Renovating your mind is not a matter of thinking positive thoughts alone because your samskaras have an emotional stake in the game. That is why positive thinking never works, at least not in the long term. Our current world focuses too much on positive thinking; neurolinguistic programming and affirmations and what not. The thing is that positive thinking alone, in isolation will do nothing much. It is a band-aid, a surface dressing on a wound which is skin-deep, bone-deep. Heck, it is even cell-deep.
Philosophy in itself is useless. Just intellecutalising the human condition is a waste of time. Do you hear, modern philosophers, all of you?
Thinking fruitful thoughts alone will be of no good, just deciding to believe in the absolute truths will not work. You will have to feel these truths, you will have to make emotional connections with these laws. Laws and emotions?
Emotional connections to absolute truths?
Definitely. That is where science has it wrong, where it thinks laws are a Platonic reality, mutually exclusive from humans who experience them. No, that is incomplete. I recently heard Carlo Rovelli, an Italian physicist and philosopher speak about ‘Time’ at the Royal Institution in London. Rovelli is one of the pioneers of Loop quantum gravity, the contender to string theory for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. What he said about time made me immensely hopeful and excited for the future of science. Among other things he said that time connects intimately with our emotions. Time is not a physical property of the universe, but we humans construct it through the apparatus of our minds to make sense of the universe and life. Of course, Einstein proved beyond a shadow of doubt that time is not fixed, but relative. What Rovelli added, and I hope thinks more about, is how our emotions affect our perception of time. When we are sad and anxious, time passes slowly for us, but when we are excited and happy it flies away. No?
I would love to invite Dr. Rovelli and more unorthodox physicists to study the Yogic technology to understand the laws of physics better. They might, I am quite sure, discover more laws if they did. Read more about Time according to Yogic laws here_____.
It is a sad state of affairs in our modern world where we have no time for anything apart from the worthy pursuit of scaling the socio-economic ladder. No time for much of anything else, and certainly not for our emotions. We push away our emotions, especially the ugly ones to the weepy privacy of our rooms. Or our bathrooms when we have room-mates or spouses who better not know, lest they think we are sissies. If the weepy privacy of our rooms is not big enough for our emotions, the couch in the therapist’s cabin should be. Everywhere else, our emotions are out of place. We do not want them. We suppress them under the invisible veils of our stoic and firm will-power. If that fails, we keep them in check with anti-depressants. Out of sight, out of mind. Those ugly, unwanted beasts. Ugly orphans who no one wants to claim, the children out of wedlock which we must hide away! Society so strongly shames any display of negative emotion that stoicism has become a virtue. Having a meltdown is a strict no- no. We view it as a sign of weakness, we shame crying. We want to be stoic, it is a sign of rationality and poise.
Stoicism is gaining popularity as the new philosophy for life, Marcus Aurelius the author of ‘Meditations’, is being canonised as the master philosopher. Ryan Holiday, a young modern philosopher has helped to teach the masses about stoicism in his best-selling book. Stoicism says that we must not be carried away by our unhealthy (and hence irrational) passions of desire, pain, pleasure and fear. It is not rational to act out on these emotions. the stoics tried to use reason and training to not act out your feelings. So that they could respond with reason and virtue to whatever they felt.
Reason and virtue? Illusions. Deceptions. You are being played like a puppet by your samskaras, your impressions. You are under the influence of your impulses, even as you seem to win over the bad ones. What an irony for life’s truths!
I heard the impressive Ryan Holiday referring to stoicism and Seneca. “There is nothing more we could explore in philosophy, they have said it all.” I don’t think so Ryan. You will have to discover Yoga to know.
In fact, it is the curse of modern society to suppress emotions which it must express and address openly. We must encourage emotional expression. Of course that does not mean we allow harm and chaos. No, it means we make it legitimate for everyone to feel exactly as they are. We will explore more later.
This is not to soothe us alone, but because it is imperative for our evolution. Suppressing them will never allow the emotional charge of the samskaras to die. They will lodge themselves deeper in the depths of us psyche-mind, if we do not drain away their emotional charge. There is no hope to emancipate ourselves from suffering, to progress and to evolve to our highest destiny without doing so. Ironically, many of us are so adept at suppressing emotions now that even accessing them is a big deal. For many, it is a herculean task to even feel, so numb they have become!
What a sorry, tragic loss for human evolution! What an irony! You cannot ignore your emotions by stuffing them into deep chests and locking them up forever. They are not secondary, they are not the side-effects of life. They constitute the foundations of your life, of your existence.
And no, not in some maudlin, sentimental way, but by being the fundamental units of existence. Like quarks or strings. Or loops. Whichever the scientists ascertain.
So you must be set them free, allow them to run their course. You must allow them to spend themselves. You must live your emotions, feel them. Deeply. To exhaust their positive and negative charges. When a good thing happens, when good memories arise, you must celebrate them till you feel nothing. You must milk them for every ounce of pleasure. When a bad thing happens, when bad memories arise, you must feel them all the way through, again and again. You must milk them for every ounce of pain, till the emotional charge does not arise anymore. Till you feel neutral about it.
You must celebrate and cry, both. Deeply.
As soon as an emotion arises, feel it, again and again. The more you will feel, the faster the emotion will spend itself, and the faster its charge will die out. The faster the charge dies out, the faster the samskara will be disappear. That is a surefire road to Yogic evolution. Of rising above the human condition. Of arriving at an ultra-cognitive, ultra-sensory, post-human state. A state of unbroken, causeless bliss. To achieve Yoga is to unite with this state, with this causeless bliss.
The goal of Yoga is this new state of existence, this plane of supra-knowing and supra-bliss. Once you reach it, nothing can separate you from it, it is with you forever.
It is you, and you are it, permanently.