pursuit is to be aware. However, being aware is rare. I have been trying to understand the reasons for this lack of awareness for a long. I feel that we keep living life somewhere between the two poles of fear and faith.

As a child, we have only physical fears. We want to have food and be physically secure and both these securities are provided by the parents. That's the reason that we get so strongly attached to our parents.

Slowly, as we grow, we start developing many more fears. Most of these fears are psychological. We start worrying about careers since there is a continuous discussion going in and around about different kids who could not do well in their careers and how their life was spoiled. We start worrying about money since we are repeatedly made to realize the importance of money. As we grow, we start worrying about wealth, health, status, positions, power, etc. since most of the social discussions around us give a lot of premium to all these things. Thus, usually by the time we grow up to our mid-age, we accumulate so many psychological fears that most of our conscious and unconscious thoughts, day and night, revolve around these fears and insecurities. 

The individual starts moving around the accumulated fears, in the "circle of pain and pleasure". He wants to minimize the pain and maximize the pleasures. Most of the time, he is occupied either in actions revolving around fears or thinking about the same. The daily routine takes over consciousness. One gets up, gets ready for the office, does the office work, interacts with colleagues, has meetings, attends social functions, goes out for recreation and that's how the entire life is spent. 

Few try to come out of this "circle of pain and pleasure" by making efforts in different directions. Some try to gain knowledge, some set up new ventures, and few join social and spiritual organizations. However, most of these endeavors, directly or indirectly, are offshoots of the "circle of pain and pleasure" only. For example, the efforts towards gaining knowledge indirectly aim at becoming indispensable in the organization or getting a better pay package. Efforts towards new ventures aim at building more wealth. By joining social and spiritual organizations, most people aim to build social networks and gain social validation.

 Thus, it seems that the orbit has grown bigger, but actually, the sphere of fear also grows larger and stronger. Since our "center of existence" remains fear, the fears also keep growing. The people who have accumulated more wealth, also have a greater fear of losing the same. The people who have accumulated more networking become more concerned about their image in their circle. The people who gather more knowledge become more anxious to update the same. Thus, increasing the radius of the "circle of pain and pleasure" has no bearing on the path of spirituality in fact, most of the time, it is quite counterproductive.

What actually matters is the shifting of the "center of existence" from fear to faith. That's quite difficult and generally, the spiritual inclination ends in one of the following 3 ways:

1. Most of the time, people orbiting around fear in their "circle of pain and pleasure" remain unaware of the possibility of moving towards faith. The whole of their life, they see similar persons around and therefore consider this "circle of pain and pleasure" to be the only possibility existing on the earth.

2. Sometimes, people come in contact with people moving towards faith and temporality and get inspired by them. But, soon their habits patterns, and fears draw them back to the "circle of pain and pleasure".

3. Sometimes, people take up the spiritual pursuit and come back to the greater "circle of pain and pleasure" 

I feel that the lack of awareness of the true self and revolving in the "circle of pain and pleasure" is because either we have a very strong fixation with our fears or our inability to have faith. It reminds me of the story of the "frog living in the well" who meets the "frog living in the ocean". The "frog living in the ocean" asks the "frog living in the well" to come out of the well and show the ocean but the "frog living in the well" doesn't have faith and spends its entire life in the well. 

I feel that different types of people need to follow different ways to move from fear to faith. We can however see that most of the people around us have very strong rational minds today. Therefore, the first step is to give exposure to reality to the intellect. Most of us develop an illusion of being intelligent by getting an education in a particular or few streams. Exposure to books written by authors having diverse experiences widens our perspective and weakens the fixation with our "center of existence". Interactions with the people who have traveled on "the paths less traveled" help us understand a different worldview. We read books on subjects that are closer to life such as human psychology, neurology, quantum physics, etc to understand how the body and mind work and what the limitations of our contemporary understanding of reality are. 

Further, philosophical books give us an altogether different way of thinking. The books written by spiritually realized masters guide us to new possibilities in life. I read a number of books and keep reading different books. The book "My Experiment with the Truth" by Mahatma Gandhi gave me an altogether different perspective to look at life. "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman was my first insight into the human psyche. I read a number of books on psychology and neurology that revealed the wonderful world inside our brains to me. These books, at the same time, also helped my intellect to understand its limitations.

Having understood its limitations, the brain tried to search for reality in the quantum world. For a long period of time, I was quite fascinated by the research in the world of quantum physics. In fact, the experiments in the quantum world surprised me a lot. However, I soon realized that our current understanding of the particle world is hardly even the tip of the iceberg.

With this, I tried to understand reality through Astrology. I have been doing research on different horoscopes and it really makes good sense. It's amazing to see the events taking place as written in those charts. In fact, the study of the division charts and philosophical understanding of the planets really help to come quite closer to reality.

However, the basic question still remains the same. Who has created this world and how will this world operate. The problems of life and death remain unsolved and that inclined me to read the books written by different philosophers and thinkers. I read books written by agnostic writers such as Paul Brunton titled "Search for Secret India" and many other books by him. I read the books written by Osho, J. Krishnamurthy, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramesh Balsekar, Dada Gavand, and many more. At this stage, I also read books by mystics like Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Sri Aurobindo, and Paramhansa Yogananda. 

With all these readings, the intellect, at some point in time, started realizing its limitations which is quite an important step. The satellite launched into space is initially taken by a rocket which contains the fuel to take the satellite out of the field of gravity. The intellect plays a similar role. It helps to take us out of the field of gravity of the pain and pleasure world.  

The second step on the path is to work on the unconscious mind. Often at this stage, we develop a dilemma. The rational mind understands the insignificance of fears, however, deep down in the unconscious mind, there are quite strong impressions. These impressions keep expressing in different forms and make us again fixated on the "pleasure and pain world". It's not easy to observe the unconscious mind. We can not observe it and therefore it's very difficult to do away with its fixations. 

Vipassana technique offers a very good solution to the same. Gautama Buddha, by long observation, could understand the following processes which result in the strengthening of different impressions in our unconscious mind:

He said that we keep receiving different inputs from the ecosystem through our senses. They are interpreted by our unconscious mind and categorized between painful and pleasurable based on our "center of existence". Based on this categorization, different sensations are felt by us in our bodies. Some of these sensations such as pain, are felt by us consciously and for most of these, we remain unconscious. We keep reacting to these sensations unconsciously and keep strengthening our unconscious mind. 

This unconscious mind is the reason behind most of our decisions. Even if the reading of books and Satsanga helps our conscious mind to move away from fear to faith, the unconscious keeps making almost all the life decisions for us. That is precisely the reason why most spiritual seekers do not seem to be making any headway along the spiritual path. Most of their decisions are driven by the unconscious.

What Gautama thought was that the "loop of unconscious" may be broken, if we become aware of the body sensations and stop reacting to those. This breaks the cycle of strengthening the unconscious. We start observing breathing and concentrate on a particular part of our body to increase the power of concentration. After this, we start observing different body parts to observe the sensations, without categorizing them into painful or pleasurable. With this observation, the impressions stored deep in the unconscious start losing their gravity and we start becoming free of the control of the unconscious.

The third step on this path is constant remembrance of the divine, consciously and unconsciously. As one moves along the path by purifying the conscious and unconscious mind, the "center of existence" starts shifting from fear to faith. One remembers and sees the divine behind all the people and circumstances. The conscious and unconscious minds start coming out of the fixations. They start growing wider from the narrowness of the pain and pleasure world to the divine world. This gives rise to "bhakti". One starts appreciating the divine play even in the daily routine. 

The last step on this path is living daily life with the realization of the divine. That's "Karma Yoga". With the conscious and unconscious minds gaining purity and constant remembrance of the divine, one lives daily life with divinity. This does not change the outer manifestation of life but the way of living is changed substantially. The reaction becomes milder to eventually disappear into an appreciation of the impurities in the conscious and the unconscious, gratitude towards the divine for blessing us with the awareness, and prayers for the ones stuck in the "cycle of pain and pleasure" to come out of the same. Life, rather than constrained and confined, becomes full of possibilities. Actions become effective since the focus shifts to the process from outcomes. Since there is no insecurity, we get an entire spectrum of energy to focus on the task at hand and therefore carry out all the tasks assigned to us with utmost efficiency.