Edward’s Diary Entry 73 – Virtue 26. Aversion to Praise/Absence of Overweening Pride (Atimanita) - Why so vain?

Pride, me, ego, vanity, haughtiness, caring for self too much, looking for praise and appreciation…

Carly Simon was right – the song is always about “him”, always about “me”. “I’m the protagonist, the hero, I take and take, I never give…” Although "You're So Vain" hit No. 1 on the charts in 1972 and sold over a million copies in the US alone, what the song actually did was spark off gossip arguments about “who this guy really was”. Too bad. Maybe it was Mick Jagger, maybe Warren Beatty. That’s not the point. It’s about ALL men, and sorry, ladies, ALL women, too, because it’s about ALL human beings who haven’t become enlightened already! So what’s the big deal about being vain?

Overweening pride (note: overweening or excessive) misplaces the focus on a fictional entity called the “ego”. You worry about your clothes and how they look – what about your heart? You’re concerned about your possessions – if a war breaks out, you may lose all of them. You harp about your good looks – some girls like Shania Twain aren’t impressed! You think you’re really smart – if you’re shipwrecked on a tiny island how would you survive? The thing is that if we’re the personality type that’s so sure about life, we think we’re always right, and we are ready to protest, get upset, anxious and fight about it. If we’re the type who confesses ignorance and feels terrible about it, using self-condemnation, it comes from the same place, from the spurious ego, which is just a thought about oneself, a faint little synapse that brings back a memory. Are either of these really the way to understand oneself and the universe? Being right and proud of it? Or feeling wrong and sad about it?

So what we do is practise “right thinking” to keep “overweening pride” in check:

I am not my body. My body comes from the earth and will return to the earth. I just inhabit it for a while. The permanence of this body, our education and our customs, prevent us from seeing the transitory nature of the body. We are too wrapped up in flesh to see that flesh eventually turns to dust. We lack sufficient #SelfAwareness to see this. For example, we might observe this when unpacking a steak from the butcher’s…but no, we are too busy being hungry to see that!

I am not my feelings. My feelings come and go and often I have no control over them. Sometimes I experience upset, sometimes joy. They seem not to depend so much on me as on my circumstances: what happens around me, what people do, whether someone treats me nicely or not! And these feelings are normally initiated by wrong thoughts...

I am not my thoughts. If I sit quietly I see them coming and going, sometimes quite aimlessly, provoked by bodily sensations, splashes of memory, external stimuli like sounds and sights and smells, etc. If I try to direct my thoughts, I find it sometimes difficult, as they tend to go on by themselves and suddenly I find I am not directing them anymore, but have wandered off somewhere else. Instead of finding out why this happens, I just get back on track and don’t think about it. That’s what one Master called the buffering effect. We are blind to our blindness.

Am I my “I”? When I try to pinpoint this “I”, and observe it, I cannot find it. It’s like trying to see my eyes with my own eyes. It’s impossible. It is the “I” that is doing the observing, so how can the “I” see the “I”? I need another faculty or power to be able to see the “I”, because the “I” is more me than what I see with my “I”.

So, in view of this, there is no real evidence for such a thing as the “ego which feels pride". When “pride” appears as a feeling, it is because there has been a proud thought preceding it. The feeling may be intense, but it was sparked off by a thought. And a thought is just that – a useful or useless consumption of thinking energy, which is pretty low-grade anyway. Now the thought may have been elicited by external factors: someone speaking, TV, radio or a song, something seen or heard. Or from internal stimuli: a memory, a sensation, a bodily posture or movement.

Whether it is produced externally or internally, what happens in the mind is that the proud thought is a reaction to a human belief or conviction, produced by a human mind. For example, we see a flag which represents a country, a soccer team or a group of trained soldiers or the place where my mother lives, etc. and we think “this is mine and it is good; I feel proud of it”. We join the flock of others who believe the same thing. The trouble is that when someone else has a different belief or conviction, CONFLICT ensues. Ego has won the game and kept us separate, apart, isolated from the Oneness of the Universe! All based on a feeble human thought.

So, to stay sane and help the world, with the application of a little #SelfAwareness:

- We OBSERVE the mind’s reaction;

- We DETAIN the incipient thought involving excessive self-importance or pride;

- We ANALYSE whether this thought corresponds to some kind of reality or not (not beliefs or convictions, which are fictional products of the human mind);

- We DISCERN that no, the proud thought or feeling makes no sense, because:

1) it separates us from others, making one good and another bad;

2) it has no reality to it because it is a synaptic flash in the human mind – a mere fantasy;

3) it does me no good, as I already suspect that whatever I feel proud of is not even my doing – it has been produced by others, so why do I ascribe its worth to my own self? 

4) it does others no good, because it isolates them from their fellow men and women, and perpetrates the fiction that one thought is good and another thought is bad. And this creates war between humans, not peace.

And so we see that excess pride fouls the mindstuff, causes separation and leads to conflict between humans. 

And this, for the time being, winds up the #Virtues (begun Monday, 4 January 2016) and the Virtues studied backwards as vices (started Friday, 6 May 2016), till today’s date. I hope the journey has been worthwhile for you.

Edward’s Diary Entry 72 – Virtue 25. Absence of Malice/Hatred (Adroha) / Why hate?

Hatred, loathing, maliciousness, spite, resentment, cruelty, envy

Of all the most ridiculous of human thoughts, “I hate you!” takes the cake. Only mankind is capable of stooping this low. A cheetah speeding after her prey does not hate; she is hungry. A wasp stinging an unwary human who has stepped on its nest does not hate; it is protecting its life. A dog wringing an unalert woodchuck by the neck does not hate; it is acting on its hunting instinct. Hate is a distinctly human emotion, the epitome of frustration, of not getting what one wants from someone else or from life itself. When I was young I heard the following phrase, in reference to another young man, thankfully not to me: “I don’t like the way you walk; I don’t like the way you talk; I don’t like nothin’ about you. I hate you; I hate you!”

It was total frustration that brought this on. The young man in question wasn’t acting very pleasantly, to say the least, but the hater was simply freaked out and couldn’t control himself, and gave way to a spluttering rage. Not a nice thing to keep inside, but it’s an even worse thing to express to another human being, or to witness.

I bet you a 50 bucks that if a young child were never exposed to adult or peer hatred, malice and cruelty, the emotion of hatred simply wouldn’t occur to the kid. If a baby’s every desire is immediately satisfied up to the age of say 4 or 5, as the native American Indians used to do (crying babies would have alerted “enemies” to their position, or scare away buffalo and other game), there is no thwarting of desire and therefore no strong emotional reactions, bottoming out into rage. When the young child comes of age, control of the emotions would be taught, along with other teachings, and a much more efficient fighter, a brave, would be produced with mind and emotions under control, not raging furiously out of control and losing important survival faculties like awareness, alertness, skill and technique. If you’re going to kill, kill efficiently and skilfully; you can’t kill well when hating or in a full-blown rage! Your survival is lessened if you lack alertness.

Well, whether I win or lose the bet (impossible to test in any case), reason tells us the following. No negative emotion is worth anything. Test it out and see. Oh yes, if you want to justify and make excuses about being “human” and “normal” just look on the web – there are thousands of justifications. Don’t get lost there. None of them take into account that we are only half human to begin with, we are fouled by society, and what we are interested in as reasonable adults striving for #SelfAwareness is the search to become wholly human.

For that we have to pose the following hate-oriented questions: Who is this “you” that supposedly hates? Don’t you “hate” one moment, get over it somehow and then “love” or at least “like” something soon afterwards? Don’t strong emotions come and go? Is it you who produces them? Or are they generated from outside and from others? Who is in control in “you”? Isn’t it that you experience a thought, saying to yourself, “I hate this”, but often times it’s just an exaggeration? Maybe it’s a strong dislike? OK, but if it is produced by circumstances, it’s not really “you” hating, is it? By “you”, I mean deep down inside, not just off the cuff. It is an idea you receive from outside. Then it rings a hate bell inside your head and the hateful thought is produced in you, then it is reinforced by emotions welling up, and it increases into a “hateful reaction”, perhaps. You have subscribed to a experience of hate, and since you can’t do anything about it, it promotes itself in you and produces an emotional outburst.

Well, what if you saw “hate” arising and didn’t subscribe to it? Can you do that? Think of something “hateful”, if you like: a terrorist or killer of some kind, of which unfortunately there are too many. Does hating a killer fix anything? Does it bring his victims back to life? Are you going to make the world a better place by hating a misguided, sub-human, spiteful person? An indoctrinated person out of touch with reality? Sure, you will want “justice”, but today most jurisprudence recognises “temporary insanity”. The trouble is they don’t go far enough, because I say that anyone who kills intentionally is nuts, crazy, insane, misguided, sick and is in dire need of a cure. Is killing the cure? Angela Merkel, after the attempted coup in Turkey, says it isn’t. The EU prides itself on having no death penalty. Unfortunately, we are all blind to our bad sides, and the EU at the same time is the third largest arms manufacturer in the world (increasing sales (um, to whom?) from US$18bn in 2002 to US$25bn in 2010). The EU has its member states engage in wars and, to put it bluntly but truthfully, the EU kills people* (but of course not through the judicial system). But this eye-opener should be used on ourselves: we are also often blind to our faults, our contradictions, our say-one-thing-and-do-another. Let’s learn from it.

So hate does not cure anything. It does the object of hatred no good. It does the hater no good either. Hate enough and fly into a rage and you can get a heart attack and die. So why do we insist on using a negative emotion to achieve anything positive? I think it’s because we’re out of control. And thinking wrong. That’s the only reason for hate. So the solution is get into control and think right. That’s the cure. Oh, and by the way, don’t listen to Shirley Bassey’s “I Hate You Then I LoveYou” or other more modern versions too often!

Hatred is a foul thought about someone else being wrong, nasty, belligerent, cruel. In this world, the things we call “bad” aren’t going to go away by themselves. The things we call “bad” are in us and in others. Remove them from “us”, ie, from your mind, and you’re helping others and contributing to a better world. That’s the only way it’s going to happen. Most hatred is because of a “wrong thought”. I have a conviction about a religion, a policy, a group of people, a nation, a flag, or any other symbol used by humans to classify things, and others have a different conviction and kick up a fuss. So I hate them because they’re wrong, bad, far away, or too near. And they hate me for the same or dissimilar reasons. It’s all about labelling. The untrained, conditioned mind labels all too quickly, and higher human nature flies out the window.

Don’t let it happen to you. Recognise truth, keep your mind pure, realise that others who hate can’t help it. They need better examples amongst us to be able to cure themselves. Only you can be that example.

* Source: http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/politics/article/war-made-in-the-eu.html

Edward’s Diary Entry 71 – #Virtue 24. Chastity (Saucam) / What do do about vulgarity?

Foul thoughts, smuttiness, impropriety, indecency, immodesty, lack of consideration for others. 

Humans without much #SelfAwareness simply have to be vulgar. There’s not much choice. In a low state of consciousness (identification with current society’s ideas, concepts, ideologies and one’s own fictitious appraisals of one’s self-worth) there are a multitude, a crowd, a throng of conflicting thoughts and impulses, all very confused and common, which, you will notice, is exactly the etymology of “vulgus”, meaning the common people. 

Now “common people” are still “People”. Even if they are the greatest of so-called “sinners”, we are still all human beings and deserve our measure of respect. It is often not even our fault that we are indecent, smutty and lacking consideration and harbouring foul thoughts towards others. Were we educated in the Virtues? Were we given a set of values by example? Did we have good fathers and mothers, a good home? Did we have teachers who inspired us? Was our local habitat conducive to good behaviour and right thinking? Was our society enlightened, or at least somewhat illustrated? Well, there’s the answer then. We weren’t even given a chance. It is “society’s fault”, because we were never exposed to anything potentially sattwic, wise, cultured or virtuous. On the contrary, we grew up with TV violence, Gameboy killing, constricted local values, lack of respect, or even contempt for others, gender issues, racial issues and all the other examples of “me and mine first – the rest can go to h*ll”.

Vulgarity is the nature of the bulk of society. It becomes part of our personalities and this is the part that must be analysed, reviewed and overcome in later years. There’s no other way. It’s a cleaning operation (Saucam) that has to done, like Gandhi’s cleanliness being next to godliness (shown in the photo). We accidentally fall into a social milieu and have to fight against it to grow. Everyone has to do it today. When mankind finally finished ancient hero-worship (prehistory to around 550 BC), in which the common man was considered useful as a slave only, and the Christian and Humanist age began (with Socrates, Lao Tzu and Confucius), we were given a new message: everyone had worth, everyone has a soul, everyone can be saved, etc. and with this, we started becoming responsible for our own minds and souls. Before that, it was nowhere like today, and only kings, heroes and pharaohs were worth saving, not the common people. 

Now, in the New Age, the age of Synergy, we – as commoners – are asked to overcome societal vulgarity. We are asked to unite with the universe, not with the culture we were born into. We have been given responsibility – too much even – and we have no choice but to exercise it, however badly. If we don’t, Nature will take care of us by causing a fall in our current unsustainable civilisation where raping the Earth is no longer possible. That’s why a Virtue like #Chastity is required. Cleansing the mind is imperative, because it is the mind of man that has, along with all the good things, erroneously created a world of suffering, poverty, killing, craziness and absurdity. 

So, by all means learn from and enjoy your culture, but never swear by it. That’s simply vulgar. We overcome vulgarity by applying #Virtue 1, Purity of Heart, and #Virtue 7 Studiousness, #Virtue 11 Truthfulness, #Virtue 19 Sense of Shame in Doing Evil Actions, etc. Our #SelfAwareness is what makes us truly human, not our cultural identities.

Cave Series 5: Echoing walls…for #GuruPurnima on July 19th

It’s getting hot and stuffy in this cave. I can’t see anything. It’s all dark. I know there’s a sun out there somewhere, but I can’t see its light. I can see a moon in my mind’s eye, but there’s no reflection on the walls from that either. It’s July 19th and I know many people are celebrating #GuruPurnima. I didn’t know what that meant a year ago. But I’ve heard it echoing off the walls this year. A year ago I made my decisions, I set up a plan, I sat down and waited, I adapted and modified exercises, I remained patient, I took up new practises, I changed old ones, I added to them and made them more difficult. I recently followed a reasonable whim and started additional work on the body. I am not young, but I stretch and strain with young people 3 mornings a week at 7am. I always start the day with a ritual, and then I have at least 3 more hours of rituals to do throughout the day. I don’t walk without my own chant. I don’t breathe without, mostly, realising it's a miracle. But I am all alone in this cave. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. Everything is just fine inside and outside. I am happy, I know joy. It comes from deep down inside. What if I am alone in this cave and can see nothing? Not to worry, there are no walls on Earth or on the Moon than can keep me from finding That, from finding It, from being what I am meant to Be, and maybe already Am, even if "I" don’t know it yet…

Edward’s Diary Entry 70 – #Virtue 23 Endurance (Dhrti): / What if you can’t grin and bear it?

Wimpiness, weakness, lack of strength, short wick, quick to give up, easily angered and upset…

With no cultivation of a realistic mental attitude, there is little or no forbearance or endurance. A realistic mindset involves a degree of #SelfAwareness. We see the world, we see how our minds work, and we strive for proper order in the way we perceive, think, feel and act.

- Say you perceive you are haunted by fears. What you do is you go out of your way to correct these by applying #Fearlessness, after asking “where do these fears come from?” From lack of realistic thinking. Think realistically then, and fear subsides.

- You are affected by someone’s unpleasantness, resentment, negativity. You consciously rectify this by applying #Purity in your own mind and recognising that only your ego is adversely affected, not you, really. The unpleasant person is suffering unconsciously. Seeing this, you remain unaffected.

- Maybe your body feels lazy and wants to lie in bed instead of getting up and going to a yoga class. You force it to comply with your decision, practising #Perseverance, as every decision taken and then broken continues the chain of weak will we are trying to overcome.

- You observe a tendency to keep something for yourself instead of giving it to another, so you place the Virtue of #Charity before your mind’s eye and give instead of grasping.

These are just four examples. All problems are solved in this way, one after another, from Virtue 5 to 26. The so-called “external” problems are solved in the same way as well. War? Humans practise war due to their dysfunctional minds. Make yours functional and you prevent war. Hunger and famine? Humans permit this due to their dysfunctional minds. Align yours with reality and you combat hunger. Sickness and disease? Things that are made have to decompose at some time, it’s part of Nature’s recycling. We humans make things worse by our non-integration with Nature, our non-understanding of Nature. So we should be more natural and practise Virtues. If disease eventually comes, we accept it and learn to live or die with it. Nothing lasts forever. The body must return to the Earth. Social discrimination? Humans do this because their minds are dysfunctional. You practise the Virtues, and treat all others at least as well as you treat yourself, that’s the only way you can help. Mistreatment of animals? Humans do this because their minds are dysfunctional. Practise the Virtues and show compassion towards all living creatures. Etc. etc.

No, wait. I have “internal” problems like stress, anxiety, tension. I worry, I feel bad, I don’t know what to do, I’m in a mess. Sorry, there is no such thing as “stress” or “anxiety”. It’s just your imagination running wild. Who controls you? Your “imagination” or “You”? We all have to grow up one day, and recognising the stupidity of "stress" is part of moving forward consciously in our lives. The normal process is that one thought leads to another, the chain cannot be broken or stopped, thoughts produce feelings and trigger reactions in the body. All this builds up and causes havoc. So we take to drink, drugs, entertainment or other forms of assuaging or calming the mind, with the mistaken idea that we can “control” thoughts this way. But the procession continues inside, the river keeps flowing, and since we have no control over the thought process, and remain stuck in our tiny, relative, self-made worlds, where everything is blown out of all proportion due to the self-protection mechanism and self-centred viewpoint of the ego, we eventually wind up with a break-down, a heart attack, a depression or simply slide into lethargy, curl up and die like a sick dog. Stress means you are punishing yourself because you don’t know how to stop the erroneous thinking process occurring within you. Re-align the mind with realistic thinking. Then there is no stress. If you think there is, describe the situation and let’s deal with it here, in public.

So we respond to weakness with strength and endurance; to wimpiness with courage; to impatience with considered reasoning and determination; to anger with tranquillity and calmness of mind; to upset with the understanding that others may be misguided and can’t help it, but we can. Because we apply forbearance and endurance with skill.

Edward’s Diary Entry 69 – Virtue 22 Forgiveness (Kshama): / What to do about grudges?

Vengeance, revenge, retribution, settling of scores, punishment, getting even…

I am familiar with a business that was managed by an employee who betrayed the trust of the owner and stole large quantities of money before he was eventually found out and dismissed, then moving on to a second concern and actually doing the same in even less time than before, being caught there too. Some employees at the first place were in cahoots with him, others stood up to him, and one who did was dismissed before the truth was found out… The owner of the business is a person who is familiar with the Virtues, and after lengthy legal battles, a decline in business, quite a few queries from clients, and doubts and frowns and criticisms, etc., eventually the whole thing settled down and started flowing more smoothly. There were many calls for vengeance, chastisement, having the thief beaten up, and similar suggestions for behaving in a way which, according to the owner, would have been tantamount to the original bad behaviour of the thief in question.

So the owner gave a lesson in patience, charitableness, faith in human goodness, and non-violence, and an actual prohibition was given not to harm this thief in any way – life would take care of him in due course. It was not necessary for anyone to soil their hands meting out so-called “justice”. Wrongdoing cannot be corrected by more wrongdoing even if it’s done in the name of righteousness. Your own karma is affected if instead of doing right, you do wrong, or vikarma.

Some people find it very difficult to understand why personal revenge cannot be taken. “If we beat him to a pulp, he will learn not to do this again!” Well, no, hitting someone may induce fear, but it is not going to change the wrongdoer’s mindset. It’s no use arguing about it. Either you choose to do right action, or you don’t. You have to see what it does to the mind to understand the application of violence and pandering to the inbred desire for a vendetta.

Once you see this and understand it, there are no grudges, no bad feelings, no oozing wounds requiring some kind of misdemeanour. Vindictiveness is nipped in the bud. A thief is a thief. He’s simply a person who ignores the boundaries between “mine” and “yours”. He is protecting his own economic security without realising that his actions are wrong. He justifies his actions to himself as being good for him. He is blind to his action as being wrong or unjust to the person he is stealing from. It is him first. His family first. His desires first. Others simply don’t matter.

If we look carefully, we will see that we all perpetrate this in some way, unless there is sufficient Self-Awareness to counteract it. We want our desires to be fulfilled, and when they aren’t, we get upset. We want our loved ones to be protected. We want our friends, families, tribes, clans, nations, religions, creeds, and so on, to be first – not those of others. We protect our egos, our personalities, our sense of self. It is the way society has taught us to act. Survival of the fittest means “me first, you later, if at all!”, and only certain social norms are supposed to counteract the meanest of our human desires. We pursue ego, but if we are somewhat cultured, we try to cater to this ego in a “politically correct” way. The uncultured just do what their crude desires tell them to.

So when we see this, and truly understand it, we immediately forgive those who have trespassed against us. Or don’t even blame them. They are us, we are them. The truly intelligent apply Kshama, forgiveness, and endure so-called “bad” behaviour with patience. “Bad” behaviour is totally relative. The wrongdoers cannot help it. Society made them that way, and they haven’t started working on their own self-development yet. They are still immature, unconscious, child-like.

What’s the solution? First, change yourself, by which you contribute to a change in society, and then as society (a larger number of people) continues to teach its unconscious lessons, the damage will eventually be lower… It may sound long and drawn out. But it starts with you and me. Or do you think that from what we know of history in the past 3000 years, punishment, home-baked settling of scores, or even nation-state retaliation actually makes humans better? 

World Population Day - July 11th

Yes, it's an official UN awareness day. Concerned people everywhere talk about it. Since we now have the technology and the information, we can watch as worldometers clocks up new net births at the rate of about 2.8 people per second, and today we number 7.4 BILLION. 

But... the World talks, too. If we look out of our little shells, our minds, we observe that Nature is intelligent. She has developed Life on this planet and maintains it in a beautifully functioning system. Man is not as intelligent because he is wrapped up in his opinionated world, and often acts very blindly. But, we are in the hands of Nature. And She is producing human beings at a startling rate. We have become globally conscious enough to see this, but are we able interpret it correctly?

If you have an orchard, a vineyard or a vegetable garden, you know you nurture it and tend to it and keep it healthy and productive so you can harvest all the fruits in abundance. If you live on a sheep farm, you care for your animals so they will reproduce and have lots of wool for the market and baby lambs for the slaughterhouse – twins, or better, triplets. The more the merrier.

If Nature has a planet where She has produced life, including Man and Woman – the height of creation – and they are increasing dramatically, it is because She needs all this Life for some reason, and She will deal with it in due course: reaping fruits in abundance, shearing the wool maybe, and sending the little lambs to market… Or maybe She is setting up a challenge that will finally either be faced by Man and Woman consciously and we will finally learn how to be better human beings, living at peace with one another, sharing and giving instead of taking in the name of the ego, and truly cooperating with Nature. 

Destruction and despair, or becoming a true family of humans on a speck of dust in the solar system. What is it going to be?

Edward’s Diary Entry 68 – Virtue 21 Energy / Vigour (Tejas) / What to do about dullness?

Dreariness, listlessness, lacklustre looks, indolence, lack of energy…

How to get fuel. That is the question. We follow our routines. We look forward to something just around the corner. Our routine is boring, we say. So we await something exciting in the future. And we get duller and duller to whatever we have around us. We read a nice inspiring phrase on Facebook – written by those great people who like to give us hope. For example, I follow various dead people whose quotes are still published frequently, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, Krishnamurti, even Sri Ramana Maharshi. Momentarily we perk up and say, “Oh, isn’t that nice?”, and then slip back into our dreary customs.

How do we get out? Out of what do we get? Who are we to get out of something? What is this something we have to get out of? It’s our mind. Our fixed patterns. A mind that runs in grooves, like our old vinyl record collection, and we can’t even find the diamond needle to follow the grooves round and round!

I have a set of daily practises for Self-Awareness, but if social activities have been longer than usual and sleep less than usual, I suffer the consequences. Even during practises I may slip off into lower consciousness and even fall asleep for a second. I battle with drowsiness. I get up and walk around like the Zen pupils at monasteries, every half hour. I have no Zen master to hit me with a stick if I drop off. And so I fight on and on to ward off my succubi. Where to get more tejas? How do we refuel when we are dull?

Maybe it’s the day, the phase of the moon, the cloud cover, the heat or humidity. Maybe it’s just due to a short night. But even just to do our daily activities and practises, we need more strength, more energy and vigour. There must be a battery somewhere that we can plug into. We need fuel for our capacity for attention. Attention is the mark of self-awareness; attention is the measure of our consciousness, so how do we increase attention?

While persevering – which we have to do in any case – we can effect various small changes to promote attention. We just change our routines slightly. When sitting as we are accustomed to, we can change position and place the left heel in the groin. When walking normally, we can make a few changes, like splaying our fingers to let the air in between them and notice an uplifting breeze. When intending to talk, we can remain silent, and vice versa. When looking, we can observe tiny details that we don’t normally see – like a leaf on a tree, a cloud pattern, or an insect crossing our path, anything and everything.

But I’m afraid there is no choice but to continue with our reasonable practises and duties, a ceremony here, an exercise there, and keep looking within to try and discern the details of the inner landscape. There will come a time when we will calmly see where the plug is, where the battery is, and then, yes, only then… there will be no stopping us! When one Virtue, like Tejas, seems impossible, simply apply all the others. We have made ourselves dull in decades; so it takes more than a day to spark off all our brilliance.

Edward’s Diary Entry 67 – Virtue 20. Faith in the Strength of our Higher Nature (Achapalam) / What to do about fickleness, wavering and unsteadiness?

What to do about lack of faith?

Answer: Apply Virtue 3, Perseverance. 

What more can I say at this time? I gave a complete picture of watching and waiting, and “inner joy” in discovering how higher nature can be sensed in Edward’s Diary Entry 41 –Virtue 20. 

So, when inspiration and faith are lacking, we simply persevere and remain steadfast. Firmly rooted, like this beautiful giant tree in Berlin's Tiergarten, near the Teehaus im Englischen Garten. 

Reason says “this is this” or “this is that”. Faith goes beyond Reason and asks “What is this?” and “Who am I?” and patiently waits for an answer...

Edward’s Diary Entry 66 – Virtue 19. Modesty (Hrih) / What to do about shamelessness?

Shameless, unashamed, immodest, don’t care, unconcerned, brash…

Why shame? What’s the good of feeling bad about something that has happened in the past? Can we make amends, say we’re sorry and then forget it? Yes, it’s simple. If a mistake has been made, we want to make someone else feel better by saying “sorry”, right?

Wait, we’re missing the point. When the mind is in the so-called “normal” state of unconsciousness, lacking Self-Awareness, remaining unanalysed, like Socartes’ “unexamined life not one worth living”, then shame is just an occasional thought and feeling. It comes and goes. It’s usually a thought about the past. Occasional because of the “hotchpotch-mind”. What kind of mind is that?

We did the diagram for a Spanish version of Self-Awareness. And it looks like the box below. It’s the traditional “potpourri” or “grab bag”, full of an assortment of confusing, contradictory, scrambled impulses, some of which are very humane, some very mundane:

The hotchpotch mind sees (sometimes) it has done something “wrong”, or has been told (more likely) it has done something wrong, and the thought pops up, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that, you’re right. I feel ashamed!” Whereupon, apologies are made if appropriate, and all is done. But is there an actual effect on the mind of the thinker. Is shame useful? What is it for? How does it work? In the absence of a striving to grow, shame is just like a patch placed on a pair of jeans. Doing something “wrong”, feeling momentary shame afterwards and apologising for it does not change the structure or content of the mind. It may very well please someone else, and make them feel better, which is good, but no fundamental change comes about in the mind of the person momentarily feeling shame. It can’t. All fundamental change only comes with greater Self-Awareness.

Greater Self-Awareness facilitates the ordering of the mental structure. But Self-Awareness starts with separation. If you are completely identified with your mind, there is little Self-Awareness unless provoked from outside. To see how the mind operates, you have to create this initial separation, so let’s say it’s one part of the mind observing the functioning of another. As this is practised, Self-Awareness increases. The structural order that has to be created is by “seeing” – the observation of one part of the mind through the faculty of our so-called Witness or Observer – which is simply consciousness, “you”, observing the operation of the mind. And “you” see how your mind produces “thought”, “feeling”, how it receives “impulses”, how – sometimes – unexpected “joy”, “happiness” or the “tingling sensation of being alive” comes into and pervades the mind and body. So we start with this diagram:

This is “normal waking” consciousness in the best of conditions. Self-Awareness (S-A) is still separated and in its own box to the left, and thinking, feeling and bodily impulses may be more or less ordered. With no S-A, you are totally stuck and identified with either 3, 2, 1 or 0. The thought is you, and you express it or not. The feeling is you and you tell someone or not. The hunger or desire is you and you want to eat or have sex. At other times you act automatically due to a hidden or unconscious impulse which you don’t clearly recognise, but you act on it nevertheless.

(Note: the crooked line and “?” to the left indicate that consciousness itself is connected to and fuelled by an unknown source. We are not autonomous: for every piece of food we eat, air we breathe and  impressions we receive, we depend on our environment, our eco-system, and this provides the energy we require for life and experience. Consciousness also comes from a source, and many names are given to “?”. You choose your own. The name is not the thing.)

If you find the strength and power to stop identifying with every thought, feeling and impulse – by generating S-A, sensing your own presence as you use your sense organs or allow the mind to operate – then you come to this enhanced mental situation:

Here, there is more order, you are not trapped by every passing thought, feeling and impulse, because you have enhanced your S-A, and are now Socratically examining your life, observing your mental processes, filtering as many impressions as possible through the bracket or funnel of Self-Awareness. But… according to some… you start losing what you call “spontaneity”, or maybe even your “rich sparkling personality”. But here, so-called “spontaneity” or “personality” is a compendium of past conditioning, which is the content of the mind, and it may look interesting, but it jumps all over the place and there is “no one” behind such spontaneity. It is fictitious. As a normal socialised ideology-based human being, your spontaneity is not even yours. It’s society’s. And to be wise and promote human growth, we have to go beyond what parents, family, leaders, society, religions and philosophical systems have fed us with. We have to start afresh. 

And if you do, you sense that you are alive at every moment – provided remembering that you are alive is possible. S-A comes and goes, it takes energy and power, and we have little of that. We get distracted by externals, we get distracted by internal operations, we need more fuel for the fire, and sometimes we can’t find it. There are techniques for promoting it. We have to learn these. It is a struggle. But the joy that comes during and after this struggle is sometimes so intense that all suffering is worthwhile. Because you know you are alive, trembling on the brink of a different world, with power coursing through your body, your mind calm and peaceful, like after an intense mediation or yoga session.

This is where shame, Hrih, or modesty actually works. As we observe and place ourselves firmly in S-A, we see we have done something useless or even wrong. Better that we see it before we do it. That is “Hrih” in the sense of being ”fearful of engaging in useless or wrong behaviour”. Virtue 1 is Fearlessness, but this refers to not being afraid to be different or to travel uncharted courses. We should and must be “fearful” of doing the stupid things we have often done in the past. But that doesn’t always happen, so Virtue 19 allows us to “feel shame” and use this energy to see our behaviour, correct it and not allow it to happen again. Through 1) simple observation, 2) detection, and 3) elimination. Then we are on the path of karma, right action, minimising useless activity (akarma) and avoiding as far as possible harmful actions incurring retributive consequences (vikarma). 

This is not a moral thing. It is a question of being efficient and practical. If useless or harmful action causes an increase in unconscious behaviour patterns in our own mind, and is not conducive to S-A, then the consequence is a decrease in S-A, a reinforcement of the unconscious patterns, with "payment" for this having to be made at some later date, in the struggle for enhanced awareness. 

It's like ironing over creases and making them worse, instead of flattening them out first, and keeping the fabric nice and smooth. The iron is your Self-Awareness.