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.
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