Devdas Menon
(Text of an
invited article that appeared in the February 2005
edition of the magazine Life Positive)
"Less
luggage, more comfort" is something that all
travellers know to be true. It is particularly true
when we deal with the journey of life. Not
just in a physical sense (we know only too
well what it means to be trim and fit), but in a much
deeper psychological sense. In that sense,
we are always travelling, and each of us carries a
fair amount of baggage. It is only rarely that we
feel freed of all mental baggage, and are able to
glide about freely and joyfully, like birds in the
sky.
Travelling
light sounds great, but aren’t we supposed to
carry the burden of our responsibilities? And, instead
of reducing our mental baggage, should we not be shouldering
more responsibilities and achieving greater things
in life? This is how most people are conditioned to
react. “Success” is all about adding more
weight to who we think we are, or more accurately,
to what others think of us.
Indeed, the
individual sense of who I am is often entirely governed
by my relative importance in the prevailing value
system of society. That is why we often end up doing,
acquiring and becoming things that are viewed as being
desirable and respectable by people around us. The
sense of “who I am” is, for the vast majority
of us, derived from the total value of my possessions,
as assigned by society. My psychological baggage is
centred on that notion, and along with it, all my
remembered past and imagined future. In fact, I
am that baggage. From that perspective, travelling
light does not sound all that great, for who wants
to be a “nobody”?
The spiritually
awakened person is one who knows that he or she truly
is a “nobody”, and is willing to be so.
Such a person knows that the only real hindrance to
enlightened living is precisely this false notion
of oneself, this narrow and total identification with
the ego-self, and its appendages. Let go of the baggage
of the ego-self, and be free!
Let go, and
be free! How simple! Yet, how difficult it is in actual
practice! Especially when we cling to the baggage
so tenaciously, and so unconsciously. Dropping the
baggage of one’s ego-self and thereby discovering
real freedom is the most absorbing errand that a spiritual
aspirant can have in life. All that is required is
continual awareness, awareness of the clinging, and
a letting go of the attachments
that bind one…
People have
serious difficulty in understanding that attachments
are the root cause of human suffering. Until that
understanding dawns, clearly and sharply, the clinging
will continue, and so will suffering. The understanding
can be initially painful, but it is a passing pain,
as in a surgical operation. Truth can be very bitter,
when one has been deluding oneself all of one’s
life.
The way of
awareness may appear to be radically different from
conventional religious pursuits, such as the path
of devotion or of selfless action. However, the dropping
of the baggage of the ego-self is common to all spiritual
paths. This is why the essence of all religions is
said to be the same. Without the surrender of the
ego-self, bhakthi is a far cry from bhakthi-yoga,
and without the dissolution of the notion of “doership”,
karma is a far cry from karma-yoga.
People are
afraid of “letting go”. This is understandable;
until one discovers the liberation that follows the
“letting go”, one will resist surrender.
Indeed, all of us have glimpsed this liberating experience
at some point or other in our lives, especially in
our early childhood. It is an experience of joy, a
sense of oneness and affinity towards everything.
It is characterised by an absence of resistance to
the natural “flow” of life. It is a state
of peace and harmony, bereft of distraction and worry.
In it, there is no sense of time. It is, in summary,
a truly wonderful state, accessible to all who are
able to “let go”.
The underlying
nature of consciousness seems to be a state of quiet
joy that does not have an opposite. It is qualitatively
quite different from the happiness derived from the
activity of the ego-self, such as winning an award.
The ego-pleasure that emanates from an enhanced sense
of self-importance (more baggage) is what most of
us crave for, but it is an outcome of delusion, and
will inevitably bring in its wake its painful opposite,
ego-pain.
The joyous
experience of the "flow" state, unencumbered
by baggage, can be felt not only when one is in a
state of “meditation”, apparently doing
no work, but also in the thick of apparently intense
activity. Any skilled worker or talented artiste or
sportsman will testify to this. Such activity turns
out to be “perfect” when one is fully
focussed on the task at hand, with a relaxed concentration
and without any distraction. One allows the universal
energy to express itself through one’s medium,
without interference, and without any motive of profit
or worry about the outcome. In fact, interferences
by the ego-self only serve to contaminate the perfection
in the work. This truth is wonderfully captured in
the following verse by Chuang Tzu, the great Taoist
sage.
When an
archer shoots for nothing, he has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind,
Or sees two targets – he is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed,
but the prize divides him.
He thinks more of winning than of shooting,
And the need to win drains him of power.
In summary,
the first thing that needs to be clearly understood
is that the baggage of the ego-self is the only obstruction
to true freedom and joyous living. Driven by the ways
of the world, our normal tendency is to add to that
baggage, rather than to lighten the load. The problem
stems not from “successes” in life, but
from the false notion that “I am the doer”
that accompanies these achievements, and from clinging
to attachments. Through continual awareness and meditative
practice, however, we discover the art of travelling
light, and becoming one with the flow of life. We
discover a sense of joyous freedom and connectedness
with the universe. Bon voyage!
