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Whatever your goals are, you’ll benefit from this
In pre-modern times, you had to slave away at a Guru’s ashram for 12 years, sweeping the floor or prostrating 100,000 times, just to get a single verse of teachings.
Now, in a time and place in which you’re being flooded with valuable instructions, we have the opposite problem.
None of us takes “information” as truly valuable anymore.
And honestly, it’s not supposed to be.
Wisdom is.
Which is something only you can awaken within you. I can only catalyze that indirectly.
So know that I’m not trying to add to the already abusive information overload on the internet. There’s nothing being sold here.
There’s just your sleeping inner potential, secretly begging for you to transform and join the millions of past humans who have walked the path before you.
Honor them, and your future self, with your current actions.
Dana: if clinging & suffering are bedfellows, higher love is the cure.
You have so many tendencies for negativity lurking in your mind that if you try a technique for awakening, you’ll eventually fall into one of your inner blocks.
That’s why in Tibet, you had to purify and train your heart first.
Instead of contracting our consciousness, we open it.
Dana in Sanskrit means giving. Generosity that holds nothing back. Not just material — giving warmth, positive thoughts, good vibrations — comprehensive all-around expansion.
It is said that to become wealthy in this or future lives — we must remove all miserliness, and develop the art of channeling (and dispensing) great wealth.
We practice enlarging our heart center in order to be capable of more, whether on the material or spiritual planes.
Sila: your behavior is your protection.
Every action we’ve ever committed has left an imprint on our mind.
That includes you sitting down to surf the internet right now.
Sila is the felt sense of moral ethical concern to yourself — the roadmap of thoughts, practices, and behaviors that can get you where you want to be.
And it has everything to do with how you interact with the outside world.
- Is your body engaging in something that brings you health and resilience, or do you engage in self-sabotage?
- Is your speech controlled, melodious, sharp, purposeful, and saying what is pleasing to others, a mindless waste?
- Are your thoughts toward others (and the world) helping your energy flow to be efficient, or caught in anger, judgement, and fear?
The behavior of these 3 doors of karma are a litmus test.
It is said that only those who pass are truly civilized enough within themselves to be able to meditate successfully.
Kshanti: only a calm mind is truly strong enough to progress.
You are going to encounter obstacles in life. Survival is a guaranteed failure.
It’s one roadblock after the next, until we lose the game.
In the meantime, at least make sure you’re not twisting your mind so much that you do double damage.
Kshanti is patience. An easeful awareness that always returns to equilibrium no matter the disturbance. Space-like acceptance of all experience, including suffering, with the flavor of warm compassion.
When we die, no possession or companion can accompany us. Only our karma does — the imprints we made in our minds while alive every moment.
So you have nothing to truly lose except the possibility of awakening in this life. And you’re fully in control of stepping toward that higher reality or not.
Make the right steps by keeping your mind cool enough to assess and respond, unravelling any excess inner knots of karma, not overheat and over-react — thus multiplying them.
Virya: you need to feed the fire of enthusiasm if you want power.
Some people spend their whole lives meditating without gaining any realizations.
They never recalibrate their nervous systems, or learn how to rewire their motivational mechanisms.
These are the same kinds of people that would fail at starting a business even if they tried 1,000 times.
Virya is charged-up heroism. A surging joy in doing what you know is wholesome, no matter the short-term difficulties.
This is about being unsatisfied until you reach your goal. And of being happy about being unsatisfied, because you just enjoy the thrill of your energy being dedicated to one pursuit.
It’s a constantly cultivated fire that’s totally contagious in how inspiring it is.
So if you can’t light it yourself, seek someone who can.
Samadhi: there is a cure to distraction, the success-killer.
It’s abandoning distractions.
Seeing just how damaging a scattered mind is for absolutely anything you want to accomplish.
And not just that, but actually training your attention, with the goad of intention, in order to corral it where you want it to stay.
Like pushing a wild ox into a field, and convincing it to do its work.
Except your mind is your birthright. Only you have the final word on what it’s supposed to dwell on.
Though most people never practice this faculty. Lacking mindfulness, we habituate ourselves into comfortable dullness. Ignorance leads to carelessness, which brings dispersion of the precious rays of attention.
Samadhi is meditative concentration; finding joy in pointing your mind in one direction, and see the misery & disempowerment inherent in every single distraction.
Bring yourself back to where your mind should be, at any given moment. Check your mind multiple times every hour, if not every few moments.
Prajna: seeing things as they truly are is the highest blessing.
And it’s not “bestowed” by some external deity-figure.
It’s the highest possible purpose of you being here right now.
You did not come to Earth to live a life of confusion, you came here for meaning. That’s what you search for when absorbed in Netflix or enamored in a relationship.
Except all these smaller meanings are impermanent. Caught up in their drama, we totally miss the underlying big picture.
Even seeking to “escape the Matrix,” we get ensnared by cages of our ego’s making.
What’s needed is the fullest possible knowing, of literally everything we experience. That’s what will get us out of our loops and limited reality-timelines.
Prajna is perfect, immediate, deep, primordial knowing by experiencing. It’s facing our truth and not running away any more, because we know how costly that will be for us.
It is said that ignorance isn’t just unknowing. It’s neutrality, even in the face of a neutral situation.
Wisdom is something to be cultivated at each moment:
- Is what you’re experiencing (thoughts, emotions, memories) permanent or impermanent?
- Is it inherently a source of joy, or tinged with dissatisfaction and suffering?
- Does it have a self or core from its own side? Is it part of your true self, ie, are you in total control of it?
When we detach from the constant impermanence, and wake up from the dream story-telling of “life,” we remember what it means to be alive.
Right now, all you remember is the junk floating in your subconscious.
What I’ve just outlined above are known as the 6 perfections — 6 practices quite literally causing perfection, known in Indic philosophy as Buddhahood.
It is said to be anuttara (unsurpassed) samyak (gone to perfection) sambodhi (utter illumination).
Perfect awakening so you can be of maximum benefit for others. And it’s not a far-off goal to be realized many lifetimes from now.
All you need is one life, the one you’ve been blessed with right now.
Plant the seeds that will inevitably snowball into something unstoppable. The recipe has been given to you.
Now it’s your job to deliver the dish — in the form of a beautiful, refined, loving, expansive, and self-disciplined mind.
One that keeps moving forward, overcoming all obstacles with poise, inner awareness, detachment, determination, and wisdom.
I wish you the greatest success, in whichever form you may need it.
