Take Your Time

by Eknath Easwaran

  Take Your Time

  The Wisdom of Slowing Down

  E K N A T H

  E A S W A R A N

  Our logo represents the ceremonial oil lamp used in homes and temples throughout Kerala, South India, where Eknath Easwaran was born and raised. “Little Lamp” is the pet name given to him by his maternal grandmother, his spiritual teacher.

  Nilgiri Press

  20121017

  Table of Contents

  Foreword: The Gift of Time

  by Christine Easwaran

  1 Take Your Time

  2 Slowing Down

  3 One Thing at a Time

  4 Finding Balance

  5 Living in Freedom

  6 Time for Relationships

  7 A Higher Image

  8 The Still Center

  Passage Meditation: An Eight-Point Program

  The Books of Eknath Easwaran

  Editor’s Note

  This edition of Take Your Time incorporates ­revisions planned during the author’s lifetime. In addi­tion to minor changes, some dated references and stories have been removed or replaced by new material drawn from his talks, and the suggestions for practice have been set apart to encourage experimentation.

  Most significantly, a new opening chapter drawn from previously unpublished work emphasizes the spiritual benefits of an unhurried mind and a more intentional life. Take Your Time was meant to complement books on time management so that juggling time and priorities can serve the need to find meaning and ­purpose in the affairs of everyday life. If other books help with ­to-do lists, Take Your Time aims at what one wants to be.

  FOREWORD

  The Gift of Time

  By Christine Easwaran

  I had the privilege of knowing someone who had full possession of every moment – all the time there is. And he gave it away freely.

  Time isn’t a thing, of course. We can’t really possess it or give it in the same way as we can give an object. When I say Eknath Easwaran had all the time there is, I mean that he lived completely in the present. Instead of being hurried by time, he was master of it.

  Living in the moment is not the prerogative of mystics. It is prized by athletes, dancers, and other performing artists. Without warning, they tell us, they sometimes find themselves so absorbed in what they are doing that events slip into slow motion; time even seems to stop. They forget themselves, the limitations of the body and their everyday personality; there is nothing but them and the ball, them and the music, them and a vision too rarefied to be described. They are experiencing “flow”; they are “in the zone.”

  Experiences like these, when one is lifted out of ordinary time, are often accompanied by a sense of profound peace. Scientists explain this by brain chemistry, but to Easwaran, (Easwaran is his given name; Eknath is the name of his family, which is matrilineal.) brain changes are effects. The cause, he explained, is that complete absorption brings a healing pause in the frantic activity of the mind. Whatever we are doing in that instant fills our consciousness. We are too absorbed to worry, to fret over the past or feel anxious about the future, to be divided by conflicts or dwell on what others might be thinking of us; we simply live. It’s as if the flickering of thoughts is our real clock: when it slows significantly, we are lifted into a higher level of awareness.

  This is a precious clue, Easwaran tells us. It suggests that the secret of fulfillment lies not outside us but in the way the mind works. We may associate being “in the zone” with performances like gymnastics or ballet, but activity is not what matters. What these peak experiences teach us is that living in the moment is a mental skill, a matter of training the mind – and that means it can be learned. We don’t have to be a star performer or rocket scientist to learn this; it’s within reach of all of us.

  In this book, Easwaran offers ways to develop the skill of living in the present so that we can open up the promise held within each moment of our lives. The more we practice, the more we discover in the time we have – and so the nearer we move to having all the time in the world. That, Easwaran says, is our birthright as human beings. It has already been granted to us; we simply have to learn how to claim it.

  When I met him in 1960, soon after his arrival in California as a professor from India on the Fulbright program, Easwaran was full to overflowing with the desire to teach these skills. A born teacher, he had distilled his experience into an eight-point program that he himself followed. In addition to his obligations at the University of California, he had speaking en­gagements throughout the Bay Area and even some popular lectures on campuses in Southern California.

  The schedule was always tight, but he was never in a hurry. Not once, then or since, did I see him pressured into speeding up to get more done in the time available. By his example, he was constantly teaching what he knew from experience: the most effective way to accomplish a lot is to do one thing at a time and do it well.

  The first time I remember Easwaran asking me to slow down was on a beautiful autumn afternoon in 1960. I was driving him back to Berkeley from Walnut Creek, where he had given an informal lecture on the philosophy of ancient India to a small but enthusiastic audience. The freeway was new and broad and there was almost no traffic. I had no reason to hurry, but under these conditions it was natural – and fun – to go the speed limit. So it came as a surprise to me when he asked me to slow down – I wasn’t exceeding the limit, after all. But I dropped back anyway.

  Yet habit is habit and the speedometer gradually worked its way back up.

  Then he asked me the second time to slow down. This seemed ridiculous. I felt a little annoyed, as I had as a teenager when I was learning to drive on rural roads in Virginia and my dad would tell me the same thing. But then I remembered. This man is from India, where the pace of life is very slow. Why else would he want to go slow? So I slowed down.

  This was my first lesson in slowing down. It took me a long time to understand why I should and much longer to learn how.

  In those days, I simply couldn’t understand why Easwaran placed so much importance on such matters. I thought it might be cultural. As an American, I took hurry for granted and considered it self-evident that speed means efficiency and faster is better. I soon learned that efficiency comes from complete concentration on one thing at a time, even when one has to manage several tasks. The secret is the unbroken flow of attention that characterizes peak performance.

  Easwaran enjoyed watching sports – especially those he understood from playing them, such as tennis and soccer – because he enjoyed the concentration of a champion. I began to see that he too moved with the efficiency and grace of the performers he liked to watch. They understood the “inner game,” he said; they knew the importance of the mind. That was his field, the mind. He wanted everyone to see that this training of the mind is the secret not just of first-rate tennis or ballet but of everything – of what he called the art of living – and that, just as in tennis or ballet, it could be learned. He was, if you like, everyone’s personal trainer in the inner game of living.

  The word “slow” is misleading when it implies sluggish. Easwaran was unhurried, but he was never sluggish. In an emergency he could act instantly, before those around him grasped what was happening. When planning was called for, however, he would often slow down like a gymnast poised before bursting into her routine. It was as if physical activity was a distraction at such times; everything important was happening deep inside. (I have read something very similar about Mahatma Gandhi.) Then, suddenly, he would act, still without hurry but with intense precision, setting in motion one by one the things that needed to be done.

  Helping othe
rs to slow down occupied Easwaran’s attention from the beginning of his career as a spiritual teacher until the end of his life. It was part of a message meant for the world, but nowhere seemed a better platform for delivering it than the United States.

  In this book he describes the shock he felt on arriving in New York and seeing first-hand the pace at which Americans were moving. (Even then! Today 1959 seems leisurely.) That first day, he says, he decided never to get caught up in this kind of rat race – and not only that, but to help everyone around him to slow down too. At that point he was still putting the finishing touches on his Eight Point Program. Two of the points suddenly jumped in importance: slowing down and one-pointed attention, his term for doing one thing at a time with an undivided mind.

  At first I don’t think anyone listening to him understood why a spiritual teacher should place so much emphasis on anything so commonplace. Today it’s clear that he was seeing what lay in store for our society if the pressures to hurry were not reduced. Thoughts are seeds, he explained; if cultivated, they have to grow into action and bear fruit with the passage of time. America was sowing the seeds of hurry; the fruit to come was all too clear.

  The seventies brought the first signs of an adverse effect on health. Type A Behavior and Your Heart called attention to what Drs. Ray H. Rosenman and Meyer Friedman called “hurry sickness,” a syndrome of time-driven behavior that they felt was closely ­associated with heart disease. Easwaran was especially pleased that their description included what they called “polyphasic thinking”: not just trying to do many things in too little time, but ­trying to think about several things at once. At last, he felt, ­clinicians were looking at the role played by the mind.

  Type A behavior syndrome is still debated by researchers, but Dr. Friedman’s description fit so perfectly that it captured popular attention. “Type A behavior,” he explained, “is above all a continuous struggle to accomplish more and more things in less and less time, frequently in the face of opposition – real or imagined – from other persons.” Type A’s are driven by an aggressive need to compete, and they keep score with anything that can be counted: how many facts they know, how much work they can do in an hour, how many things they can do at once.

  When Type A Behavior and Your Heart was published, many Americans, as Jane Brody wrote recently in the New York Times, recognized in themselves “quite a few of the obnoxious – and perhaps life-threatening – traits typical of Type A behavior and vowed to make some changes.” While researchers argued, Easwaran and I saw close friends who had undergone heart surgery transform their lives through Dr. Friedman’s clinical program, which taught Type A’s how to become Type B’s – or, in Easwaran’s language, how to slow down, learn to be more patient, and find meaning, love, and rich relationships in lives impoverished by years of hard driving in the fast lane. Dr. Friedman and his colleagues were demonstrating that even when time pressure is forced on us, we can learn to deal with it in freedom.

  Yet life kept on getting faster. In the mid-eighties, Time magazine asked “Is America Running Out of Time?” in a cover feature full of warnings but short on suggestions for what to do. Newspaper and magazine articles talked about the hazards of “kids on the fast track,” whose hurried lives and packed schedules mirrored those of their parents. Whenever Easwaran went out, he came back struck by how few people looked happy. Everyone was in a hurry – hurrying themselves, hurrying each other, hurrying their children. Therapist friends told us that each year they saw more clients complaining of the stress of a life with too much to do. Those who specialized in family counseling reported additional casualties: parents too busy to see each other, friendships slipping apart, children with stress disorders like those of executives.

  Recently some thoughtful books on these themes have begun to appear, joining articles in business and women’s magazines and even professional journals. Hurry is no longer “cool,” no longer a mark of efficiency and success. And patience, thankfully, is beginning to be seen not as weakness but as a virtue that measures inner strength: the capacity not to be thrown off balance when things don’t go our way. All these developments may be signs that our society is waking up to the toll that hurry and multitasking take not just on individual lives but on civilization itself.

  I said that hurry was Easwaran’s first concern on arriving in the US. It stayed with him to the end. In 1998, while he was in chronic pain, Easwaran agreed to give a talk at a local community college on a topic of his choice. In those days he rarely left home; when he did, it was only for a quiet drive. Nearing the end of his life, he had been giving all his time to retreat participants and close students, training those who would carry on after him.

  Clearly this would be his last opportunity to address a wide audience. A topic of the utmost seriousness was called for. What did he want his message to be? Would he speak on meditation? Some theme from world mysticism? Mahatma Gandhi?

  He chose to talk about slowing down. And he chose to use most of the time simply to tell stories, slipping in his characteristic touches of practical wisdom almost as asides.

  In retrospect, I don’t know why that should have been surprising. Wisdom has always been conveyed through stories. Stories are what we remember; they wrap ideals and values in images that stay with us all our lives. Great spiritual teachers consistently teach first by story and parable; explanations are dry by comparison.

  So this is a book of stories. Again and again, as we read, we find ourselves in a familiar situation where we generally get impatient or upset – standing in line, waiting on hold, shopping with lively children who have agendas and timetables of their own. But as Easwaran relates each event, we see it through his eyes. From the perspective of an unhurried mind, familiar situations open up. We glimpse possibilities we had never suspected, little ways to change how we respond – and those little ways, as we act on them, quietly begin to transform our lives. An unhurried mind opens a door to discoveries in every moment. We don’t have to change the circumstances around us; we simply need a mind that is quiet, calm, and kind.

  I warmly invite you to step aside from the hurry around us, take your time, and let this gifted teacher help you discover a doorway to joy and serenity where most of us never think to look: in the ordinary activities of our everyday lives.

  CHAPTER 1

  Take Your Time

  Every moment is a doorway

  to meaning, purpose, and joy. The key is an unhurried mind.

  When our nieces Geetha and Meera were young, they lived with their grandmother, my mother, in a cottage that Christine and I shared. Even at seven, Geetha was a force to be reckoned with. She used to storm around like a small tornado as she got ready for school. That upset my mother, so one morning I decided to say something. “Geetha, dear,” I urged her, “why don’t you slow down? Take your time. You don’t need to hurry.”

  “You can say that, Uncle,” she shot back without breaking stride. “You don’t have to go to school.”

  She had a point. All of us have to go to school one way or another, but rushing for the bus is no time to consider that we might actually get there just as well by slowing down – not just slowing down our physical movements, but especially a mind that is racing in overdrive trying to get things done.

  It may sound paradoxical, but however tight our schedule, however many things clamor to be done, we don’t need to hurry. If we can keep our mind calm and go about our business with undivided attention, we will not only accomplish more but we’ll do a better job – and find ourselves more patient, more at peace.

  However much we have to do,

  we don’t have to be in a hurry.

  Our whole way of life militates against this today. Our civilization has developed a mania for speed, careening out of control in the fast lane of life – a race with no prize and no way of winning.

  One sure sign is that no one has enough time. Another is how many of us are always hur
rying to be late. Everyone seems to be trying to fit more and more into the same fixed twenty-four hours. That is the paradox: we hurry faster and faster only to find we have less and less time.

  Have you noticed that when you try to fit more into a day, you’re likely to go through the whole day late? Trying to squeeze more in, we only squeeze time out. The first thing we do each workday morning is check the clock; the rest of the day we’re running to catch up. We grab breakfast without really seeing what is on the table, if we bother to sit down to a table at all. We barely taste the food or see the faces of those we live with.

  And the pace accelerates. We dash for the bus or battle with rush-hour traffic and arrive at work – if nothing goes wrong – just in time. Not an extra minute to smile and say good morning, perhaps not even to see who else is in the office. They are not co-workers; they are specters getting in our way. And of course they feel the same. They have their own list of things to check off by the end of the day, and barely enough time to get them done if they can manage to fend off interruptions.

  After a day of this, we are moving so fast that we can’t change gears. We whip homeward like a boomerang. And we’re tired, drained from the pace of it. We drop into a seat on the bus and close our eyes – and as we do, some mild-mannered chap next to us looks up from his paper and asks innocently, “What is that Australian creature with a three-letter name that ends in u?”

  We don’t want to be rude, but we hear our voice growl, “Emu!” The mind is screaming, “I don’t care about crossword puzzles! Who cares about Australian creatures with three-­letter names?” By the time we reach home, we’re ready to blow up at the very next person we meet – who is, all too often, likely to be someone we love.