ARANI SERIES
Spark 49
Thursday, September 20, 2018
PATIENCE PAYS
Understanding Our Own Psyche Requires Careful Watching
The inner world is as complex, if not more, as the universe outside. Our psyche is the storehouse of countless impressions of the past, which may include previous lives too. We cannot change our perception of the world by making a ‘birthday resolution’! The power of will in the context of deep, inner change is sadly limited. We must nurture will-power to an extent so that certain factors like laziness or impulsive tendencies do not throw us overboard. For example, we maintain a degree of efficiency in all our work by gentle self-persuasion to adhere to timelines. “Make a plan and go by the plan,” is an advice that certainly has much merit in the transactional realm but spiritual growth is to be brought about by exercising faculties that are subtler than the will.
Watching requires patience
Patience is one quality that facilitates self-knowing. We often talk about giving up likes and dislikes (rāga-dvesha) but have we understood the structure of our attachments and aversions? These movements of our mind are sophisticated and comparable with modern gadgets, which have very intricate programming. An old-time lock, if we have lost its key, can be opened by using force and breaking it. A machine, protected by a password, does not open by the use of force! Our mind, with its numerous beliefs and conditionings, will not open if we merely get charged by emotions. Careful observation of our own behavior and understanding various errors in judgment can pave the way to transformation.
Desiring fruits fast, a gardener may pour more water at the base of the plants; will that work if the season for the fruits to come up is two months away? Saint Kabir highlights the need for patience, using the very metaphor, in the following couplet1.
| dheere dheere re manā, dheere sab kuch hoye |
| mālee seenche sau ghadā, ritu āye phal hoye |
Go slow, go slow, O mind; you will achieve everything by going slow. Please remember the fruits will show up only when the season arrives, even though the gardener may pour a hundred pots of water!
The wisdom of the words of Kabir has relevance to both mundane activities and to the search for peace.
The highest intelligence defies time
By appealing for patience, we are not making a virtue of time. Insights that set us free are not products of time. It is puzzling to note that time is not a player in the profound game of searching for the timeless truth! The riddle gets resolved when we discover that patience is neither investment in time nor dismissal of it. When we neither hurry nor believe that time will heal our wounds, but rather exercise attention that is free of bias, we begin to see what we had always missed.
In the Vedānta, virtues like patience constitute enhanced ‘purity of mind’ (chitta-shuddhi). While it is highly valued, the science of the Upanishads uncompromisingly says that jnāna (right seeing), and not any amount of chitta-shuddhi, sets us free2. What is more, liberation is not an effect at all. It is not caused by anything. It does not happen! It is not an event or a phenomenon. Moksha is nitya-siddha, ever accomplished!
Swami Chidananda
Notes:
1 The old verse goes,
धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय,
माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ॠतु आए फल होय।
2 jnānād-eva tu kaivalyam – Liberation is through right seeing only. (Old saying)