Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academ-advaita.com
The Netherlands
3 December 2019
Anxiety (7)
“Impatience”
You are impatient in life. You are impatient to do your spiritual techniques or any activity. Is it not so? Understand today, you are only impatient to do. Understand it clearly.
You are impatient that you have to meditate in the morning. You are convinced that you have to do it. Your wife does not come into your concern; neither do your children, no.
You do not want to be disturbed. You have to get up, go into the room, switch the lights out and sit down to meditate. You do this because you believe, if you do meditation, close your eyes, you will get enlightened.
Not at all, you will not get enlightened. If you get up in the morning, sit in a room, close your eyes, your wife is very happy and peaceful. That is all that is happening. You are doing a favour to your wife.
Enlightenment is not going to happen to you as long as you are thinking that you are doing meditation. That will be your finding one day. That is, if you are doing it. If you are doing it, write it down today and you will find after ten years that you will still be doing the same thing.
Then you will know that it will be the same doing, if you are honest. But the mind will tell you, keep doing it. This brings in impatience. Understand this much that, if you repeat, it just means that you have repeated. That is all. Nothing else.
That is all life teaches you. Hey, you did this yesterday? You are doing this today? The only conclusion is that what you did yesterday you are doing today. That is the only conclusion. Be happy about it.
If what you are doing today is the same as what you did yesterday and, if what you did today is going to give you enlightenment because you did it yesterday, it implies two things.
One, you need not repeat meditation or any technique tomorrow because you will be enlightened today. Two, you need not repeat it today because you are enlightened, for you repeated meditation yesterday. Also, you need not have done it yesterday because you were enlightened the day before yesterday.
If it were real for you to get enlightenment, it should happen the day you open your eyes because you have done it yesterday. That is all life is telling you. Hey, you just repeated what you did yesterday, though the repetition was not identical: it was only similar.
Now, if it is never identical, how would it all amount to your getting enlightened on that one day??) It is impossible because every day is different and never identical. It is just like collecting small pieces of information, which you like, to understand the big picture. This is impossible as well.
The wise understand that enlightenment will happen if it is meant to happen. The wise understand that enlightenment is independent of doing and not doing.
The enlightened do not know that they are enlightened. They merely live life that happens to them in patience, without anxiety.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V.S. Shankar 2019
Editor’s Note:
Man’s pathway in life is populated with imaginations and expectations, albeit illusory, during the waking state. They are his main focus. They may not only entertain man, if at all they do; they may also keep him in thrall. When this is the case, there is little liveliness in his life for it is weighed down. This may be the world of adulthood; it is not the world of the child, who lives life as it happens, effortlessly. Enlightenment may be our target in life, but the wise reveal that it cannot be realised by man nor even known upon realisation. Understanding this relieves the pressures of having to do this, that and the other, day upon day, lifetime upon lifetime. Life is alive and full of delight for the childlike, as it is meant to be.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator‘s Note:
In his impatience to finally be happy forever in his mind, man uses, albeit illusory, numerous mental and physical techniques that are supposed to reach the goal through repetition.
Through these techniques, your mental programming is to be changed from harmful to useful in order to become successful and happy in life. Is this not the goal of all self-improvement techniques? The wisdom that Dr Shankar shares in this article and elsewhere goes into every corner of the mind and explains why the programs of the ego are illusory and not real. As a result, an even deeper inner freedom evolves that is independent of success and failure. True unshakable happiness, or better constant contentment in the timeless here and thoughtless now are the result. Wisdom is about words and how they determine our view of the world so that it seems real to us, whereas words are completely illusory. In contrast to spiritual and mental techniques, however, it is not about changing what happens by itself when it is meant to, but about understanding the conditioning. The detailed explanations in this article are clear and concise. Through deep understanding, the conditioned patterns of the mind eventually lose their destructive power because they reveal themselves to be completely illusory. All this happens without doing it, when the intelligence of life manifests this in a particular individual.
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.