The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [34]
• After a few hours or the next day, repeat this whole process.
This may seem like a stiff regimen, but you are being asked to spend only 5 minutes a day on any one of these areas. Tiny steps bring big results. The simple state of awareness is nature’s default position; suffering and the complications that keep it going are unnatural—it wastes energy to maintain all that complexity. By working toward a simpler state every day, you are doing the best anyone can do to bring suffering to an end by cutting out the roots of unreality.
Secret #6
FREEDOM TAMES THE MIND
DO YOU LOVE YOUR MIND? I’ve never met anyone who did. People with beautiful bodies or faces frequently love their gift from nature (although the opposite can be true—the most beautiful people physically can also shun themselves out of insecurity or fear of being seen as vain). The mind is the hardest part of ourselves to love because we feel trapped inside it—not all the time but in those moments when trouble breaks in. Fear has a way of roaming the mind at will. Depression darkens the mind; anger makes it erupt in uncontrollable turmoil.
Ancient cultures tend to echo the notion that the mind is restless and unreliable. In India, the most common metaphor compares the mind to a wild elephant, and calming the mind is said to be like tying the elephant to a stake. In Buddhism, the mind is likened to a monkey peering out at the world through the five senses. Monkeys are notoriously impulsive and fickle, liable to do anything without notice. Buddhist psychology doesn’t aim to tame the monkey so much as to learn its ways, accept them, and then transcend to a higher awareness that is beyond the fickleness of the mind.
Metaphors won’t get you to a place where you can love the mind; you have to find the actual experience of peace and calmness on your own. The secret for doing that is to free the mind. When it is free, the mind settles down. It gives up its restlessness and becomes a channel for peace. This is a counterintuitive solution because nobody would say that a wild elephant or a monkey can be tamed by setting it free. They’d say that the freed animal would only run wilder, yet this secret is based on actual experience: The mind is “wild” because we try to confine and control it. At a deeper level lies complete orderliness. Here, thoughts and impulses flow in harmony with what is right and best for each person.
How, then, can you set your mind free? You need to understand how it became trapped in the first place. Freedom isn’t a condition you can simply step into by unlocking a door or breaking a set of shackles. The mind is its own shackle, as the poet William Blake knew when he contemplated people on the streets of London:
In every cry of every man
In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
When they tried to understand how the mind traps itself, the ancient Indian sages devised the key concept of samskara (from two Sanskrit word roots that mean “to flow together”). A samskara is a groove in the mind that makes thoughts flow in the same direction. Buddhist psychology makes sophisticated use of the concept by speaking of samskaras as imprints in the mind that have a life of their own. Your personal samskaras, built up from memories of the past, force you to react in the same limited way over and over, robbing you of free choice (i.e., choosing as if for the first time).
Most people build up an identity on the basis of samskara without knowing that they chose to do this. But the clues are inescapable. Consider someone prone to attacks of rage. For these so-called rageaholics, the anger impulse is like an “it,” a thing that controls them from some secret place of power. Uncontrollable outbreaks unfold in stages. First, there is usually some physical symptom—compression in the chest, the onset of a headache, rapid heartbeat, tight breathing. From there an impulse rises. The person can feel anger building up as if it were water behind a dike. The pressure is both physical