Foundation of Life

Once there was a Sage sitting beside the river. He saw a scorpion that has fallen into the river. Sage put his hand inside the river to rescue it, only to be stung. After some time, the scorpion again fell into the river. Once more Sage rescued it only to be stung at the end. A man is observing all this, asked Sage, why are you rescuing this nasty creature again and again? The Sage replied, it's the dharma of a scorpion to sting but it's the dharma of a human being to save.

Do you notice something?

The Sage used the word dharma but what is the meaning of dharma? We use words like this every day without knowing their underlying meaning. Let's explore them one by one.

Dharma derives from the root word dhri which means to support. Dharma implies support from within, the essence of a thing, it's a virtue that makes it what it is. It's a law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation.

Is there anything that supports your life, the life of your family, or the entire world?

The teachings of the great sages imply that penetrating below the senses, they found out not a world of solid, separate objects but a ceaseless process of change. Matter coming together, dissolving, and coming together in different forms. Below the flux of things with name and form, they found something changeless. An infinite, indivisible reality in which the transient data of the world cohere. They called this reality Brahman: the Godhead, the divine ground of existence.

Brahman is the one who knows Brahma. The Brahma is the infinite, changeless reality that exists within each of us. The one that exists within me also exists within you. A feeling of oneness. Loving others means loving yourself and vice-versa.

The core teaching of spirituality is:

1. There is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change.

2. The same reality lies at the core of every human personality.

3. The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially, to realize God here on Earth.

Nothing can be achieved without desire. Desire is the fuel of life. Desire is not the problem but the selfish desire is the root cause of all evils. Action without selfish motive purifies the mind, the doer is less likely to be ego-driven later.

You might be thinking that why does Selfless action lead to Self-realization?

It's not the good action being rewarded to realize the divine nature. We aren't bargaining with God. An activity that involves ego can't purify consciousness as it goes on creating new karma in the mind. Practically, we are entangled in what we do. Selfless action purifies our consciousness because it doesn't involve any ego. No new karma is created, the mind is working out the karma it has already accumulated.

The great sage Shankara illustrates it with an analogy of the potter's wheel. The ego's job is to go on incessantly spinning the wheel of mind and making new karma pots, new ideas to act on, fresh desires to pursue. When this pointless activity stops, no more pots are made but for a while the wheel of the mind spinning out of the momentum of the past's karma. Eventually, the wheel does come to stop, dissolving the mind's process in Samadhi.

Consciousness is the light that burns in the chambers of your heart.

Shraddha is which is placed in the heart. A person is what his shraddha is. All that we are is the result of our thoughts. A man is made and molded by his thoughts. A thought is a response to the conditioning and the memory. Be very selective of what you are putting in your mind. Thoughts are the packets of potential energy. They grew more and more solid when favorable conditions are present or when obstacles are removed. They become desires, then habits, and then ways of living with full consequences.

Wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your actions. A thought is a seed that can grow into a deep-rooted, wide-spreading tree. It's more difficult to uproot the wide-spreading tree and terribly difficult to undo the lifetime of negative thinking, which can extend up to many people's lives. It's difficult to unlearn something than to learn in the first place. The body always follows the mind. Positive actions are the result of positive thoughts and optimism.

Karma is the web of cause and effect. The law of Karma states that every event is both a cause and an effect. Every effect has consequences of a similar kind which in turn have further consequences and so-on. Every act is a result of some previous karma. You are the creator and destroyer of your life. In fact, you can control your destiny. Don't throw the responsibility on someone else, Be brave and Lead!

Rise, rise and rise until lamb becomes a lion.

Maya is the creative energy that makes unity appear as the world of innumerable separate things with name and form. It appears as if you are different than me. Of course, on the physical level, you are different but on the spiritual level, the same changeless entity exists within each of us. Anything that divides is sin. On the contrary, anything that unites is holy. Things that seem to be unrelated once connected form a bigger whole. Life is unity.

Ego and Maya are related to each other. Ego is I am, am-ness. It creates division. That is why it is false. Ego wants something special, something rare, something that doesn't usually happen, that has happened to you, not to anyone else. It wants something extraordinary. If your success boosts your ego then it acts as a hindrance to your spiritual life. As you climb the ladder of success, be more humble and stay grounded. A tree full of fruits always bends towards the ground. Be like that tree, vast number of skills yet down to earth. It will make you successful both in the spiritual world as well as in the material world.

Kabir said,

When the seeker is there, the sought is not;

When the sought is found, the seeker no longer exists.

Someone asked Kabir, what kind of meeting is this?

This is a very deep and beautiful statement. Here, Kabir is talking about Ego. As long as, Ego exists how can you become one with the Universe. When the ego disappears then only you are one with existence. When the seeker is there, his ego exists, how can he attains unity. When unity is attained, his ego vanishes and so the seeker.

Samsara is the cycle of birth and death. Life is like a school, one can graduate or one can skip a grade and stay behind. As long as a debt of karma remains, a person has to keep coming back for further education. This is the basis of Samsara, the cycle of birth and death.

Time: The Valuable Asset

Once there was a fisherman arrived at the bank of a river before dawn. The morning was too dark so he was unable to catch fish from the river. He sat near the bank of the river waiting for the sun to rise. He found a small sack near him. He thought that the sack contained the tiny pebbles so he started throwing them one by one into the river. As he was about to throw the last pebble, a ray of light fell on it. He was surprised to see that it was a diamond. He felt sorry for himself for throwing the precious diamonds into the river. Still, he had one precious diamond that was enough to make him wealthy.

Our life is also similar to the fisherman. We waste our precious yet limited time by thinking of it as a useless stone only to realize its importance at the end of our life. Time is the most valuable asset in our life. We have a limited number of years in this beautiful galaxy. Still, we squander it on useless activities.

Let me ask you a simple question: Why do you want to earn money?

The most obvious answer is to fulfill the basic needs of our life. Once the peace of the stomach is taken care of, then our next priority is happiness. Happy people have a great amount of control over their time. Spending time on the activities we love greatly enhance the quality of our life. It gives more meaning to our life. People spend a large amount of time to save money. Instead, they have to spend money to earn time. Always trade money for time not the time for money. Money spent can be earned back but once the time is gone, it is gone forever!

Naval Ravikant on the value of time:

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. Set a high personal hourly rate, and stick to it. When I was young, I decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth. And I started treating myself that way.

Factor your time into every decision. Say you value your time at $100 an hour. If you decide to spend an hour driving across town to get something, you’re effectively throwing away $100. Are you going to do that?

Say you buy something from Amazon and they screw it up. Is it worth your time to return it? Is it worth the mental hassle? Keep in mind that you will have less time for work, including mentally high-output work. Do you want to use that time running errands and solving little problems? Or do you want to save it for the big stuff?

Our day must be filled with activities that will make us creative, productive, and joyful. There are two kinds of activities: Beer activities and Coffee activities. In Coffee activities, we are working towards a specific outcome. Laser-like concentration is needed to complete them. We are highly productive but not creative in this mode. In Beer activities, we are in a relaxed state not focusing particularly on anything. It's more likely a diffuse mode where we become the sky and the thoughts are like the clouds that come and go. Best ideas come to our mind when we are not thinking about them. Beer activities are not a waste of our time rather these activities make us more creative and joyful. Fill your day with a mix of Coffee as well as Beer activities.

Paul Graham on Beer activities Vs Coffee Activities:

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is you can control it indirectly.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they were allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. This means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

So far we have discussed the importance of time, the effect of Money on our well-being, and the kind of activities that should be present on our to-do list. The important question is:

How to allocate our precious time to various activities to get the maximum yield?

Eisenhower's Decision matrix will help us to solve this problem. Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t only the 34th President of the United States. Before that, he was a five-star general in the Army, responsible for command of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. He was also the Supreme Commander of NATO and President of Columbia University.

Eisenhower divides the cohort of activities into four categories.

1. Important and Urgent

2. Important and Not Urgent

3. Not Important and Urgent

4. Not Important and Not Urgent

My Framework of Eisenhower Decision Matrix

Important and Urgent: Make these activities to be the top priority in your to-do list. These activities need to be done immediately. Don't get overwhelmed by the big and complex tasks. Divide them into small and manageable chunks so that it looks weird to say no to such simple tasks. Given long enough time, you can easily complete them.

Important and Not Urgent: It includes your Long term goals. You are more likely to procrastinate these tasks due to the lack of urgency. Always think long term. Play long term games with long term people. Spend huge chunks of your time doing these activities. Most of you want immediate results so you develop a myopic vision(Short-termism). Short-termism means to focus on short term results despite knowing the usefulness of long term results.

Doing work-out for a single day is not going to help you to get in good shape, Reading a single book won't make you a smart person, and Meditating for a week won't make you a calm person. When you don't see results then you stop doing them. Don't be too result-oriented. Of Course, the result matters but it's the right process that drives out the result. Focus on the process. Do the work for its own sake.

Not Important and Urgent: Spent the least amount of time on these activities. The fundamental delusion is to consider urgent as important. Yeah, there are some activities that are urgent and important but most of them are urgent but not important. If you let them consistently interrupt you then it will significantly decrease your performance on important matters. One approach to counteract this effect is to turn off notifications while doing deep work. You can respond to a phone call or an email once you are done with 1st and 2nd quadrant activities. These are low energy tasks so do them when you are less productive.

Not Important and Not Urgent: If possible, eliminate these tasks from your to-do list. It is nothing but a sheer waste of time. These are very attractive tasks because they provide immediate gratification. Cheap dopamine is the modern devil. It would be unhealthy to get rid of leisure completely in your life but is essential to evaluate how much of your time is being spent on unimportant activities so that it doesn't get in your way of achieving long-term results.

Lay the bricks of wisdom hour by hour to build the inner citadel to protect yourself from the storm of Misfortune.

Beauty Of Progress

The quality of our life depends upon the kind of glasses through which we look at the world. Dark glasses create the dark world around us. Conversely, white glasses create the beautiful, serene, and peaceful world around us.

Which kind of glasses are you wearing right now?

Is there any model that helps us to look at the world in a more optimistic way?

To your surprise, the answer is Yes! Before discussing the models, let's understand the meaning of Optimism. According to Morgan Housel, Optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor and overtime things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery.

Most Respectful Interpretation (MRI) is the best tool available to us to interpret the actions of others in a more positive light. Given any situation, MRI says always interpret it in the most respectful way. You sent birthday wishes to your friend through an email but he hadn't responded. What is your reaction? He doesn't love me. No, Of course not. He loves you.

The most respectful way to interpret this situation is he might be busy. He was so involved in his current project that he forgot to send a reply to you. Analyzing situations using MRI not only makes you a better person but also foster your relationships with others.

Another model you can use in your day to day life is Third Story. A few years back, I thought there are only two sides to the story. One person supports an idea while the other one rejects it. The world is not black or white. Thinking in binary leads us on a wrong path. The best observation is grey thinking. Grey thinking incorporates in it an impartial observer who looks at both pros as well as cons, weigh them accurately to reach the final conclusion.

What do you see in the above image?

If you are like me you see an image of a young beautiful girl. Do you see any other image in it? Look closely, it also contains an image of an angry old lady. Yeah, I know you have spotted both the images. The problem arises when someone sees a beautiful girl in it and not ready to accept that it also contains an image of an angry old lady. You definitely encounter a situation like this in your life. The remedy to this problem is to put yourself inside the shoes of an impartial observer. The crux of this model is to be open-minded. Have a strong opinion over your ideas but hold them loosely. Update them regularly.

In the Computer world, it can be summarized as,

while ( When new information comes)

{

Update your mental Toolbox;

};

I have read a story about a man named Victor. He was reading a book while traveling on a bus. At the next stop, a man stepped inside the bus with his two children. Children started making too much noise. Victor became very upset as it was very difficult for him to concentrate on the book. Victor told the passenger who was sitting next to him, why was this man not shutting up the mouth of his children? Coincidently, the passenger was the distant relative of the children. He told Victor that the man was coming from the funeral of his wife.

Victor was dumbstruck and felt deep empathy for that man and his children. The moral of the story is to always keep an eye on the whole picture.

Another important model is the Fundamental Attribution Error. People do unfair things to us, not because of their intrinsic motivation but because of the external factors that are outside their control is the essence of this model. People are generally good, their intentions are not to make us feel bad. The problem is with our judgments. For example, If someone runs a red light, you often assume that person is inherently reckless but it might be possible that the person is rushing to the hospital for an emergency.

People are generally unconscious of their behavior. They might say something without even considering what impact it has on us. The most arduous thing in this world is to remain aware of ourselves. If someone treats you disrespectfully, forgive them that they are unconscious of it. Try it for a few days, just observe yourself without assigning it any kind of judgment. The flame of consciousness is too bright that it will dispel all the darkness of negativity from your life. It will make you more creative, calm, and serene.