We live in a world where there are temptations on all sides. How do we strengthen the intellect to control the mind?
There may be many temptations in the world, but they all fall into very few categories. They are either things that make us feel better, or things that we think will make us feel better. There are temptations to eat and drink things we shouldn’t eat and drink, to have relations with people we shouldn’t have relations with. Those form the outer, most superficial layer of temptation. If I eat that, I will feel good. If I drink that, I will feel good. If I smoke that, I will feel good. If I engage in sensual pleasures with this person, I will feel good. For a lot of people, these temptations are very difficult to resist.
I remember when I was young, my mother was always on a diet. It’s what people in Los Angeles do; everybody diets. My mother’s always been very thin; nonetheless, she was always on a diet. I remember this one time when we went out to eat. My dad really loves desserts. He’s got great discipline and he’s a very healthy eater, but we were on vacation, so he ordered a hot fudge sundae for dessert. He and my mother were sitting side-by-side in the booth. I was on the other side.
My dad is very methodical and slow, very peaceful, and he takes his time, while my mother has more frenetic energy. They were sitting next to each other and the hot fudge sundae arrived. As my dad sat surveying it, perhaps taking in how beautiful it looked, my mom had already picked up her spoon and was eating it! Of course, he was very happy to share it—the thing was huge. By the time my dad actually picked up his spoon and took his first bite, my mom had already eaten three or four spoonfuls. At that point, she decided that she had had enough. She remembered she was on a diet and shouldn’t be eating it, so she picked up her glass of water and poured it over the entire hot fudge sundae! That was, of course, the end of my dad’s dessert.
I share this story to show you how strong temptations are! Why didn’t she just stop eating it and let him eat? Why did she have to ruin the rest of the sundae? When we’re in the grips of temptation, particularly when we are depriving ourselves, disciplining ourselves or controlling ourselves, temptation takes on a life of its own. Here was my mother, this well-educated, intelligent, wonderful, caring woman—what had the hot fudge sundae done to her? Once she decided she was not going to eat any more, that should have been enough. She could have just put down her spoon and been done with her meal. But temptations take on this power of their own—‘I have to eat the sundae!’ So once she had decided she shouldn’t be eating it, the only way to overcome her temptation for the sundae was to ruin it completely!
That’s our superficial layer of temptations. We are drawn towards things we’re going to have—eating them, drinking them, smoking them, purchasing them or going to bed with them—that are going to make us feel physically good for a very short time period.
If we go one step deeper, we face temptation in the form of things we’re going to do that may not be physically gratifying or rewarding in the moment, but that are going to make us feel good later on. The temptation to cheat on an exam, for example, we know is wrong, but it can be overpowering. There are temptations to cheat in so many other ways as well—to cheat on our taxes, in our workplace. The world gives us so many opportunities to be dishonest for what seems to be our own best interest.
If I get an A on this exam, whether through merit or through cheating, I’ll do well. I’ll get into the right university, get the right job, and be successful and satisfied. If I cheat on my taxes, I’ll have more money and be happy. Every temptation looms over us with this hypnotic call. Even the urge to go shopping. You’re walking down the street and see a new coat or a pair of shoes shouting at you, ‘If you just wear me, you’ll feel better about yourself!’ You have no intention of going in, but the temptation to feel better becomes overwhelming.
There’s this story shared by a wonderful meditation teacher about his friend. This friend would go to a pastry shop on his way to work daily. One day, the friend decided to exercise discipline and to stop eating the pastries. He would make the pledge every day, but even so, he found himself heading back in there every day. So he went to the meditation teacher and said, ‘I don’t know what to do! Every day I pledge to not buy pastries, yet every day, without knowing what happened, I find myself with a bag full on the way to the office.’
The meditation teacher told him, ‘Well, one way out is you leave your wallet at home.’
And the guy said, ‘What, you want me to steal them?’
The idea of not giving in to temptation was inconceivable for this man. He thought, ‘If I have money, I will buy them. If I don’t have money, I will have to steal them.’
The answer or solution is not about controlling the individual temptation. If that were the case, all that would happen is we’d control the pastries, then the cake, then the hot fudge sundaes . . . it is a never-ending cycle. The universe is full of temptations everywhere we look.
The only solution is to understand that, within, we’re already full. The only solution is our intellect—not the intellect we gain in university or from books, but the real power of discrimination which makes us understand, ‘I am not my senses. I am not this chemical and electrical pattern of drive for reward in my brain that says eat or drink or smoke.’ That’s what’s going on in our brains. It’s just a pattern of electrical and chemical firing, a neural circuit with our reward pathways. That’s all it is. But every time we give in, we’re telling ourselves that we are merely light bulbs that can be flicked on and off. Circuitry goes up and I’m on, circuitry goes down and I’m off. No. We are more than that. We are divine. The best way to overcome any temptation is not just to discipline myself, but furthermore, to recognize who I really am.
This is where spiritual austerity comes in. If we look at the Hindu tradition, we will find so many practices of austerity—fasting, staying up all night, meditating without moving, practising yoga.
When Pujya Swamiji was young and living in the jungle, he spent eleven hours a day standing on one foot. Why? His Guru was not in the muscle-building business. It was not as if he was training Swamiji to win some yoga competition or athletic contest. It’s the same reason why we stay up all night. The body needs sleep, we know that. Why do we go without food or water? It’s simply to teach ourselves that we are not just a stimulus-response reaction. We are not Pavlov’s dogs. There’s a consciousness in us, there’s a purpose to our lives that is not just ‘eat, drink, respond to instinct’.
We gain that ability in our spiritual practices. We all know that we are going to go back to eating and drinking water again, to sleeping again. But the reason we practise austerity is to have the experience of feeling our stomachs growl, feeling them send all the chemical and electrical patterns to our brain saying that they need to eat, while we know in our intellect that today we are keeping a fast. We’re not going to eat. The signals come, and so do the temptations—the aromas of the food—but we stop ourselves because of our fast. That practice develops a great awareness within ourselves that says, ‘Yes, my body may be screaming for food, for water, for sleep, but I’m sitting up all night doing japa, it’s Shivaratri.’
Please remember though, it’s not about torturing the body or punishing ourselves. It’s not because we’ve been sinful and need to be punished. People see penance and austerity as a form of torturing the self. No. It’s simply to teach ourselves, give ourselves the experience of having all the neurons firing—saying, ‘Eat, drink, sleep!’—and then not doing any of it. In that experience, we realize, ‘Wow, my body and mind are screaming at me to give in, and yet I’m still here. I have not disintegrated or imploded or ceased to exist simply because I didn’t give in to my temptation. The wave that commands me to eat or sleep washes over me, but I don’t respond. The wave rises, eventually breaks and recedes, and I’m still here.’ That teaching is very deep.
We must learn that there is an ‘I’ that is not the response to the stimulus. There is an ‘I’ that is not just the feeder of my desires. When we connect with that ‘I’, it stays with us throughout our lives even though, of course, we go back to sleeping and eating. The awareness and the learning stay.
When I first came to Rishikesh, the prayers held in the Satsang Hall from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. were compulsory. I was not used to sitting on the floor, and I could sit for barely thirty minutes before my knee or hip would start hurting. But the prayers would go on for an hour, so most of the time, I would just cross my legs the other way, or switch to a different posture. But every once in a while, I developed a meditation technique that went thus: ‘I will not move, no matter how much it hurts or burns. Whether I itch, whether there is a fly on my nose, I will not budge.’ It was actually an incredible experience, one I really recommend practising every now and then. Even though normally in meditation, if you need to uncross and re-cross your legs, you do it so that you can go back to retaining your awareness on your mantra, or your breath, or the Divine. Usually, we don’t want our awareness in our meditation to be on our knees or hips. But every once in a while, it’s an incredible practice to just set an alarm and commit to not moving at all until the alarm goes off. The pain comes, the itch comes, but you just look at it, you don’t push it away.
This is really the key factor that I’m getting at. When the temptations come, we don’t push them away. It’s not ‘I’m not going to think about chocolate’, because then what are we invariably doing? Thinking about chocolate. Our consciousness is still filled with chocolate. If I say to you, ‘Meditate now, but whatever you do, don’t think about ice cream’, what are you going to think about? Ice cream! So, it’s not about pushing that away. It’s actually about recognizing and seeing it, acknowledging it, but not giving in to it, knowing that it’s just a temptation to itch or move or eat, to smoke a cigarette or drink alcohol, to cheat on my spouse or cheat on my taxes. Whatever it is you’re tempted to do, you don’t get anywhere by pretending it’s not there.
When we really win is when we can look at it, see it, and not be overpowered by it. That was the technique I developed in my Satsang Hall meditation. Instead of trying to ignore my hip or my knee, I would literally turn that into my meditation. In my mind, I would stare at my hip or knee that was hurting and just be aware. And when you actually look at it, you find that the power of the stimulus becomes much less. Temptations act very macho when your back is turned, shouting at you and taunting you from behind your back, but the minute you turn around and stare them in the face, they’re nothing but an itch or a pack of cigarettes or a piece of cake or whatever else may be tempting you.
We must recognize that we are divine. We are not slaves to chemical and electrical patterns in the brain. Here’s the exciting part: we can change the habits formed in our mind. These habits are what we call in spiritual semantics a sanskara; in scientific semantics, we call it a neuronal network or a neuronal pattern. We can change them. If every time you are tempted to eat chocolate, you do, you strengthen the pattern that says, ‘When this network fires, I eat.’ If every time you feel angry, you throw a temper tantrum, you’re doing the same thing.
The Western model of psychology says, ‘Let it out, you need to get it out’, but the problem is that you’re not actually getting it out. It’s not going anywhere. You can’t vomit out your anger or pain. People try, but they cannot do it. All it does is lay an even stronger network and pattern that says, ‘This is how I respond to anger.’ Every time you do it, you strengthen that network, you deepen that sanskara. The way to be free is actually to lay down a different sanskara, a different pattern. Instead of having a temper tantrum every time you get angry, sit down, close your eyes, chant your mantra, take a walk in the park or light a candle. Whatever it is, set a new pattern which will slowly get ingrained deeper than the previous one.
This is the way to do it. Not by pushing away anger or temptations or controlling them only through discipline, because that just causes us to contract. Spirituality is not about contraction, it’s not about withdrawal. It’s about openness, with the awareness that the path of divinity, spirituality, devotion and yoga has so much more to offer. The joy I get from a piece of chocolate is nothing compared to the joy I get in my spiritual practice. It’s not a path of renouncing joy. It’s a path of experiencing greater joy. It’s not about pushing things away, but rather embracing something that is much deeper, much fuller and much more real. Then, the temptations just drop off automatically.