The second klesha says that a person suffers because of clinging, which means clinging to anything at all. Holding on to something is a way of showing that you are afraid it will be taken from you. People feel violated when a purse snatcher runs away with a purse, for example, or if they come home to find that the house has been broken into. These violations don’t matter because of what has been taken; purses and household goods can be replaced. Yet the sense of personal injury often persists for months and years. If the right trigger is pulled, having a purse snatched can make you lose entirely your sense of personal safety. Someone has stripped you of the illusion that you were untouchable. (America’s national paroxysm after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center continues to play out this drama of “us” versus “them” on a mass scale. The sense of American invulnerability was exposed as an illusion. Yet at bottom this wasn’t a nation’s problem. It was an individual problem felt on a huge scale.)
There are many twists and turns to suffering. The trail leads from fear of death to a false sense of self and the need to cling. In the end, however, unreality alone is the cause of all suffering. The problem never was pain; quite the opposite: Pain exists so that illusion won’t keep getting away with its tricks. If unreality didn’t hurt, it would seem real forever.
The five kleshas can be solved all at once by embracing one reality. The difference between “I am my hurt” and “I am” is small but crucial. A huge amount of suffering has resulted from this single misperception. Thinking that I was born, I cannot avoid the threat of death. Thinking that outside forces exist, I must accept that these forces can harm me. Thinking that I am a person, I see other persons everywhere. All of these are perceptions that were created, not facts. Once created, a perception lives a life of its own until you go back and change it.
It takes only a flicker of awareness to lose touch with reality. In reality nothing exists outside the self. As soon as you begin to accept this one bit of knowledge, the whole purpose of life changes. The only goal worth attaining is complete freedom to be yourself, without illusions and false beliefs.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE FIFTH SECRET
The fifth secret is about how to stop suffering. There is a state of nonsuffering inside you; it is simple and open awareness. By contrast, the state of suffering is complicated because, in its attempts to wrestle with pain, the ego refuses to see that the answer could be as simple as simply learning to be. Any steps that get you to stop clinging to complications will bring you closer to the simple state of healing. Complications occur as thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and subtle energies, meaning hidden emotional debts and resistance.
For this exercise, take anything in your life that is bringing you a sense of deep unease, discomfort, or suffering. You can choose something that has persisted for years or something that is uppermost in your life right now. Whether there is a physical component or not is unimportant, although if you pick a chronic physical disorder, don’t approach this exercise as a cure—we are dealing with the patterns of perception that encourage you to hold on to suffering.
Now sit by yourself for at least 5 minutes a day for the next month with the intention of clearing away the following complications:
Disorder: Chaos is complicated, order is simple. Is your house a mess? Is your desk piled high with work? Are you letting others create messes and disorder because they know you won’t make them take responsibility? Have you hoarded so much junk that your environment is like an archaeological record of your past?
Stress: Everyone feels stressed, but if you cannot completely clear your daily stress at night, returning to a calm, centered, enjoyable inner state, you are overstressed. Look closely at the things that make you tense. Is your commute stressful? Do you get up too early without enough sleep? Do you ignore signs of exhaustion? Is your body stressed by being overweight or by being totally out of shape? List the major stresses in your life and work to reduce them until you know for certain that you are not overstressed.
Empathic suffering: Getting infected with the suffering of others causes you to suffer. You have crossed the line from empathy to suffering if you feel worse after offering sympathy to someone else. If you honestly cannot be in the presence of negative situations without taking on pain that isn’t yours, get away. Losing sight of your boundaries doesn’t make you a “good person.”
Negativity: Well-being is a simple state to which body and mind return naturally. Negativity prevents this return by causing you to dwell on not being well. Do you casually gossip about others and relish their misfortunes? Do you spend time with people who carp and criticize? Do you watch every disaster and catastrophe dished out on the evening news? These sources of negativity don’t have to be engaged in—walk away and put your attention somewhere more positive.
Inertia: Inertia means giving in to old habits and conditioning. Whatever the cause of depression, anxiety, trauma, insecurity, or grief, these states linger if you take a passive attitude. “That’s just how things are” is the motto of inertia. Become aware of how doing nothing is actually the way you’ve trained yourself to keep things the same. Do you sit and dwell on your suffering? Do you reject helpful advice before even considering it? Do you know the difference between griping and genuinely airing your feelings with the intention of healing them? Examine the routine of your suffering and break out of it.
Toxic relationships: There are only three kinds of people in your life: those who leave you alone, those who help you, and those who hurt you. People who leave you alone are dealing with your suffering as a nuisance or inconvenience—they prefer to keep their distance in order to feel better themselves. Those who help you have the strength and awareness to do more with your suffering than you are able to do by yourself. Those who hurt you want the situation to stay the same because they do not have your well-being at heart. Honestly count how many people in each category you have in your life. This isn’t the same as counting friends and loving family members. Assess others solely as they relate to your difficulties.
Having made a realistic count, take the following attitude:
• I will no longer bring my problems to anyone who wants to leave me alone. It’s not good for them or me. They don’t want to help, so I will not ask them to.
• I will share my problems with those who want to help me. I will not reject genuine offers of assistance out of pride, insecurity, or doubt. I will ask these people to join me in my healing and make them a bigger part of my life.
• I will put a distance between myself and those who want to hurt me. I do not have to confront them, guilt-trip them, or make them the cause of my self-pity. But I cannot afford to absorb their toxic effect on me, and if that means keeping my distance, I will.
Beliefs: Examine your possible motives for wanting to suffer. Do you deny that there’s anything wrong? Do you think it makes you a better person not to show others that you hurt? Do you enjoy the attention you get when you are sick or in distress? Do you feel safe being alone and not having to make tough choices? Belief systems are complex—they hold together the self we want to present to the world. It is much simpler not to have beliefs, which means being open to life as it comes your way, going with your own inner intelligence instead of with stored judgments. If you find yourself blocked by your suffering, returning to the same old thoughts again and again, a belief system has trapped you. You can escape the trap only by ending your need to cling to these beliefs.
Energy and sensations: We rely on our bodies to tell us when we are in pain, and the body, like the mind, follows familiar patterns. Hypochondriacs, for example, grasp the first sign of discomfort as a clear message that they are seriously ill. In your own case, you are also taking familiar sensations and using them to confirm your suffering. Many depressed people, for example, will interpret fatigue as depression. Because they haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep or have been overworked on the job, they interpret feeling depleted as a symptom of depression. The way to deal
with these sensations is to strip away the interpretation. Instead of being sad, look upon this as the energy of sadness. Like fatigue, sadness has a bodily component that can be discharged. Instead of being an anxious person, deal with the energy of anxiety. All energies are discharged in the same way:
• Take a deep breath, sit quietly, and feel the sensation in your body.
• Feel the sensation without judgment. Just be with it.
• Let any feelings, thoughts, or energies that want to come up do so—this often means listening to the voice of anxiety, anger, fear, or woundedness. Let the voices say what they want to say. Listen and understand what is going on.
• Watch the energy disperse as much as it can. Don’t demand complete discharge. Take the attitude that your body will let go of as much stored energy as it is able to.
• After a few hours or the next day, repeat this whole process.
This may seem like a stiff regimen, but you are being asked to spend only 5 minutes a day on any one of these areas. Tiny steps bring big results. The simple state of awareness is nature’s default position; suffering and the complications that keep it going are unnatural—it wastes energy to maintain all that complexity. By working toward a simpler state every day, you are doing the best anyone can do to bring suffering to an end by cutting out the roots of unreality.
Secret #6
FREEDOM TAMES THE MIND
DO YOU LOVE YOUR MIND? I’ve never met anyone who did. People with beautiful bodies or faces frequently love their gift from nature (although the opposite can be true—the most beautiful people physically can also shun themselves out of insecurity or fear of being seen as vain). The mind is the hardest part of ourselves to love because we feel trapped inside it—not all the time but in those moments when trouble breaks in. Fear has a way of roaming the mind at will. Depression darkens the mind; anger makes it erupt in uncontrollable turmoil.
Ancient cultures tend to echo the notion that the mind is restless and unreliable. In India, the most common metaphor compares the mind to a wild elephant, and calming the mind is said to be like tying the elephant to a stake. In Buddhism, the mind is likened to a monkey peering out at the world through the five senses. Monkeys are notoriously impulsive and fickle, liable to do anything without notice. Buddhist psychology doesn’t aim to tame the monkey so much as to learn its ways, accept them, and then transcend to a higher awareness that is beyond the fickleness of the mind.
Metaphors won’t get you to a place where you can love the mind; you have to find the actual experience of peace and calmness on your own. The secret for doing that is to free the mind. When it is free, the mind settles down. It gives up its restlessness and becomes a channel for peace. This is a counterintuitive solution because nobody would say that a wild elephant or a monkey can be tamed by setting it free. They’d say that the freed animal would only run wilder, yet this secret is based on actual experience: The mind is “wild” because we try to confine and control it. At a deeper level lies complete orderliness. Here, thoughts and impulses flow in harmony with what is right and best for each person.
How, then, can you set your mind free? You need to understand how it became trapped in the first place. Freedom isn’t a condition you can simply step into by unlocking a door or breaking a set of shackles. The mind is its own shackle, as the poet William Blake knew when he contemplated people on the streets of London:
In every cry of every man
In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
When they tried to understand how the mind traps itself, the ancient Indian sages devised the key concept of samskara (from two Sanskrit word roots that mean “to flow together”). A samskara is a groove in the mind that makes thoughts flow in the same direction. Buddhist psychology makes sophisticated use of the concept by speaking of samskaras as imprints in the mind that have a life of their own. Your personal samskaras, built up from memories of the past, force you to react in the same limited way over and over, robbing you of free choice (i.e., choosing as if for the first time).
Most people build up an identity on the basis of samskara without knowing that they chose to do this. But the clues are inescapable. Consider someone prone to attacks of rage. For these so-called rageaholics, the anger impulse is like an “it,” a thing that controls them from some secret place of power. Uncontrollable outbreaks unfold in stages. First, there is usually some physical symptom—compression in the chest, the onset of a headache, rapid heartbeat, tight breathing. From there an impulse rises. The person can feel anger building up as if it were water behind a dike. The pressure is both physical and emotional; the body wants to throw off its discomfort, and the mind wants to release pent-up feelings. At this point, the person generally looks for an excuse to trigger a full-blown attack. The excuse can be found in some slight infraction—a task not performed by the children, a slow waiter, a less than courteous store clerk.
Finally, the eruption of rage occurs, and only after it settles down does the person realize the damage he has caused—the cycle ends in remorse and a promise never to erupt again. Shame and guilt enter, vowing to damp down the impulse for the future, and the mind reflects rationally on the pointlessness and risks of venting one’s rage.
For any rageaholic, the element of choice is hard to reclaim. When the impulse starts to build up steam, the pressure has to find release. Often, however, there is collusion—a tacit agreement to let the rage have its way. At some time in their pasts, raging people decided to adopt anger as a coping mechanism. They saw rage at work in their family or at school. They linked power to intimidation, perhaps they had no other access to power. They typically feel unable to express themselves verbally, and striking out in anger becomes a substitute for words and thoughts. Once in the habit of raging, they stopped seeking other avenues of release. The rage they struggle to end is bound to them by need and desire—they don’t know how to get what they want without it.
This is the anatomy of samskara in all its varieties. You can substitute other experiences for rage, such as anxiety, depression, sexual addiction, substance abuse, obsessive compulsion; all will testify to how samskaras rob people of free choice. Unable to escape their toxic memories, people adapt to them, adding one layer after another of impressions. The bottom layers, laid down in childhood, keep sending out their messages, which is why adults often look in the mirror and feel like impulsive, frightened children. The past has not been worked through sufficiently; samskaras rule the psyche through a jumble of old, outworn experiences.
Stored memories are like microchips programmed to keep sending out the same message over and over. When you find yourself having a fixed reaction, the message has already been sent: It does no good to try to change the message. Yet this is exactly how the vast majority of people try to tame the mind. They receive a message they don’t like, and their reaction is one of three things:
Manipulation
Control
Denial
If you look at them closely, it becomes clear that all three of these behaviors come after the fact—they deal with the mind’s disorder as the cause of the distress rather than as a symptom. These supposed solutions have tremendous negative effects.
Manipulation is getting what you want by ignoring or harming the desires of others. Manipulators use charm, persuasion, coaxing, trickery, and misdirection. The underlying idea is “I have to fool people to make them give me what I want.” When they are really caught up in their ploys, manipulators even imagine that they are doing their victims a favor—after all, who wouldn’t feel good helping out a guy who’s so entertaining? You can catch yourself falling into this behavior when you aren’t listening to other people, when you ignore what they want, and when you pretend that your desires cost nobody else a price. There are also external signs. The presence of a manipulator brings tension, strain, complaints, and conflict to a situation. Some people use passive manipulations
—they come up with “poor me” scenarios to coax sympathy and pity out of others. Or they lay subtle guilt trips with the aim of making others think that what they want is wrong. Manipulation comes to an end when you stop assuming that your desires are all-important. Then you can reconnect with others and begin to trust that their desires might be aligned with yours. When there is no manipulation, people feel that what they want counts. They trust that you are on their side; you aren’t seen as a performer or salesperson. No one feels that he or she is being fooled.
Control is forcing events and people into your way of doing things. Control is the great mask of insecurity. People who use this behavior are deathly afraid of letting others be who they are, so the controller is constantly making demands that keep others off balance. The underlying idea is “If they keep paying attention to me, they won’t run away.” When you find yourself making excuses for yourself and blaming others, or when you feel inside that no one is showing you enough gratitude or appreciation, the fault is not with them—you are exhibiting a need to control. The external signs of this behavior come from those you are trying to control: They are tense and resistant; they complain of not being listened to; they call you a perfectionist or a demanding boss. Control begins to end when you admit that your way isn’t automatically the right way. You can tune in to your need for control by catching yourself complaining, blaming, or insisting that no one is right but you, and coming up with one excuse after another to prove that you are without blame yourself. Once you stop controlling them, the people around you begin to breathe easy. They relax and laugh. They feel free to be who they are without looking to you for approval.
The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life Page 8