Tag: happiness

Left Brain / Right Brain

I recently read a quote that goes “Enlightenment is not about learning but it is all about unlearning”. I thought that is such a profound statement. So today, let’s try and figure out what it is that we need to unlearn to develop lasting inner peace.

My brother and I had this discussion a few years ago. We both agreed that “Bhola Ne Bhagwan Jaldi Male”. Loosely translated, simple people get to Nirvana faster. There is a lot of truth in this. If you think about it, all we are saying when someone is simple is that they are right-brain dominated. They tend to have an artistic streak but more importantly, they focus on life’s little pleasures. They are at peace with themselves most of the time. They are not out there trying to prove anything to anyone. When you are happy, inner peace naturally comes to you.

So how do we get to a point where a lot of people in the Western world lost their ability to connect with their right brain? I have a theory. I believe that from an early age, we put so much emphasis on left-brain activities for children. Our linguistics controls are in our left brain. So does the ability to do Math. The area that keeps us organized is right in the center of our left brain and of course, the logic that we put so much emphasis on also is on the left side of the brain. As a result, we as a society have put undue emphasis on the dominance of the left brain.

What we learn to be successful in daily life actually gets in the way of our inner happiness. We learn about how to be “clever”, how to out-negotiate someone, how to push buttons to get our ways, and so on. All of these things give us some degree of material success and allow us to make “progress”. However, all of these skills increase our inner chatter. This inner chatter keeps us on the toe and keeps us always on the go. Which in turn prevents us from reaching true lasting happiness.

All of us have this potential for lasting inner peace. However, these so-called life skills are like layers of dust on the nugget of happiness. The dust layers are so thick that we don’t even know what the nugget looks like anymore. This is what the quote means when we talk about enlightenment is about unlearning.

So how do we remove this dirt from our inherently peaceful nature you ask? Well, the first thing to do is recognize. Once you realize that we need to unlearn some of these, it is then a matter of getting to work in a step-by-step fashion. We can begin with keeping an eye out for our inner chatter. Our mind keeps going all the time thinking of all kinds of things. It plays and replays things that happened in the past. It makes up stories about what may happen in the future. I recently read the book “My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Taylor. This is an interesting story. Dr. Taylor is a neuroanatomist. I didn’t know the word until I read the book quite frankly. Essentially, she studies brain-behavior for a living. At the age of 37, she had a devastating stroke. He left-brain hemorrhaged and as a result, she could not read, write, speak, hear, see for a long time. It took her eight years to recover believe it or not. In her book, Dr. Taylor says something interesting. She says our inner chatter has very little basis in fact. It makes up all the stories based on the previous history that is most convenient at the time.

My question to you is if our inner chatter is all made up, why are we listening to it anyway. Do me a favor, keep an eye out for where your inner chatter takes you for the next day or so. You will realize that it mostly wants to take you on a ride that is not useful anyway. So when you do catch yourself with this inner chat, bring yourself back. Just think about a happy incident that happened recently. Or, listen to music or start doing some arts and crafts. Point is, bring yourself to the present moment. Every week, when we meditate we talk about how the present moment is peaceful and how that allows us to have the next peaceful moment and so on. So if we are aware of our inner chat, it will allow us to bring ourselves back to the present moment. I hope this makes sense and we all start paying attention to the right side of our brain just a little more than we have been.

Instant Happiness

We live in the age of instant gratification. So I thought I would offer you an instant gratification version of meditation today! We have talked about happiness on and off here for the past year. I have talked about how real happiness comes from within and that outer problems should not affect our inner happiness. On one level all of you have told me that it makes sense but difficult to grasp. Today, I want to prove to you that real happiness is within us. We will do a meditation known as transfer of enjoyment meditation to show this.

Before we do that though, let’s talk about how many of us can say we are really happy all the time? Forget all the time, how many of you were truly happy meaning no delusions – no anger, attachment, hatred, upset, hurt feeling, jealousy, and so forth for a full 24 hour period? Hardly any one of us can say we have been truly happy for a straight 24 hour period. It certainly comes and goes. We are happy for a while and all of a sudden, our mind starts to wonder and gets to a negative place, and poof, it destroys our happiness. So why is that? If we are on a vacation, we should be free from all worries. But even on vacation, something disturbs our peace of mind. Geshe Kelsang says in the book How to Transform Your Life, “Inner peace, or mental peace, is the source of all our happiness. Although all living beings have the same basic wish to be happy all the time, very few people understand the real causes of happiness. We usually believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result, we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring them. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we will see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.”

This is similar to what I mentioned earlier. When we are on vacation and if something sets us off, we are no longer happy. So, it is certainly not our surroundings that make us happy. I think we can say for sure that everyone wants to be happy. No exceptions. Have you met anyone that does not want to be happy all the time? Their definition of happiness may be different but they all want to be happy –  free from suffering. If all of us have the same desire to be happy, happiness should be not as elusive as it has been. The reason for this elusiveness is that we are looking for our happiness in the wrong places. Some people look for happiness in food, money, travel, sex, drugs, big houses, fancy cars, and so on. None of that can give us permanent happiness. We are told early in life that you achieve a certain career goal, get married, have kids and happiness will follow. Well, the divorce rate tells us that is not true! We have turned this whole thing backward. Rather than being happy with the journey, we are teaching kids to look for a destination. This in turn creates unreasonable expectations as kids are growing up and sets up them for a lifetime of unhappiness. Happiness is a state of mind. If we develop a positive state of mind, we will naturally be happy. This is what we need to train ourselves into. Fortunately, there is a shortcut to this process called Transfer of Enjoyment meditation. This meditation is a doorway into this practice of getting our mind to a happy state in an instant. It is however not the be-all and end-all. Initially, it is a good practice to use this meditation until we get to a point where we can get into a happy state of mind on demand. Without needing any external stimulus.

This Precious Human Life

Today let’s talk about a topic one of the most basic concepts in all of spirituality. Our precious human life. Someone asked Buddha how precious is this human life. He had an interesting answer. He said imagine there is a blind turtle in the vast ocean. We all know how deep and cast the ocean is. Now in this ocean, there is a golden ring floating around. Our blind turtle is swimming deep in the ocean. What the chances of this blind turtle coming out and get his head in the golden ring when he comes on the surface? Think about it. There must be billions to one or some crazy odds like that for it to happen.

There are theories as to how rare human life is and one theory is that we get a human life once in a hundred thousand years on average. Does not mean one cannot have back-to-back human lives but in general, it is as rare as once in a hundred thousand years.

So now that we know that how rare an occasion this is let’s look at what makes it so special and what to do with it. A human being has an opportunity to work towards the liberation and even enlightenment. An animal does not have that opportunity because they are not capable of learning and practicing Dharma. Only human beings have the opportunity to engage in spirituality which leads to lasting happiness. This is what makes human life precious.

Another way to look at this is to realize that there are more than 7 billion human beings on this planet. Every one of us gets one life and that’s all. No matter who you are – rich, poor, powerful, layman, religious authority, nonreligious person – it does not matter. Each person gets one shot at this life. You are no different than Jeff Bezos in that sense. Steve Jobs tried everything in his power including a liver transplant but in the end, he could not buy more time. You can buy many cars, houses, all kinds of material things but you cannot buy another life. So once this human life is over, it would be very difficult to find another human life so that makes it a rare occurrence.

Now that we understand how rare and precious opportunity we have, we must make the most of it. It means we use this human life to advance our spiritual practice. Get one step closer to liberation and even enlightenment. This makes life very meaningful.

Nearly 150,000 people die on a daily basis in this world (maybe a little more during COVID). To quote His Holiness Dalai Lama:

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I’m not going to waste it, I’m going to use all my energies to develop myself. To expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I’m going to have kind thoughts toward others, I’m not going to get angry, or think badly about others, I’m going to benefit others as much as I can.”

Sadhguru tells his followers to put an alarm every hour when they are awake and when the alarm goes off, just say I am still alive.

Can you imagine how it will affect our daily lives and decision-making process? I am sure once we start appreciating our human life, we will stop wasting a lot of time. We will begin to let go of little things and focus on what matters.

Our Daily Problems

When you think about our daily problems, they fall into two categories: outer problems and inner problems. If we understand the difference between outer problems and inner problems, we can begin to look at a solution for a peaceful life. Let’s take some examples. Say our car breaks down. Some people get really anxious when their car breaks down – creating an inner problem. This is a result of a strong attachment towards an object. We have so much attachment towards our things that we begin to identify with our possessions. When a car breaks down, it can be fixed by a skilled mechanic. It just needs the right person to fix it. However, when we begin to get unhappy because of the breakdown of the car, no one can fix that. We are the only ones responsible for our inner happiness. If we control our mind and realize that car is an inanimate object. It has no feelings, so it has no problems as such. Yes, it is broken but by itself, it has no problems. It cannot express its disappointment. It is completely an outer problem. On the other hand, if we look at the breaking down of a car objectively, take it to the right shop to get fixed and not let it disturb our inner peace, we will come out ahead.

Let’s take another example of our body which is much closer to ourselves than an external object or a situation. Now, this is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people because all of our lives, we have identified our body as I. Let’s say we get diagnosed with a disease. Getting a disease or hurting our body is an inner problem most of you will argue. But it is actually our body’s problem. We have this strong attachment to our bodies that makes us think that we are our bodies. We believe our pain comes from our body, but the body cannot feel pain without the mind. The body is also an inanimate object just like our car. You may have heard stories of Indian yogis who let their Doctors perform surgery on them without anesthesia. These yogis do not feel any pain because they have overcome their self-grasping and understand that they are not their body. We, on the other hand, grasp our bodies a little too tight!

If we let that outer problem affect us internally, it affects our happiness creating an inner problem. Our unpleasant feelings are the result of our mind. They are arising out of uncontrolled desires or attachment, anger, and self-grasping. What do I mean by that? When we become upset about an external object such as a car breaking down, surely, we are responding to our attachment to our car or our attachment towards a meeting we are headed to and so forth. It is certainly our attachment that is driving these feelings. If we learn to objectively separate our attachment, we will not get angry and we will be able to maintain our inner peace. For example, I was in a car accident a few years ago. I hit a car in front of me on a highway. I walked out asked the other driver to make sure he was fine. And then knowing he was fine, I apologized to him and he said it’s just the car! What a beautiful way to look at it. I am sure he had somewhere to be and was delayed because of me. He knew the car was going to be fixed by insurance. He did not let an outer problem affect his inner peace. How many of us can remain peaceful like that? That is what keeps our inner happiness.

It is never too late to start controlling our minds. If we make a determination that we will not let outer problems disturb us, we should be able to make a habit – remember, it takes 21 days to make a habit.

How much is enough?

Let’s talk about contentment today. Have you ever thought about how much is enough? If you think about every one of us doing better than where we thought we would be. Even then we are on this race for more. We want just a little bit more. More money, more prestige, more pizza, more travel, more TV, more computer game, and whatnot. Have we ever contemplated how much is enough? We must realize that it is a moving target. I remember when I was in college, they used to pay me a $900 per month stipend and tuition waiver. I thought I was on top of my world! Not only I was driving a brand new car but had some money left over at the end of the month. Fast forward 30 years and $900 may not cover a day on occasion. So what happened? We kept wanting more and as we received more, our needs kept increasing. This is what we need to realize. There is never enough unless you are content within yourself. I have everything that I need at this moment. You may have heard the story of a Mexican fisherman. A wall street executive takes a vacation in a small town in Mexico. He notices that fishermen go out every morning and return with fish by early afternoon. They cook the fish and then have beer and dance the night out. This was their daily routine. Wall Street guy sits down the fisherman and says you know I can make you big. He says how so? Wall Street guy says we can get you a loan to get a couple of boats where you can catch more fish and sell it to the town next door. Fisherman asks what next? He replies well then we buy some more boats and sell the fish to the City. Fisherman asks then what? He says then we buy a fleet of 100+ boats and make you the biggest fishing operation in Mexico. Fisherman asks then what? He says then we do an IPO and you cash out and retire. The fisherman asks what was next? Wall Street guy says then you can retire in a small town and wake when you want, go to sea catch some fish, have a beer, and party the night out. The fisherman says I am already doing it! So you see sometimes what we are chasing is right in front of us. Just with a little bit of contentment, we can get what we want without chasing for it.

So in meditation today, we will settle down in our hearts. Then we will contemplate do we really need more? After contemplation, we will make a determination I am where I am supposed to be. I have what I need for this moment. We will than hold that determination.