Self-Development

Of Attachment and Detachment

To me vairagya does not mean rejection of life and the world, but the ability to attach and detach at will. For me attachment is as important as detachment, provided that it is you who throw yourself into the ocean of life and not that you are sucked into it. Without attachment there can be no spiritual growth because there will be no experience upon which to build up your spiritual philosophy . Attachment and detachment must alternate where the attachment phase provides intense experience which is then churned during the detachment phase. The detachment phase must provide theoretical analysis of the experience gained during the attachment phase. The attachment phase must provide the raw material upon which your own personal spirituality must be built up.

I earnestly believe that this is not merely my interpretation of the Hindu scriptures, but a complete and true understanding of their spirit. Hinduism is not the denial of life but its celebration. What it teaches is not the scuttling of life, but swimming across it to go beyond it. The concept of maya is not the rejection of the world as unreal, but an emphasis that there is a greater Reality beyond this apparent reality. To go to that Ultimate Reality you must first throw yourself into the ocean of life and swim through its multifarious waters. Detachment is not standing on the shore of life, but keeping your sense of direction while swimming through it.

Meditation and Cognitive Intensification

Meditation is based on the fundamental principle that the human brain and nervous system is an electro-magnetic organ in which an extremely complex electric circuitry produces ideas and cognition of emotions etc. Therefore, when Maharishi Patanjali says “Yogah Chitta Vritti Nirodah”, the vrittis must be understood as those flows of current which must be controlled during meditation. Meditation then, essentially, is the cutting down of certain channels of electric flow so that certain other channels might be strengthened.

It is this strengthening of the wanted channels of electric flow that results in higher creativity and cognitive intensification.

The 30-70 Principle

In my experience with leading teams, I have found that it pays if you and your team spend 30% of your work-time on learning and 70% of the time on actual work.

Some questions may be raised: why 30-70 and not some other ratio? What type of learning? Etc.

The 30-70 ratio is just a gut-feeling, a sort of extraction from my day-to-day experience of several years. As it is, there is no logical reason for this ratio, but I feel that once you start following it with your teams, you will find that the 30-70 ratio has a meaning.

What to learn is a bigger question and not easy to answer. Sometimes what you decide to learn may have long-term benefits but little impact on your immediate functioning. A balance between the long-term and the short-term is essential. Planning always works in the smaller-pictures-in-the-bigger-picture style. The same style should be used for planning your learning. The best form of learning process in my opinion is to keep a note book with you when you are working and keep noting down whatever you think may be useful. You should keep coming back to these notes. I have found that even if you take notes about the drift of the arguments in a meeting and go through them at a later time, it tends to make your meetings more effective in future.

Meditation and the Multi-tasking Mode of the Mind

In today’s world the human mind has to work in a multi-tasking mode. The mind has to switch back and forth between the present moment and situations to which it is constantly being pulled. You are sitting and struggling with a book of Java codes and suddenly the cell-phone rings. While you attend the call, your mind moves from the book to the friend at the other end and then to the party you had the previous night. You explain to your interlocutor why you had to leave early. By the time you finish the conversation, a joke is SMS-ed to you. The joke takes you to a Bengali house and by the time you close it with a chuckle on the lips, you have roamed within your mind through a spectrum of similar jokes. You re-collect yourself and get down to work with the book.

This is the routine rather than the exception with most of us. The mind has to constantly switch, adjust and re-adjust. Such quick movement from one type of situation to another produces stresses and strains.

There is another type of multi-tasking the mind is often called upon to perform. You may have to listen to someone while attending to a file or working on a report. The mind has to resort to a time-sharing that puts pressure.

Often we are not aware of these stresses and strains, but they take their toll on our level of mental calm as well as on our mental and physical health.

Meditation helps us gain control over the mind and teaches us the art of withdrawing and applying to a situation at will. Those who practise meditation correctly and frequently are able to detach and attach to the situations around them at will. Shrimad Bhagwad Geeta describes this ability in the following words:

yada samharate cha ayam, koormo angan iv sarvashah
indriyaani indriya arthebhya, tasya prgya pratishthita

The meaning is: he who is able to withdraw at will the senses from their objects like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell, is able to remain steady in knowledge and understanding.

Have you ever practised this art of voluntary withdrawal? It is not escapism. It is the attainment of emotional independence from your environment. Try it if you haven’t.

Tadaa Drashtuh Swaroope Avasthaanam

A friend wrote this in a recent blog entry: “Have you ever seen a villain making love to his girl? Never. It is always the hero. All that he manages to get is, at the most, a nasty rape, and emerges out of the entire episode sweating like a pig and face full of bleeding scratches.”

This set me thinking. Why is a villain’s love-making presented as something ugly and unacceptable?

In civil society the audience won’t perhaps accept an association of pleasant love-bytes with a villain. Majority of the people are “good” and, even when they indulge in whatever, by their own standards, is “bad”, they still wish that the world should be controlled by good rather than bad values.

Maharishi Patanjali in his Yog Sutras says, when the vrittis of the mind are brought to a halt, the Seer within us comes to its own.

The answer to today’s problems lies in halting the vrittis and allowing the Drashtuh (Seer) to come to its own. Even those who act badly still wish the world to be governed by good values. Can we all join together to become agents of awakening this good within all of us?