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I took me a while to write this article on love. And I don't know when I will write another article again, but if you have any suggestions on what you might like to read, that will provide some motivation.

An Upanishad of Love

My inquiry here is into relationships with special reference to “love”: what are the myths and realities in the so-called love? Is there a genuine relationship that could be called love? What are the factors that go into making such a relationship? What are the dependency and liberating factors? And so on. I am interested in the morphology of love.

When I was teaching Upanishads in an Eastern Philosophy class, I used to say to the students that they could write their own Upanishad, as for example on the subject of love. Any such Upanishad would start with what is the most obvious aspect of love, viz., physical attraction and eventually culminate in a non-dual state where there is neither the lover nor the loved, and no need exists for the lover either. The following essay explores those various aspects of love, partly from personal experience and partly from observations of human behavior. This Upanishad perforce is somewhat autobiographical, but it will illustrate the stages one could go through to arrive at what might be construed as the non-dual aspect of love.

An Upanishad of Love:

Stage 1: The process starts with sexual arousal. When you see a person of the opposite sex (sometimes same) you begin to have an arousal; maybe the person is naked or you have touched him or her. Either by accident, because there is no channel for expression of sex, (and no experience of being held physically or holding another), or because of company one might get into sexual fantasies and even masturbation. One yearns for the contact of a sex partner.

Stage 2: If, by chance, one does get into a relationship, (especially as a teenager), one feels that his or her life has found a new meaning. One is full of life and joy. One feels as one lives for the sake of the other. You buy gifts, say sweet things, do various favors and so on and so forth. If there is no sexual intercourse, one keeps fantasizing and hoping for that moment of touch and union. If it comes, it will last for a while and can end up in marriage or at least an affair.

Stage 3: When there is a frustration or some obstacle in the course of love, and one’s emotional needs are not yet satisfied (for instance, for lack of an adequate response from the partner), there is a likelihood of becoming dependent on the other. This can also be coupled with one’s ego being hurt, one’s sense of conquering or power or self-importance not being satisfied. Then it’s bound to express itself either with excessive or unreasonable demands or expectations, or as a show of power withdrawal of affection or favors from the other. Or if forcing oneself or one’s will on the other doesn’t work, one can end up hating the other. And it can, in the same vein, lead to force and violence. One can also get into a state of loss of meaning or interest in life or total boredom.

Stage 4: One can get desperate and seek escape from one’s condition by entering into more dependency-generating relationships, activity, achievement, alcohol, attempts at suicide and such. Ultimately, if none of them succeed, one can run into a total life crisis.

Stage 5: Questioning Assumptions or Premises in one’s thinking process: I recall a time of crisis in my own life: That day when it happened, I had called this girlfriend 21 times, each time being hung up on the other end. Finally, I ended that effort. But the pain and agony did not go away. That night I was groaning and moaning with my head in the pillow. In one of those moments, whether thanks to my being acquainted with the teachings of J. Krishnamurti or because something else, I can’t say, but I became aware of a mistake I had been making in all my youth, namely, assuming that life without love is not worth living. The youthful urge for sex and contact with the opposite sex (which I was deprived of in India, thanks to the sexual segregation in the culture there), the previous frustration of an affair with a married woman (6 years older than me) not getting anywhere, the eagerness to fall in love with someone available around and that love not finding a response -- all precipitated in this crisis. The idea in my assumption was that someone, somewhere, must love me. Of course, if it is just any love, I could have found that in umpteen numbers of ways and places – among friends, parents and so forth – but that wasn’t good enough. It had to be romantic love and that too from this woman, or whomever I chose to be with at that moment.

Once I became painfully aware of that assumption, I was out of my crisis instantly. I merely questioned the assumption, I did not accept it or reject. The problem, as a consequence, dropped out of me as if a handkerchief dropped itself out of my pocket. I never had to become dependent on another person again in my life.

I stopped calling my girl friend. Yet, I heard from her about three months later. Her foot was hurt in a skiing accident. There were a few meetings and sex, and even an attempt on her part to get me to meet her grandparents (perhaps for possibly of marrying her). But eventually the relationship fizzled out. She married a lawyer and divorced him in six months! I heard from her again about 17 years or so later. She said she later discovered her true sexuality and had a relationship with a lesbian who walked out on her after 10 years. She had a habit of calling me when she was in doldrums! Anyway, I was so glad I did not get entangled any more with her.

It’s not that somehow I could never again relate to another person, nor was it that I was never involved in sexual or other love relationships with women any more. Far from it. It’s just that the relationships never deteriorated into dependency any more.

One more consequence of this event was that I was sort of rooted out of both my native Indian culture as well as the Western/American culture I was engrossed in for the previous three and-a-half years of my life. I remember going on a bus to San Francisco from Berkeley on some errand and while I was travelling on the bus, I had this vision of my travelling in some sort of a ship when the round window of the room suddenly opened up and I saw the vast expanse of the ocean and sky outside for the first time. That sight was too frightening for me and I quickly shut off the window. It was clear to me that a part of my self was dropped the previous night and this freedom which resulted from the event was too new and too scary to bear. It took me years to understand the implications of that freedom.

Stage 6: Relationships after: I would still go after women, have affairs and eventually I got married twice and had two children, one from each wife. I have an excellent relationship with my present wife and family. And my ex-wife is still on friendly terms with me and my family and visits us at least once or twice in a week. Yet, there is no involvement in relationships, and certainly no dependencies. People who have observed, an elderly person in India, for instance, described my relationship as no involvement yet fulfilling my family duties and obligations. By the way, I and my wife never used the word ‘love’ when we talk to each other. (UG says ‘love’ is just a “four-letter word!”)

But I think more needs to be said in this context, because it relates to the matter of love. I enjoy relationships, yet I am also content to be alone. I do think about myself and my health and other matters, but when there is another person in front of me, such as my wife or a friend visiting or a someone who needs my attention or help, I think also (perhaps even first) of the other person. I do things for them which I don’t necessarily do for myself. When there is a conversation, most of the time it’s not to win a point or show myself off, but rather it’s geared toward listening, understanding and helping, if necessary. It’s not as much that the other takes precedence over my needs and tastes, but that there is not much thinking about my own needs – they, not being many, would be met easily anyway. Relationships are no longer based on need. They just happen. I do not mean that I sacrifice myself and my needs. I am just not in the picture.

And when I am by myself, when I have not immediate concerns about my health or other needs, and I am not occupying myself with various activities (such as playing games on the computer!), there are moments when nothing and no one in the world matters, and there just in no one in the picture. When someone does enter into the picture, then that person is the primary focus of attention and nothing else matters. I am not sure you could call that ‘love’. Anyway, it’s not based on mutual exploitation, push and pull, expectations or demands.

Comments:

While many relationships are rather clear-cut, we notice that some of these create bondage for both (or several) parties involved. In almost all these relationships there is a mutual dependency of one on the other. The same can be said about even the relationship of love. More often than not, the dependency is generated by a set of desires or expectations and/or fear of these not being fulfilled. Perhaps friendship is the one relationship in which the partners are free to be related or separated as they wish.

In some sense or other we are related to the environment around us, including the people in it, whether we will it not. To exist is to be related, not in the sense of self and other, but in a very existential sense – I am related to the things in the environment, for instance. May be they are my tools, my property, things I cherish or detest, and so forth. But I am already jumping ahead – by calling these such, I am already involved in a self-thing relationship: For example, I have an identification with the newly bought TV set in the sense that if a part of it is broken, I feel as if a part of me is broken.

But once the self is formed through the thought process, i.e., my being connected through memory to my past experiences which in reflection are regarded as pleasant or unpleasant, I am related as a self to my environment, whether it be objects, situations, persons or ideas and beliefs. We can generalize here and say that ultimately all our relationships are based on the pleasure principle, i.e., pursuing what has proven to be pleasurable in the past and avoiding what has been experienced in the past as painful. As UG, would say, our relationships, particularly love, are based on “what can I get out of it?” When things fail in our relationships, when we don’t get what we expected, and we can’t seem to press the partner into yielding what we desire, we play the last trump card call “love”.

Role of Instinct: Although thought is invariably mixed and drives most of our responses, some forms of behavior are closer to the instinctive behavior we observe in the animal world: Take, for instance, a mother’s willingness even to die to protect her child, or a person’s starving himself or herself to death upon the bereavement of the partner in love or matrimony. The attachment is too great to even care for one’s own survival. Even such behavior in other cases, however, is vastly modified, of course, by one’s upbringing and various other factors generated by the ego-centered thinking mechanism.

Physical Contact: There is no question that touch and any sort of physical contact play a vital role in sex, romantic relations and other human relations. We know that children deprived of physical contact have a stunted growth and grow up as warped human beings. When someone is in distress, nothing consoles like a hug, or getting the other person physically close to you or at least a touch on the shoulder. Lovers sitting in embrace or even hands-in-hands can experience a state of euphoria or ease and blissfulness. These are the moments which we normally remember and cherish about love, along with friendly conversations in which we sense no conflict.

Touch in Sex: No doubt touch plays a central role in sex. In India when I grew up I knew how starved I was for touch and physical contact with the opposite sex. If only I had such a contact, I would have not grown up to be so warped in my sexual growth. In sex, of course, chemistry and electricity are major components. We can actually feel how charged we are before the contact, and how the charge gets ‘neutralized’ after a period of contact. This phenomenon is even more poignant in sexual intercourse, part of the reason we feel so laid back and relaxed (and even wasted) after the orgasm. The glands have done their job. There is no ‘built up’ tension any more.

In a sense Freud was right: most of sex is touch. But unfortunately he reversed the equation and somehow thought that most of touch is sex. His interpretation of the tactual relations that exist between a parent and a child of the opposite sex as sexual, in my opinion, is a perversion which led to his weird theories of Oedipus Complex and penis jealousy.

When sexual relationships (or so called ‘love’) are limited to sex, it is quite likely not only a sense of bonding does not develop between the partners, but one tends to treat the partner as a mere object to be utilized for one’s pleasure, and change partners like one ‘changes jackets.’ One gets into the mode of conquest: I knew of a ‘friend’ in India who boasted one day that he had slept so far with 267 women and was still counting! I also know women who did similar things with men.

Sharing: Doing things together and sharing things with each other are some other components. Doing things for one another, dedication, loyalty, sharing a family and children and so on, are other ingredients of what we normally call a love relationship.

Communion: In our minds we sometimes have a sense of communion where the other person’s as well as our own minds are so completely relaxed and at ease and nothing else seems to matter, and the mind doesn’t seem to go anywhere else.

Bonding: Just as one develops a bonding with one’s child or a friend or a spouse (in India many times after marrying), you could develop a bonding with your partner: her (or his) interests become your interests. One would do things for the other which one wouldn’t do for oneself. Bonding generally goes beyond dependency. There is a certain empathy you feel for the other which is beyond normal relationships.

An Expanded Self: When two people are entwined with each other, soon one’s self-interest begins to encompass the other too, and the two begin to form an exclusive relationship. As a consequence, people who were friends before no longer receive the same treatment. A transition has been made from the ‘I-club’ to ‘We-two Club’.

This is somewhat akin to the in-groups one becomes part of as one grows. More often than not, one’s family becomes such an in-group. Collectively, the family and its interests alone are what count. And one is willing to exploit others (or rob them) to feed the family. The standards that we apply to the others we don’t apply to our family members. We say, “It’s the family.” Property relations are only part of the story.

So, although it start out to be an expanded self, love relationship can eventually lead to become more aware of others and shed more of oneself in favor of other.

Power in Relationships: It’s not just pleasure-seeking or gratification one seeks in relationships, but a sense of power or importance which often expresses itself in the form of competition. A win or victory in competition as well as pleasure gives a sense of one’s own existence and continuity. The continuity of the self is ubiquitous in human relationship.

Women as well as men use sex to gain power or domination over the other by dangling it, withdrawing it when they find it necessary and so forth.

The Role of Will: More often than not, one tends to exert one’s to assert one’s will and insist on having one’s way. A tug-of-war of wills is the usual consequence. When both the sides assert themselves in this fashion, not only conflict, but ultimately a breakdown of relationship can occur.

Possessiveness: Once a relationship has been established, each side can become possessive of the other, and that is bound to choke the relationship and lead to ultimate failure. Jealousy, violence and domination and submission (as well as masochism and sadism) are bound to enter into such a relationship.

Faithfulness: In marital or other love-based relationships, each partner feels that he or she owns the other, and that the other owes allegiance to oneself and one’s relationship. When she or he has a side affair, anger, jealousy and hatred flare up in the other and we all know the consequences of these.

All this seems somehow bypassed in what we imagine as love relationship. When there is romantic love, one is intoxicated, to be sure. The mere presence or even thought of the loved one is enough to trigger a sense of exhilaration, well-being and feeling good about oneself. Each thought about the other fuels the feeling one has towards him or her. But like all other feelings, this feeling of love also is transitory and subject to changes of time – it lasts only until a sense of doubt, questioning or some other obstacle presents itself and begins gnaw at it. The rest of the self naturally asserts itself and introduces expectations and demands into the picture. The self and its interests, for instance, jealousy, will eventually have to play a role and bring down the edifice of love one has built so assiduously. Also, competition is bound to create division: you keep looking for the difference in the other person and that creates the division. The division is the source of conflict. We develop contempt or fear of the partner. Where these exist, there is no scope for love.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that these divisions have to be permanent. It’s entirely possible that a couple, even after they are married, may work these differences out to the degree of not only being able to live with them, but also being able to allow the partner to be different. But in this process something is lost. The initial fervor no longer exists. We may arrive at a point at which we may let each other be, but we are lone individuals living under the same roof, meeting occasionally for dinner or lunch or some social occasion when friends visit us.

Economics: After one forms a family with the partner, economic relationships not only a play central part, but also become one of the major sources of conflict within the family, as they do in the rest of one’s life, and become a source of pulls and pushes and ultimately of even divorces. That’s one reason why I think in spousal relationships, it is highly advisable to get economics out of the way, by, for instance, leaving complete access to money and property to the partner. Of course, this takes tremendous mutual trust. Economics, we know is a key to feeling power in life. Such a relationship is bound to create a more relaxed married life.

The same goes for enabling the partner to have a total sense of power by including him or her in any major decision making within the married life. In fact, in my family I even included my children in the decision-making. I used to say, “Don’t think of just what you want and how you would want to get it. But think of how, given the whole picture, including every one’s interests and wishes, what sort of decision you would make not just for yourself, but for everyone. Whatever decision we come to must be agreeable to all of us.” Of course, I also let the children have their say in the choice of schools or subjects they studied. That too gives them a sense of power. I was there to merely advise them of the consequences of their choices – as for instance, when I told my daughter how difficult it is in the highly competitive contemporary world to make a living as a dancer. If my daughter still wanted to go into dancing, it would be her choice. And when she grew up, neither she nor the rest of the family were unhappy with her decision.

Is there a need for a relationship? In this process, one has perhaps lost one’s zest for life. You may become slowly lifeless and merely carry on the business of living. Also notice that one’s self and interests have diminished somewhat and the self is carrying on a minimal load. Of course, you may turn out to be a lonely person: whereas earlier the same loneliness drove one to a relationship (even if it is an unpleasant or unfulfilling one), having turned somewhat bitter, now you get reconciled to this sort of existence. You only do what comes in your way. You only respond to people and situations when there is a demand from outside. You have no initiative.

Also, as one ages, one sees that one’s possibilities are limited and he or she is stuck with the partner one is left with, which may be better in one’s mind than not having a partner at all. Or, the other hand, the couple could develop a genuine friendship with each other and enjoy each other’s companionship.

Of course, these are all just abstractions and purely hasty generalizations. A lot of people choose many other and different paths of life. They can repeat affair after affair; or if life presents frustrations, one could escape or compensate through activity, achievement, drinking, or even suicide. The possibilities again are endless.

The impressive features I have noticed in various instances of love: 1) The bereavement in birds and cats and even in people can lead to suicide and death. I remember that one of the pair of little kittens once disappearing and then the other kitten stopped eating and eventually disappearing too. 2) You notice that some persons never recovered from the grief of the death or even separation of their partner. I don’t think, my friend Bob, for instance, ever recovered from his wife leaving him to be with a family friend. 3) I notice that people go to extraordinary lengths to care for their partners, even to their own detriment: I remember Vito being so patient and serving his wife Shalom when she was having serious problems. Same with my wife’s friend, Ann, when her husband had an accident and was seriously injured. You see how forgiving fathers and mothers are when dealing with problems caused by their children. These instances are not people just bound by custom and tradition. There is an intimate bond that has been formed that accounts for such behavior. You could say it is identification based on habit and so forth. But it may be more than that. The self simply has diminished or has little place in determining one’s actions. What’s happens to the other is the only factor that operates. 4) Also I see with some such gentleness and affection emanating from every move of theirs (I remember the elderly lady, part of the renter’s family in our house, when I was little). She would just wish ill for no one. Nothing around her trained her to be so. It was her nature. She was just born with very little self, I would say, and never let it get the upper hand over her. 5) Or someone like UG, who would show such utter compassion for even total strangers – we don’t even know what triggers it. But he can go extreme lengths to care for that person. Again, there is a total lack of self.

In all these behaviors, one thing that seems to be common is that not just there is some bond between people, but the self or ego and interests don’t come in the way. We can say that it’s the self or the ego that has its own interests which are sooner or later bound to conflict with the interests of the loved one that is detrimental to anything that could be called genuine love.

Then the question arises as to why one needs a relationship such as love at all if there is no self-centered need? Why bother?

Is it possible to live without a relationship then?

A few things I want to say about relationships, especially about what you might call ‘love’: I strongly feel that where there is fear (of authority, for instance), dependence, contempt for the other, and feelings of inferiority or superiority, there can’t be love. Also, when relationships are based on mutual need or exploitation, they might work for a while (even for a long time), but I would say they are not based on love.

After all this, how do we go about describing or defining love? I don’t know. But you know what I mean. As long as there is the self and the needs based on the self, you don’t have any love. I know this goes quite contrary to the current beliefs, especially on the part of psychologists and psychoanalysts, about love. But check it out yourself.

Need for a Relationship: There surely are biological and psychological constitutional factors that initially prompt one to seek a relationship. For one thing, sex glands being active is a primary reason: the sight of opposite sex, even one is a child, is bound to invoke feelings of sex in oneself. Add to that the fact as one becomes conscious of oneself and a sense of the self has formed, one feels a gap or emptiness sometime or other. Combine these two, you have the ingredients for a romantic love: as I said before, plain consciousness is an unstable state, if only for the fact that the psychological elements of memory, acting through the brain, are bound to impinge themselves on one’s consciousness. Once they are present in the consciousness, one can see oneself as lacking or needing such things. This one could easily perceive as a need to fill the gap generated by these memories. Aloneness or loneliness thus arising constantly prompts to seek fulfillment through seeking company, achievement, proving oneself and what not.

I am not saying there is no such thing as friendship or affection beyond these things. But if there is such a thing, it masks the initial emptiness, and soon uncovers it when there is a frustration or other obstruction in its way. It is the same with what we call ‘love’. There are moments when we are in company with someone, with whom we are not necessarily romantically involved, when we are gloating in each other’s company and our minds do not go to some other place. We are not even conscious of ourselves. Those idyllic moments, unfortunately, are short-lived. Soon there is an awareness of it, and the desire process butts in by either wanting to continue or perpetuate or repeat those moments. Then we are back again in the process of seeking and desiring and the accompanying aloneness or loneliness which we constantly make up for.

Of course, it is also quite likely that without such warm relationships such as friendship and love, our life may seem not only dry, but may in fact feel meaningless. We may drift and drag in life and merely carry on. However, I feel that such an attitude may be the result of some initial frustrations and once they are cleared from our way, we just live our live without any negative feelings.

What I am saying here is that if there is any such thing as love or friendship, it is quickly contaminated by the process of the self which introduces various elements into the picture, such as calculation (how much each is giving or taking), competition, power relations, finding differences or other kinds of division. It takes quite a bit of maturity on both sides to eventually overcome and transcend these divisions and come to a place where one lets each other be without the common pushes and pulls and enjoy each other’s company.

Such a state also enables one eventually to become aware of the whole process of the self and enables us to be free from it, however short-lived that freedom may be.

Announcement

One of my readers posted a comment yesterday asking why I have not been posting any new articles on this blog site. I apologize for the long silence. Here is a rather lengthy explanation and a resolution:

For the past few months I have been wrestling with some medical problems which resulted in my arms and wrists practically dysfunctional. Thanks to a drug I have been taking, now they have regained a reasonable amount of strength. I should start writing soon.

Also, last Christmas, as a gift to my friends and a few relatives I thought I would put together all the articles in the blog in the form of a book and present it to them. I did. My wife is currently editing the book. There is a possible offer to publish it from India. (My wife got only 5 copies printed as a hard copy and the rest I sent electronically by e-mail.)

Once that job was done, I didn't have either the energy or the motivation (especially since I didn't have an overwhelming response to the articles I had already posted) to continue writing. Now that someone has made a noise about it, I am prompted to write again.

I am wondering about what I should write about next: Here is a thought: I will see if any of you is interested in it: when I was teaching my Eastern Philosophy I used to make up a "Love Upanishad". Would it be interesting to writing about the "Myths and Realities of Love"? Of course, it might take a few weeks (I would say two to three) to write an article on it. Let me know your interest.

Ending the Downward Spiral

The build-up of thought: whether it is a positive or negative thought, memory, impression or sensation, our mind builds on them, making the positive ones more glorious and rosy. These are forward-looking. We do the same with the negative thoughts. We build up on them, turn them into nightmares and try to avoid them at all costs. These two are forward- looking. In fact, many memories we have, just because they have an emotional charge, they look toward future for fulfillment, and repetition, annulment and annihilation, revenge and what not, if they are negative ones. In other words, as we get older, it may seem like we are only repeating and reliving our past, but we are really trying to resolve them in the future.

As we get older, we tend to emphasize the worries and the negative thoughts more, although we do too reminisce the positive ones a lot. Of course, it all depends on the occasions when we see the threat of negative thoughts; that’s when we tend to dwell on them so much. Indeed, we build up on them so much that we panic and terrorize ourselves with them, turn them into nightmares and start trembling at their occurrence. And we become paralyzed. The downward spiral never seems to end. Every symptom or sign we read we turn into something huge and start dreading it. An itch or a rash somewhere on our skin is turned quickly in our mind into the threat of a cancer, for instance. We become mentally and therefore physically sicker and sicker. If this is not hell, what else is?

We don’t question our positive thoughts, because they give us pleasure. We tend to avoid the negative ones, because they are painful. But there is no rut which we cannot extricate ourselves from. To do so it may not be enough to become aware of our conditioning or attachments and let them go, as they keep recurring. At times, we may have to consciously and deliberately say to ourselves, “I will accept the worst, and I am not going to go into this any more.” We have to make a conscious decision. Like a young fellow saying to himself, “I am not going to be intimidated by this kid any more; what’s the worst he can do to me?” or “I will work this out.” It’s not that you are using your will, which is generally based on identification with something. But rather it is that after seeing getting into the same rut repeatedly, you decide consciously not to slide into it. Buddhist meditation Vipassana meditation recognized the role of such a decision. (Also, in the eightfold path, part of Buddhist meditation consists in encouraging our minds to think wholesome thoughts and discouraging it to think unwholesome thoughts. The Buddhist realized that our minds do have a tendency to build.)

When you once again confront a symptom and start reading its meaning, you catch yourself before or right at the time when you fall headlong into the thought-habit pattern and stay or step out of it. It doesn’t matter if you have to do it repeatedly and it doesn’t even matter if you have already been caught in the spiral. The moment you are aware of the rut, you step out! And you can.

The trouble with stepping out of things is that when you are involved in some thought process or state, you are within it and as such you don’t even think that it’s possible to get out of it, let alone make any effort to get out. But when the pain is great, and you see no way out, it might just occur to you to “surrender” to you or to drop the whole process. Or you might just say to yourself that you have had enough of the rigmarole, it’s time to get out of it. Anything is possible. Unfortunately, there are no rules.

The stepping out of things is a very unstable state. Consciousness, as Sartre would say, constantly seeks a foundation. In other words, it seeks content. If there isn’t any, it will try to find some. Being without foundation is indeed a heroic task. But if you could be there from moment to moment (unfortunately there is no continuity here, because it’s not a mental state), then you stand alone. In some sense, you are always there catching the beginning of sliding into a mental state. I don’t know if this is called freedom, but it surely can end the downward spiral and the descent into hell.

In and Out of Mental States

I talked elsewhere about how the continuity of mental states not only creates mental problems, but also creates in us our sense of identity, a notion of myself as a separate entity from others, the world and even from myself. It is indeed fascinating to see how this identity actually occurs.

Without our interference mental states have their own natural duration and then they fade out on their own. We pour life into them by either participating in them or resisting them and thus give continuity and permanence to them.

Take grief, for example. Like anger, fear, depression, loneliness or boredom it is a state of mind. Left to its own devices, it is a limited life and duration. Then it fizzles away, sometimes through distraction and sometimes naturally without any effort on our part. But our past experience works on it through our thought process and interprets it as something undesirable. In that very interpretation is the process of resistance. Since I, what I think about and my thought about it are not in reality separate entities, although I might presume they are, my very thought of it and resistance to it pours life into the mental stat e, gives it a continuity and a life. In fact, we have no way of looking at it the state of mind except through our thought of it. If we could, then we wouldn’t even know we are in that state.

Thus, in my mind a duality is set up between me and my mental state (of course, through my thought process). I keep battling the state and can’t understand why it continues despite of my resistance or trying to suppress it.

The mental state does not have any strength if I don’t participate in it or resist it. Just suppose I come to some terms with it by understanding that perhaps grieving is a natural process or that death is inevitable and so on. The state will have its natural life and die its natural death. The duration of the state depends mostly on the intensity of it. Of course, as long as the perceived cause of the state remains, the state has to remain, unless one turns his or her attention away from it.

Fear is another example of a mental state: Our initial attitude to fear is that it shouldn’t be there, i.e., we should not be afraid. And then whatever we do to address it will inevitably strengthen the fear, even if the attempt is merely to accept it. You cannot will to let it be. You just let it be. This is so, because the will presupposes a duality set between yourself and your fear and as long as you operate within the duality, the fear not only persists, but is multiplied and strengthened. But suppose you surrender to it. Cease and desist from any effort to change it. On many such occasions, which generally happened in my bed, in just a few moments, the fear not only fizzled away, but my organism relaxed and I fell asleep to wake up to notice I had no problem any more.

The discussion about mental states gives the hope that we can do something to change a given mental state. But unfortunately this essay can give no such direction or instruction. Even the instruction “Do nothing about mental states” can easily be taken as a direction. Then we tend to look upon a given state with a view not to change it. That too has the motivation of wanting to change it.

The reader can always ask: “Then what to do?” “Nothing,” would be my answer.

2) But this talk may sound all too easy. Actually, it’s more difficult than it seems, because we are so used to living by the pleasure principle of enhancing what has been pleasant and avoiding what is painful. As long as we fall headlong into pleasurable experiences and want to repeat them, improve upon them and seek further pleasurable experiences, we guarantee the continuity of ourselves. It is the same attempt to preserve the self that also automatically produces the negative reaction to some other experiences calling them painful. So, the learning about inaction regarding mental states has eventually to apply to the so-called pleasant or positive or pleasurable states of mind as well as the negative painful states.

It’s of course not to say that we shouldn’t enjoy what happens in our life. This is a far cry from preserving mental states as a way of perpetuating ourselves. But this does involve a fundamental overhaul of our systems.

What is the difference between letting a state be and being in a state? We are sometime in a state struggling in it (like in a depression) and there may seem to be no end to it. This is an inevitable question to arise. The answer is that when you are struggling within a state, either you are aware of your struggling in it or you are not. If you are aware, the fact that you are aware is itself in indication that you are other than that. And that awareness also implies that there is an attempt to become free from the struggle. Thus you are back to square one. If, on the other hand, you are not aware that you are struggling, then as such there is no problem. The state will wither away, unless, of course, it is generated by body chemistry or drug-induced. The solutions for such problems (which are observed by others) are not from within. You have to get help!

If by some means you can get out of mental states, say by just letting them be and surrendering to them, there is a “neutral” zone, a zone of mere consciousness. Here you are merely aware of the innards of the body such as the throat, the stomach or the mouth, and you are not within the mental world. Thoughts may arise and pass, but you are not them or in them and there is no reaction to them. It is indeed a skill -- not a skill which you can consciously and deliberately develop, as that requires a goal of changing the given and a will to change it – to just let the state be. Once you have a clear taste of the zone, then you can move back into the “neutral” zone whenever you find yourself caught in a mental state – you just have to let be whatever the state you find yourself – if it is fear, let it be; and if it is a hurt, let it also be. It is a skill of instantly freeing yourself from any mental state by letting it be and letting it last as long as it wants to.

I can only talk about when I am out of mental states; I cannot really talk about pure consciousness as such. Hence this may not constitute enlightenment at all. (As I said, I don't care what it is called anyway.) While I have sensations such as awareness of the throat, it is followed by some self-consciousness and verbal activity. The awareness of my sensation as well as the recognition of it through my verbal activity does involve duality and yet it is subsequent to the initial awareness where there may be no subject-object division. There is also no response to the sensation. Divisions and reactions enter into the picture only within mental states. The conceptual picture of this is not terribly clear to me, but this is the best I could come up with as yet.

You can say this zone of consciousness is self-luminescent, to use a Vedanta phrase. You know it exists because there is a built in self-awareness. I think UG himself talks about consciousness knowing itself (he says, for instance, in the Mystique that life knows itself.). You could call this a temporary state of enlightenment. On the other hand, you can say it is a shift in the brain. I am not so much interested in what you call it as the fact itself. When the ‘front’ of your brain is active, you are in mental states and you struggle within them. When you shift to the ‘back’ of your brain (or ‘head’ if you prefer that word), then you are in the zone of the body and awareness of the innards. There are no values here, nothing bothers you, and you don’t have to do or strive for anything. There are no relationships, including with yourself, no emotions, no love, and no fear of death. You can’t say it is anything. It’s not a nothing either. It’s just awareness.

Reflections on Meditation

Preface: I used to define meditation to my students as having the main function of disrupting one’s thought process. This definition is consistent with the Yoga definition of meditation as cessation of the activities of the mind. But unfortunately, like many other activities carried out by means of our mind, meditation is a mental activity, although its aim is to disrupt the thought process. In other words, its aim is psychological suicide!

Unless we intend to change ourselves to become someone different or better, or be in a more peaceful or ‘enlightened’ state, we wouldn’t take up meditation. Such an activity is the product of the mind, as it is our thought process which always attempts to change the given situation and help us be somewhere else. Meditation presupposes an awareness of our condition and dissatisfaction with it, as well as an attempt to change the condition into something better. The following demonstrates the paradoxical nature of meditation and how and why it is fundamentally frustrating. I will also show some of its virtues as well as its limitations.

Then I will mention some possibilities and discuss them.

What is Meditation? In the West, meditation is used, more often than not, to relax, to gain a sense of calm and freedom from anxiety. In the form of biofeedback it has been used to control blood pressure, promote alpha rhythm in the brain or whatever. For purposes of relaxation, it is also coupled with deep breathing, differential relaxation, visual imaging and so forth. Those who use meditation for such purposes don’t have any pretense to enlightenment, liberation or whatever.

Traditionally, however, meditation has been viewed, at least in the East, not merely as a method of relaxation but as a means to attain Nirvana or Release or enlightenment.

Forms and Methods of Meditation: There are many different forms of meditation: a) the most common form is to focus totally on whatever you are doing, not minding anything else. The traditional story of a woman going around three times with a pot on her head with nothing else in her mind, not even knowing that she was walking around, comes to mind. This is considered one of the means of transformation (mukti) traditionally recognized. That is what one might call the path of karma. You just are focused so much on what you are doing, you are not even minding what it will get you or won’t. Of course, in any skilled action, you have to constantly adjust your means to the ends, or else your actions misfire. That doesn’t mean you care about the outcome; you do care, but not about what you will or won’t get for yourself.

b) Repetition of a mantra or some sort of formula or a holy name is what comes to mind next as the most common method of meditation: Whether it is the syllable ‘Om’ or the names of gods, or a prayer, it doesn’t matter. You could help it with the counting of beads and what not. (Then you have to split your attention between the reciting and the counting – which I think becomes a chore.)

c) Or you could engage in contemplating God or having a dialogue with Him. This could also take the form of singing the praise of God, as in bhajans.

d) One frequently adopted form of meditation is self-inquiry, looking into the true nature of the self. In a contemporary version, it took the form of the well-known ‘Who am I?’ question one asks oneself constantly, as advocated by Sri Ramana Maharshi.

e) Just sitting and being aware (passively) of the mental contents is yet another form. Soto Zen and other forms advocate this meditation. Non-interference with what you observe is essential. There is and should be no goal for mediation. If there is a goal, meditation becomes contrived and you begin to interfere with the contents and generate conflict within yourself since you constantly calculate, measure and compare.

f) Many times this method is aided by focusing visually on a point on the wall, or the space between one’s eyebrows or just the breathing (watch the way breath enters the nostrils and leaves them. In some forms of meditation, being aware of your breath and counting the number of breaths constitute meditation. It has been long known in yoga practice that making exhalations slower than inhalations can indeed help one to relax.

g) Some other methods employ the instrument of thinking to create a space between oneself and one’s problem element such as a fear or depression by thinking about the whole picture, contemplate the consequences of actions, or the opposite side of an issue, or take another’s point of view and so forth. These too can result in freeing one, relatively speaking, from the problem one is currently facing and perhaps even develop detachment (Shankara’s Bhajagovindam and Buddhist descriptions of the body and prospect of the cremation ground come to mind). Some special types of meditation like Vipassana take an objective approach to one’s action and look at it as an impersonal process than done through one’s agency. The aim here, once again, is to fee one from an ego-centered point of view, thereby developing detachment. These types of meditation employ the instrument of thinking to counter or dissolve the problems created by the thinking process.

h) Also in Vipassana meditation, like in some other forms, awareness (or self-awareness, if you will) is interspersed between the perception of any part of the body or emotion of the mind, without interfering with the mind. Sweeping the floor being aware, watching how your foot step falls on the ground when you walk, being aware of how an emotion of anger rises, has its life and passes away, are some examples. This sort of awareness has not only the virtue of objectifying what one perceives, but also breaking up identification with it.

i) One frequently used form of meditation in contemporary practice is differential relaxation – focusing on each part of the body and relaxing it. In contemporary practice, one finds similar techniques to reduce pain. Focusing on one’s pain with awareness and breathing and relaxing deeply helps one being relieved from the pain.

j) Awareness in movement (much like meditation) as in Feldenkrais can be and has been used successfully in solving skeletal-muscular physical (perhaps psychological as well) problems. In some ways this is similar to practicing yoga asanas with breathing and awareness.

I can go on listing these methods.

Outcomes of Meditaton: The outcomes of meditation vary with the belief system one participates in or the method of meditation one uses: you may gain a vision of Christ or Krishna, you may experience God, you may feel oneness with the universe, you may have out-of-the-body experiences, you may lose all awareness of your body, you may feel that your head is missing, you may feel that your consciousness is expanding to encompass the whole universe, you may experience states of bliss or beatitude, or have a total sense of peace and harmony, or you may become part of the universal energy, and so on and so forth. The list is endless. Some may claim super sensual powers, peep into their past lives, have precognition, have psychic powers as well as powers to heal, not counting ability to know the internal structure of matter. Or your aim may be to simply relax and move into day-to-day chores with ease and a lightness of being.

Relaxation and Release: We need to examine the mechanisms or operation of meditation to see how it works and how it can help, if it does. In meditation you are either focusing or you are simply relaxing. In either case, you don’t interfere with the contents that show up either in the foreground or background of your consciousness. This is primarily reason why people who have been suppressing contents in their minds, or have problems facing their own undesirable thoughts, emotions or past experiences have no business meditating unless they can face up to everything that shows up in their minds when they meditate. But if you can let things go and not react as and when things show up, there is a genuine possibility of being released from the contents, particularly if you have gotten to the bottom rung of the ladder of the layers of a problem. One could term this process self-knowing or self-knowledge.

For example, fears. Normally we resist fear. But below the fear there is the threat we feel from the object of fear. And we dread the consequences of the threat. If we listen to the process of fear and all the consequences of the threat that we are afraid of, figure out what could be the worst consequence that could happen and let it be, then the object of fear will no longer pose a threat.

Or it could be frustration or conflict with another person or depression. Coming to terms with the happening which we dread or the not obtaining what we so cherish and desire, then we could obtain a release from either the fear or the frustration that is generated by the attachments, negative or positive to the objects. The same goes with attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

In the process of meditation in terms of self-knowledge as described above, one could come to some very basic attachments, particularly to positive attachments to good health and life itself, and negative attachments to pain and to death. When we learnt to let these too go, we could arrive at a stage where nothing is important to live any more, not living or dying, and you are just plain consciousness. In that moment of consciousness or awareness, thought might appear just like sounds and experiences as mere images. You now have the ability to let them come and go. They have no longer the hold on you they had before or the charge. The emotional charge is dissipated, as it were. (Of course, this can also happen in confession or confiding with a friend.)

Self-knowledge in the sense described above implies the awareness of the contents of the self, and since the awareness is non-interfering, it could be described as an automatic process of detachment. In other words, in some way, we are shedding the contents of the self from ourselves.

Limitations: This freedom may be just momentary. You may fall headlong into a thought or an experience and react to objects of these as though they are currently happening. In other words, the attachments reassert themselves. You may have to go through the process again and again and release may only be momentary.

So the relief and release you obtain in meditation is relative and temporary. Don’t expect any permanent changes. The conditioning that generates the attachments may be too deep and perhaps even beyond the reach of your consciousness. And meditation may not be able to uproot these conditionings. You may have to accept meditation at that level; but it doesn’t mean it’s useless.

Relaxation is similar. To the degree that you are able to let things happen or go, you are able to relax. Or you might say, your ability to relax physically in the face of the various attachments or hang-ups that show up in consciousness is indeed what enables you to become released (detached) from them. This only shows that body and mind are not really two separate entities, but two aspects of the same entity (whatever that is – see my article on the mind-body problem on this blog).

You can re-invoke this consciousness by consciously letting go everything, even if it be for just a moment. The process can be progressive shorter, telescoping a whole lot of previous self-knowledge in just a moment, as it were. But then you are back again in the thought-game.

The primary reason why release of this sort is only relative and temporary is that underneath all conscious activity is a holding on to existence which is essential to the survival of the self, self in the psychological sense. The survival appears as physical survival – after all, the psychological is only a mental extension (or abstraction, if you will) of physical survival (that’s how it appears to the self). This holding on manifests itself as fear of death, of old age, of disease and most of all of pain, as well as the contrary side of seeking continuity through pleasure seeking (the opposite of avoiding pain. We can fool ourselves that we are totally free from all this holding, but when it comes to brass-tacks we fall headlong into these whenever the opportunity presents itself when we confront objects, persons, events or situations in life and in the world.

This is the reason why I say there is a radical difference between this relative freedom and total liberation where you are free from the will to live, free from the attachment to living or the negative attachment (fear of) to death, pain, disease and old age. You could only witness rarely among human beings. I could see that in UG at the time when he was face to face with death. From my own perception as well as a detailed account I have read by Mahesh Bhatt who was with UG until the last moment of death, I could say UG never cared whether he lived or died, never sought medical help[1] to become free from pain or sickness, I mean after he had gone through his ‘calamity’. And to me that’s radical. I don’t know if this is indeed desirable for any of us, but I do know that this is what constitutes true liberation, if there is such a thing.

Unfortunately, it is not subject to conscious choice, since, as far as the psychological self is concerned, this is tantamount to not just psychological, but actual suicide. No wonder, UG kept saying that in order for such a thing to take place there must be ‘clinical death,’ not that you can consciously choose to do that.

Feelings of Ecstasy, Energy: Once you are momentarily free from the contents of consciousness (i.e., the ego or self), at that moment, one may feel a surge of energy flowing through the body with or without the accompanying feeling of bliss. This can be (and is often) interpreted as experience of enlightenment; but tradition warns against such feelings, they are mere feelings and as such fleeting. The consequence of such feeling may well be that the person feels unburdened, lighter and refreshed for the rest of the day, unless and until some concern, worry or obsession, stemming from the past, of course, takes over.

But this is not what traditionally what liberation is supposed to be. If you are liberated, it’s final, once and for all. That I can’t see happening through conscious meditation and I give below my reasons for it. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen at all, it just means that it can’t happen through my conscious effort and will, nor by any deliberate meditation.

Critique: To repeat, meditation is an activity of the mind, although it is geared to let the mind cease its activity. It’s a suicidal process, not instantly, but as a gradual procedure. There is always hope behind this activity that it will eventually take us to our goal, namely, being free from all mental activity and the activity of seeking goals. But that’s a contradictory process. It will not succeed.

Practicing meditation is much like believing and having faith and praying. You could say that you can eventually become free from the self by keeping on practicing meditation; just like you could say if you have enough faith you can move mountains. If you haven’t succeeded, it’s your own fault. It means you haven’t done enough. This is a tautological requirement: you have meditated enough only when you have succeeded in becoming free from the self and you will succeed only if you have meditated enough.

So, you can go around, walking around, without doing any ostensive meditation. But your awareness doesn’t go away. You are stuck. You can’t go forward and you can’t go backward. Whatever is happening within you, you are still aware.

You keep going on endless loops, get more and more frustrated, and trying in various ways not to meditate, to meditate, measure results, watch the activity of the self, get frustrated again, try to let go of that activity, let go of everything, and so on and so on.

There are times when you don’t care what happens and are merely aware, but only to fall headlong into the habit of thinking and responding to the world through the self. This is an endless activity. And there is no end to it nor is there any hope.

You feel cornered.

But that too may not be a problem, given the nature of the mind – this is bound to happen. You are now declutched and then again you are clutched.

Possible Conclusions: What possible conclusions can we arrive at so far? 1) It’s a waste of time to meditate. 2) Meditation can at best help you arrive at State Zero, a neutral state of awareness, but it cannot help you stay in it, for it is an unstable state, volatile; you are back in the automatic conditioning cycle each time you have to respond to something in the world. Not only the conditioned mechanism is brought into play, but simultaneously the dualism between the self and the world comes into the picture. You cannot but respond to the world ultimately in terms of the self and its interests. (For instance, however much you are enlightened, you are back to your prejudices (caste, race and religion), and also to feelings of inferiority and superiority, seeking power, pleasure, sex, and what not.) Of course, through meditation you can work your way back to the state of pure awareness; but you have to do it again and again. It’s an endless cyclical process. Perhaps, you can telescope the process somewhat. That’s about the best you could do.

Possibility: When by some chance the mind does cease its activity, there is no meditation, and none necessary. You just are in the mode of being, not in the mode of becoming, getting somewhere, the future inviting us, haunting us. And there is tension in our minds pulling us forward toward the future. This restlessness will not cease until we give up the goal of achieving anything, including anything like self-liberation through meditation; it will not cease until the very goal to meditate ceases to be. Then there is neither meditation, nor any need to meditate.

When all activity of the mind stops, there is a respite. You are not meditating, nor are you not meditating. I used to say in my Eastern Philosophy class that you are truly meditating only when you are free from the very need to meditate. (Just as UG would say, you are truly free when you are free from the very concern to be free.)

I don’t know if I would call this liberation. It’s not liberation, if liberation implies some kind of permanent state. There are no permanent states. There is only a constant dynamic, a dynamic in which sometimes you respond to the world through the self and at other times there is no response. You just are. Nevertheless, as I discussed above, there is a radical change in oneself which called ‘true liberation’.

Question: Exactly what brings about the anchoring (I mean being ‘hooked’ to a thought or situation once again)? It’s clear that there are times when you are not anchored (UG’s ‘declutched’ state); and at other times, you are automatically connected to the mental contents and respond to the world as though you are a self. It couldn’t just be as UG says that the situation calls for it and brings it about, because there are situations in the middle of which you can ‘drop out’, declutch yourself.

Here is an answer: My mind goes out to repeating a habit pattern; in this instance, there is the urge or thought to play a computer game. Then a counter thought presents itself of how this is part of the pattern of restlessness, the chatter of the mind, and what not. The idea says that instead of going through the activity, just drop everything. Then, the thought simply drops out, at least for the moment. There is just nothing. You can say, its pure awareness; but it’s not aware of anything. Then also a jerking (like a shiver) in the body indicating an explosion of energy.

This is followed by the urge to record the event, as this gives a specific answer to the above question. Of course, this is also a mental activity. No wonder none of this lasts, because thoughts and what is generated by thinking can only last that long.

Then moments later, there is a strong urge to play a computer game once more. I being one who doesn’t fight his temptations, yield to it. I let the urge play itself through. The strength of the urge must be the force of habit, or what we might call karma. Restlessness follows. Then again a dropping of the thought processes and so on and so on. So goes the story.

And that’s about all you can do in meditation – masturbation!

Surely, there are a lot of mental contents: the head is abuzz with them. It’s not that there is any problem with them.

The self’s agendas are not so easily understood nor dealt with. Feeling important, having power, having control and feeling that in some way that I am better than anyone whom I compare myself with is a central agenda. So is the seeking of pleasure and avoiding pain. Greed, appropriation of things and people are a third. Of course, these motivations are all just different forms of the self to continue. Hence, of course, the fear of death.

* * *

Possible Objection from UG: UG would object to this account by saying that you don’t know that you are in a state of awareness except by means of thought. So, thought must very well be present when you are aware of your awareness in order to claim that you have that awareness.

Reply: This is a debate I had with UG a long time ago. I asked him that same question, “How do you know that there is such a state as the Natural State or whatever?” (You can watch this discussion in the video “What am I Saying?”) I don’t believe he gave a satisfactory answer. The best he could come up with are these two answers: “I don’t know,” and “Life is aware of itself.”

UG is not consistent when he is asking a question about the account I have given. I am not claiming that there is knowledge when I am in the state of just being aware. I am just saying that there is awareness. The knowledge of it may come later when I start thinking about it. And you can’t say that there can be no awareness when you think of it later. The least you can say is that there is memory (or trace) of that awareness when you think about it and that you may not longer be in that state. That account does not bother me. I am not claiming that awareness is aware of itself (although I could say that) and that is turned later into knowledge.

Nevertheless, I must grant UG this much: if this awareness is only a mental state and does not last for more than a moment, it is entirely possible that it is thought-generated and that we are back to square zero. For one thing, you don’t know that it exists except by recognizing or remembering it by means of your thought process. For another, it too is a state and has its origins, time of stay and disappearance.

Objection Extended: UG’s objections can also spread to detachment and as a matter of fact any other action consciously undertaken: because they are done consciously, from his logic it should follow they are done by means of thought. Consciousness must then equal thought. For instance, you cannot consciously detach yourself from anything, especially without an ulterior motive. Just the same way, you cannot freely give anything selflessly, because that is done consciously and therefore with self-centered motivation.

* * *

Another Reason Why Meditation is Frustrating: There is another profound reason why meditation is fundamentally frustrating: Our mind, i.e., thought process, which I can also call the process of the self, is a seeking mechanism. It constantly seeks to be some other place than where we are at the moment. This tendency manifests itself in a very basic way by trying to know whatever state we are in. In our constant search for fulfillment (and permanent happiness, as UG would put it), we seek and strive for a state of unbecoming from where we don’t travel any further. This is an endless process.

Even if such a state of permanent happiness or fulfillment ever exists, we are not content merely being in that state. We want to know and cherish that we are in that state. And that’s where the seeds of becoming are sown. That very urge to know our state not only puts us outside of that state in order to cherish it, but also makes us seek further to continue or enhance or preserve that state by whatever means. This knowledge or consciousness is the curse of the human condition, because it puts us in the merry-go-round of alienating ourselves from ourselves and then again trying to unite with ourselves.

Since the urge to know or be aware of what we are or what we are experiencing is inherent in any meditation process, meditation is a fundamental failure and has to end ultimately in frustration. The ill-gotten gains are momentary!

From all this it should follow, that you have to be left with utter despair, with no hope what so ever, and nothing you can do about it either.

Alternatives? Then what are the alternatives left? Wait for the ‘Calamity’ to happen, which might never occur? Be disillusioned with the whole ‘awareness’ business and ‘jump in the lake’, or accept your fundamental state of helplessness and keep going in circles (for we are called ‘wheels!’). The end result might be shortening or telescoping the mental process one goes through to drop the motivational structure piece by piece. Or one may just keep going in the business as usual until one dies and then the story really ends! The last seems to be more likely than anything else.

Gloom and Doom! You are doomed to fail and there is no way out! As usual, UG is right! There is no way out!

* * *

P.S.: Objection from Advocates of Meditation: I hear a strong objection from the advocates of meditation: it’s not true that meditation yields mere awareness. It could lead to knowledge. There is a means of knowing which is beyond the ordinary: that’s what results in extrasensory powers, healing, knowledge of God, other lives, even atoms and their inner structure.

Here I am treading a totally unknown territory. I don’t have to deny that there are such means and types of knowledge. It’s entirely possible that meditation (or prayer) clears the way for them. But since they are not universal, we don’t know and there are no known methods of accessing or controlling them. I am sure there are some who believe that there are, but I have no answer to them. UG himself is believed to have had some of those powers, but, even if he did have them, I don’t believe they were consciously cultivated.

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[1] Except on rare occasions as when he consulted a doctor about his ‘plumbing problem’ (hiatal herinia) or when he wanted his teeth extracted by a dentist.

The Self, Meaning and the Significance of Life

The Question of Meaning or Significance of Life: My former philosophy professor who later became my friend once bemoaned the fact that in spite of carrying the Bhagavad Gita under his arm for many years he could never ‘believe’ (in religious matters). He is a well-known scholar in Indian philosophy and tradition as well as in Western philosophy and logic. I told him that he could never believe nor make himself believe because he knew too much, meaning that the knowledge prevented him from naïvely believing in anything. The knowledge would prompt him to question and doubt any belief he might entertain. The same holds true with innocence in matters of living.

The question, “What is the meaning of life?” like questions such as “Who made God?” “What was there before everything?” is a metaphysical question. It does not lend itself to any satisfactory answer, because such questions are basically paradoxes created by our reason, which is a form of thought. For instance, suppose there is some meaning to life, say, for instance, serving God or His purposes, letting alone the question of whether there is a personal God or not, one could immediately ask the question of what is God’s purpose or why should one serve God. This questioning is endless. That’s why the question has no general answer.

In order to satisfactorily answer this question, we must ask in what contexts the question of meaning of life arises. I used to point out to my students when discussing the question of meaning of life that a five year-old just doesn’t run to his or her daddy and ask him, “Daddy, daddy, what’s the meaning of life?” We don’t ask such questions when our lives are moving on smoothly. Our lives must have run into some crisis and come to a halt before we ask such a question. As UG often said, a living man never asks the question of why he should live. You don’t ask such questions until you have lost your innocence in living. You must ‘know too much’ to get to ask such questions.

Normally, when we do things, engage in various activities of life, we don’t look for any external meaning to our actions except the goals we seek. It’s natural that when we confront various frustrations in life, particularly with regard to some significant goals, be it a girlfriend or boyfriend we wanted, or a job we seek or the ill-health that we try to recover from. In striving for our goals, we make constant assessment of our status, where we are and how far we still have to go, what we have achieved and what that ‘means’ to us, and so on, by reviewing not only our present situation, but also our life, constantly and repeatedly, and the reviewing becomes a habit. It is when we face some profound failures that we tend to review our life, assess its significance and ask if there is any meaning to the whole of our life. We have to arrive at a general idea of the whole of our life, which we didn’t have earlier, (even when as young people we constantly looked forward to our future,) before we could ask such fundamental questions about life. The questioning can land us in various forms of malaise: one might lose one’s taste for life, become bored with life, and worse, become an alcoholic or workaholic, or become addicted to achievement, or become chronically depressed or even go the limits of losing one’s will to live and of committing suicide.

The solution to the problem of meaning of life lies in the sources where it was generated, viz., in the initial frustrations regarding achieving one’s basic desires or goals. In other words, the solution to the problem is in its dissolution. If we were totally engaged in living and are not separate from it, the question of what is the meaning of life would not even arise.

Fulfillment and Frustration: Built into the activity geared toward goal-seeking are ideas of time and future. We labor under an implicit assumption that the satisfaction of each goal will somehow fulfill us. The feeling of fulfillment or the feeling that our life has been fruitful could come not only from satisfaction of goals such as money, a good family, a house, a boat, power, achievement and what not, but also from religious sources: you ardently believed in God and his grace, you feel blessed and or through your devotion and piety you feel that some day your life will be blessed or you will reach the presence of God.

When the goals are reached, when we get what we want, we do feel content and satisfied, and feel fulfilled for the moment. But the matter never ends there: the very awareness of what we have achieved turns it into a further goal, at least of preserving the status quo or continuing it in time, for we once again feel we lack it or feel uncertain about it in some other fashion (we may not have it tomorrow or there is a risk that someone or something might take it away from us, and so on). When our striving process proceeds without interruption, we normally do not tend to ask fundamental questions about living or its significance. If we happen to have religious beliefs, then as long as the beliefs are strong, they tend to give us support in tiding over our frustration: this life with its travails, for instance, might be viewed as a testing ground in which God or some other power morally and spiritually prepares us for a life of blessedness.

But when we find that the goals are not achieved and frustration is the only outcome, and when we confront several such failures, we tend to believe that our lives have been a waste and we start wondering whether life itself has any meaning. We could even lose our faith in God, particularly if the shock of frustration is too great and no amount of prayer has been answered. It is not as much that we look toward a higher meaning as wondering whether there is any meaning at all that is the crux of the issue.

The flow of life has been interrupted when we ask such questions; our naiveté and involvement in the life process have left us. When the frustrations are rather fundamental, no substitutions for the goals or simple patching will put us back on track. We have lost the taste for life. The lost belief or faith can never be regained. Is there any solution to such a problem short of getting into boredom, depression, suicide, alcohol or what not?

Once the question arises, one then asks the further question of how to become free from this separation, this alienation between ourselves and our life.

As long as we are attached to goals and something outside of us to fulfill us, frustrations are inevitable and the question of meaninglessness of life must arise, as we keep insisting that not only our desires must be satisfied, but that we must have no failures and we must be permanently happy ‘without a moment of unhappiness’. The problem of meaningless of life is intimately bound with the problem of time and our own future non-existence: for we try to fulfill ourselves only because we feel we lack all the things we desire.

If we can confront our own future non-existence (i.e. death), and emptiness, then perhaps we could see the superfluous nature of our values and goals we have been seeking all our lives. We can see then all the goals and values that have hitherto given meaning to our life are dispensable. This doesn’t mean that we do not pursue goals or have desires. Living simply requires us to. But we could see the tentativeness of goals and strive for them when one needs to and not be daunted by failures. Each thing we undertake would have value only on its own merits, but not as part of a life-project or ulterior meaning; and when we don’t succeed in our endeavor, we are flexible enough to try some more or in other ways or abandon the goal and move on to other things.

Notice that we are not talking about not having goals or not enjoying or suffering the results of our actions. Of course, we will as we currently do. Suppose we come to the realization that there is no external meaning to life, and whatever we do has to have its meaning stemming from the results of the action; and further suppose, that we realize that success and failure are equally possible outcomes of every action and that when we confront failures, we let that happen and move on to a further project, even if it is retrying the earlier project and perhaps keep working at that. If we can succeed in doing that, that means we have learned to become free from the residue of the disappointment generated from the previous failure or failures.

Each failure is an invitation to revisit our goals and assess their feasibility. Each failure is also an opportunity to become aware of our attachment to things, people or situations and question it. Each failure is also an opening to our own emptiness underneath all our goals and activities.

Then we tend to live life on its own terms, and not in terms of ulterior values we have acquired here and there.

I am not saying that there is no significance to life or meaning in life; I am saying that if you don’t ask fundamental questions about living, then each little thing we do will have its own temporary and tentative meaning. The metaphysical question of whether or not there is an ultimate, exterior meaning to life doesn’t bother us anymore, because we realize that that meaning is bound up with all the goals and values that we have so far found desirable and that our self is that meaning. The loss of that self is what we have been afraid of. Once we are free from that fear, we don’t have to look for any ulterior meaning. Life is its own meaning.

Meaning and the Self:[1]The world we build for ourselves, the world of our meaning is our self. The self is meaning. The loss of meaning is the loss of self. Our thought process puts together repeatedly various situations and events that occur in our life from time to time and assign meaning and value to it. Then we feel elated or depressed, depending on the outcome of the evaluation. Meaning and value are assigned, however, in terms of one’s past experience; that’s the measuring rod and the backdrop against which things and events acquire meaning. The meaning we assign to our world is our meaning and it defines us.

Our feeling secure is bound up with our being able to find meaning in our lives. The mind constantly tries to impose structure on any given situation. One has to find a place for oneself in the scheme of things and see how one measures up in relation to it. Not being able to do so makes one insecure, because the situation then is seen as fraught with uncertainty and one wouldn’t know where one is.

Boredom: One of the opposites of a meaningful life is boredom. If things are not interesting or meaningful, then we are bored. We constantly labor under the opposites of ‘boring’ and ‘interesting’ when we confront situations. What’s interesting and what is not are determined, of course, on the basis of comparing the current situation, action, idea, thought, conversation or whatever, with what we have experienced in our past as more or less interesting or meaningful than this. The ability of not looking for meaning in life is the ability to confront situations not on the basis of such comparisons, but just as themselves – i.e., neither interesting nor boring. You just do them because either you have to, or that’s what’s in your way. Everything you confront has its own interest.

Loneliness: One of the consequences of meaninglessness, particularly that stemming from frustrations in love, is the problem of loneliness. Unless you are, once again, comparing the present situation as lacking something you wanted, there is no room for isolation or loneliness. The world is filled with things and people – they all keep us company. You don’t get lost in them nor do you feel isolated.

Depression: Depression is another one of the consequences. Depression is considered as a malaise. Unless it is generated from some physical condition (such as gloomy weather) or chemical imbalance, it is always in relation to something we have been missing or frustrated about. Depression is a withdrawal response. You don’t reach out any more as you were frustrated earlier. Your energies, as it were, are turned inward. And depression is inevitable as long as you are still hooked to the person or thing you have been attached to and you can’t, for some reason or other, continue to strive for it. If and when you could let the person or thing go, then depression drops itself out of you “like a handkerchief from your pocket.”

Fear and Worrying about Future: We are not only proud of our past achievements, we also worry about our future – what will happen to our money, fortunes, job, health, family, house and so on. The worry is created by the thought process which also creates our future. We constantly live in hope and yet when there is some doubt about the future outcome we worry about it. The meaning structure, i.e. the self, is constantly at risk. We feel threatened. As long as you think about your future, you must worry. The mind is constantly calculating possibilities, measuring one’s progress against them and responding to them through worry and hope. We will never be free from one (fear) without being free from the other (hope). To be able to become free from both requires an overhaul our system -- our values and cherished desires. Worry is a form of fear. We cannot be free from fear until we take it all the way to its limits and accept the worst possible outcome. If we could ever get to do that, that would generate the possible required disillusionment with our desires and goals. Thus we become free from our attachments.

In the final analysis, the question of meaning in life as a blanket question is tantamount to the preparedness to let go of one’s set of values and meanings that one has acquired in the past, and that means the same as losing one self. By facing one’s annihilation, one is able to break up this total meaning structure into pieces. Then, perhaps, one is able to live without having to have an overall meaning, each life situation or event having a meaning in its own terms: I am currently writing, for instance, because there was some occasion in my previous writing where this sort of question arose, or someone raised a question regarding this. Once I finish writing this piece, its purpose is served and I move on to other things. I don’t have to have this contribute to my overall meaning of life, nor do I have to feel disappointed if people criticize it or do not understand it or agree with it. That’s their problem, not mine. As to the question of why I write at all, the answer is simply for lack of anything better to do. It is, as a matter of fact, one among the many things I do in my day-to-day life, some necessary for living or survival and some totally gratuitous. How else could it be? I can’t, at my age, make myself believe in some artificial or religious goal and go about assigning meaning to my life on its basis. But I have no disappointment in my life either. Life is what it is. You just live as best as you can, and then you go!

I know all this sounds totally counter-commonsensical and absurd as we are all so used to living on the basis of a set of values to which we feel so committed and attached. We feel that there is no point of living without such a basis (I can hear a resounding response, “Then why live?” in my ears!) This is just one possible analysis and solution and it may or may not appeal to you.

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[1] I wrote about this in my previous article, but it can bear some repetition in the present context.