The present article is in response to an e-mail sent to me by my youngest daughter. She has drawn my attention to a CNN article Can mindfulness help manage pain and mental illness ? by Elizabeth Landau. In it the writer mentions the case of one Monty Reed, a former US Army Ranger, who after a fall of 100 ft from his parachute broke his ankle and back. He has lived with breathing discomfort and walking pains for two decades. But now with the incorporation of mindfulness in his therapy, he is better able to manage his pain and discomfort. When his therapist first made a mention of mindfulness to him, he took it to be a hokey, tie-dye, love-in kind of thing. But with the third session, he began to distance himself from the old thinking groove. He could see that it was his irrational anger that increased his physical pain and discomfort.
Elizabeth Landau has built her thesis on mindfulfulness by dwelling on cases of pain, eating disorders, depression and anxiety . She says that mindfulness helps bulimia patients by making them aware of their habits. In this way they learn to sit with their emotional pain and tolerate it, rather than try to numb it through binging. She mentions Susan Albero, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who explains that mindfulness means being present in the moment, and observing in a nonjudgmental way. Accordingly, Jo Selle Vanderhooft, a writer/editor from Salt lake City, Utah who suffered from a constant barrage of negative thoughts earlier, found to her happiness that Being in the moment with those thoughts and recognize them for what they are has really helped me to kind of shove them aside, or to kind of diffuse them.
Mindfulness, as the term so clearly suggests, means watchfulness. To be mindful is to be watchful or careful. We may as well ask us to be conscious or aware. In Sanskrit it goes by the name of dhyan. Buddha, who spoke Pali, called it jhan. In China it came to be known as ch'an and in Japan it flourished as zen. Though the popular term for dhyan in English is meditation, it doesn't fill the bill properly. Meditation implies concentration, which dhyan is not. Concentration anticipates focusing, focusing on one object to the exclusion of everything else. In dhyan we are not looking for any particular object. In fact we are not thinking in terms of an object at all. We simply try to become conscious to be aware. Therefore the correct injunction is not dhyan karo. It is dhyan rakho. Clearly, one has not to do anything; one simply has to be-- mindful, that is, aware.
With due regards to Elizabeth Landau, I would like to put the frame of reference rather differently. I feel that showcasing mindfulness as an aid to alleviating pain, whether physical or emotional, or depression and anxiety, is to limit its domain ceremoniously. Mindfulness is woven in the fabric of the cosmos. Nay, it is the fabric of the cosmos. The living elegance of the universe is what Einstein once called the cosmic religious feeling. Science is hesitant. It takes one step forward and two steps back to admitting that the blueprint of the universe is embedded in Consciousness. Consciousness is the immanent architect of the universe. It is the causa sui, the cause of itself. Yes, mindfulness is the stuff we are made of and therefore it is also our natura naturata, our created nature.
Is it not an irony that mindfulness comes at a premium ? In the backdrop of the First War, Ouspensky questioned Gurdjieff : Can war be stopped ?, to which Gurdjieff responded Yes, it can. But first you will have to understand man, Gurdjieff cautioned. By man, you mean the psychology of man, Ouspensky asked. No, I mean the mechanics of man. Psychology is a far cry yet, Gurdjieff agonized. Psychology is for human beings, not for machines. We must first understand the mechanics of machines, Gurdjieff pointed out. Machines don't think, cannot think, but they are most efficient. Unwittingly we are competing with them. Machines are run by external influences. Computers are fed with memory and they work relentlessly with utmost reliability. The same principle applies to man-machines.
Gurdjieff bemoaned : Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences. What Gurdjieff is trying to hammer in is that the role of Consciousness is limited only to keeping our bodies and minds alive. Our bodies and minds do all the jobs by making the most use of memory. Don't confuse mind with Consciousness. Mind is hyphenated with body. We build houses and bridges, fight fires and do complicated surgeries on a shoestring budget of Consciousness but robots can do the same with greater efficiency even without a trace of Consciousness. So we step on the gas to increase our efficiency and end up shrinking further our Consciousness to entry-level. Aren't we competing with machines for more mechanicality ?
In mechanicality the level of awareness becomes picayune. Efficiency and knowing can work--infact they do work, not as an exception but as a rule-- on two-bit awareness. Awareness is available/ unavailable equally to anyone irrespective of he/she being lettered / unlettered. It depends upon us to be erudite with/ without awareness. Ouspensky mouths Gurdjieff's words in this regard thus : And especially in Western Culture it is considered that a man may possess great knowledge, for example he may be an able scientist, make discoveries, advance sciences, and at the same time he may be, and has the right to be, a petty, egoistic, caviling, mean, envious, vain, naive, and absent-minded man.
Not only do men have the right to be absent-minded, they are totally oblivious of their unmindfulness. They are asleep. We live and act and reason in deep sleep, not metaphorically but in absolute reality, lamented Gurdjieff. Almost the same conviction was expressed ruefully by Axel Oxenstierna, who had governed Sweden as Chancellor for 42 years, from 1612 till his death in 1654. In 1648 he wrote to his son : Behold my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed. Socrates come alive ? Such a candid self appraisal can come only from a Socrates. All our decisions from building WMDs or toppling governments to rolling the bottoms of our trousers or parting our hair, are made in sleep. That is to say, they are not made, they just happen. Everything happens--popular movements,wars, revolutions, changes of government, all this happens, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff in In Search Of The Miraculous.
All life is intertwined, inter-dependent, connected intricately with each other. One cannot even yawn without sending a frisson across the infinitude. The cosmos has endless triggers and no one has the software to engineer them. Therefore events just happen. Nobody does anything. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire--all this happens, declared Gurdjieff. Men are simply not able to see that they are nothing more than tiny cogs in the Cosmic juggernaut. It was an affront to man's egos but Gurdjieff used shock exercises to shake people out of their irresistible slumber. He told them that In order to do, it is necessary to be. For doing, it is obligatory to crystallize the being.
What Gurdjieff calls being, Vedas define as brahman. Hindus remember it as atman, which is translated as self in English, but Buddha called it anatta, that is no-self. The difficulty is not because of names, but because of the attributes of this entity. It is invisible, infinite and hence inconceivable and immeasurable, sui generis because it is unborn and therefore deathless, immanent and unknowable. Its complexion is consciousness. In order to come out of our mechanicality, our sleep, so that things don't just happen, so that Niros don't strum while Rome smolders, so that people don't discard spouses like dirty clothes, so that children are not refused, so that humaneness is not sacrificed at the altar of Mammon, so that wars don't dehumanize, one has to be aware of Consciousness.
Gurdjieff used crystallization of being to describe awareness of Consciousness. To attain to this state, Buddha taught samma jhan or right mindfulness. Mindfulness is now quite popular in the West primarily because of the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Gurdjieff, however, popularized the terms self-remembering and self-observation , for mindfulness. Buddha taught anapanasati or remembrance of breath as a first step in mindfulness. Gurdjieff devised works or situations where one is obliged to become alert. He started the Institute For The Harmonious Development Of Man at the Prieure in Fontainebleau, about 35 miles south of Paris to prepare man such as not known in modern times, particularly in Western world.
While practicing self-observation, one was expected to observe one's mechanical, robotic, automatic behaviour as somebody else would see it. It was like the sun watching the dawn. It enabled one to see oneself objectively. This exercise was intended to be performed at all times, whatever the nature of the physical work involved was. One was not to make any attempt at judging or changing the behaviour. Fritz Peters, an American teen who spent four years at the Institute, quotes Gurdjieff, without editing his English, in his book Boyhood With Gurdjieff : If change, then will never see reality. Will only see change. When begin to know self, then change will come, or can make change if wish--if such change desirable. Only when the self, the being, builds itself up significantly can one hope to bring about changes in oneself. Such a person can distance himself from the body and see any thing that happens to the body quite objectively.
When we look at an object, we have to part with our energy. We have got to consume energy. Our consciousness is the source of our energy. By redirecting our gaze on ourselves, we conserve our energy which helps us in the crystallization of our being. Once we are endowed with a significant core of this subtle entity, the next step is to view every object from the strong base of this core. This is described as antarlakshyo bahirdrishti, that is, looking outside, but rooted inside. Gurdjieff had spent twenty years of his youth, crisscrossing dangerous ravines, heartless deserts, inaccessible mountain folds, in search of what he called remarkable men. He met with many remarkable fakirs, monks, and yogis and learnt their ways, but he did not make any of them his role model.
The reason was that all of them prescribed renunciation and severing of relations from their families and homes which was not compatible with the Western psyche. He therefore cobbled his own Way with emphasis on self-remembering of the Buddhists and whirling dervish dances of the Sufis. He christened his Way, the Fourth Way. It did not require any renunciation and it could be practiced in the midst of the world, without setting aside any special time for puja or worship. For self- remembering is just another name for being in the present, that is, being aware of Consciousness, that is, being aware of our Essence. Call it God, Ishwar, Allah, or the Creator. If all work is done with awareness, one is all the time with one's Creator. But this, like learning any thing new, requires effort.
For crystallization of the being, relentless effort was needed. Gurdjieff was unsparing with his students. Whatever may be the other reasons, but this was the trigger that sent his two best disciples, Ouspensky, the Russian mathematician and philosopher and Orage, Editor of the prestigious magazine The New Age, packing. Fritz Peters was once witness to the dressing down given to Orage. Gurdjieff insisted that civilized and cultured people had exactly the same interests that the most ignorant savages had. Civilization consisted of violence, slavery, and fine words, according to him. Osho sums it up succintly : Our whole civilization is a pretension. Progress, in the real sense of the word could happen only with the crystallization of consciousness. Real man only conscious", Gurdjieff ordained
The best way of helping a man free himself of his bondage is to make him aware that he is in bondage. For example, if you want your buddy to get rid of his smoking, just let him be aware that you are watching him when he strikes a match. Let no words pass between you and him. Let only awareness exist--awareness that he is striking a match while you are watching him. You will see he can't smoke. After some time he will learn to watch himself without your help and that will be the end to his smoking. So whenever you are angry or greedy, prideful or lustful, resentful or deceitful, just be watchful. Mindfulness is a forerunner to good fortune. To be mindful is to break away from one's conditioning so as to be present in the present and experience the awareness of Consciousness.
I would like to wrap up my write-up with a summary of Leo Tolstoy's famous story How Much Land Does A Man Need ? In this story Pahom is a landless peasant who tills a certain landlady's land. He is unhappy because of the behaviour of the lady's steward. He curses himself for being landless. Meanwhile the landlady decides to move away from there and puts her land on sale. Pahom manages to buy forty acres of land for himself. For a landless peasant to become a landowner was a big jump and he became overjoyed. But soon he discovered that all around him were big landowners and he had a measly holding. So he became unhappy again. Then he heard that a commune was being set up beyond the Volga and people were being granted land there. He tried his luck there and he was granted 125 acres of arable land with enough pasturage.
He was extremely happy. The land was fertile and he had bumper harvests. But after a couple of years he felt that there was nothing like having free hold land. He came to know from a passerby that there was enough land available in The Steppes, just for a song. One had only to humor the Bashkir Chiefs who owned the land, with robes of silk, bags of tea and cases of wine. As he was modestly moneyed now, he set out in a cart of his own with a servant and the provisions. After a long journey he reached the land of the Bashkirs. He found that the Bashkirs were as simple as the sheep they reared and the land could be had almost for nothing. It was one thousand rubles a day. Do you understand their measure ? As much land as you covered on foot, running or walking, from sunrise to sundown, was yours for 1000 rubles!
Pahom plied the Chief with the gifts he had brought with him and the Chief was won over and the deal struck. Next morning everybody gathered on a mound. The Chief took off his fur cap and placed it on the ground. Pahom put 1000 rubles on the cap. He was to make a round trip that began and ended there. The only rider was that if he couldn't make it before the sun set, he would forfeit the money. Pahom braced himself for the day's schedule and as the sun broke out , he started on his journey with a flask of water and some bread. He headed in the direction of the rising sun and after covering three miles, dug a hole and piled some turf. He went on repeating the process till the sun stood in the middle of the horizon. He then turned left. He found that he was becoming tired and the sun was sliding rather fast now. It was not possible to make this arm equal to the first arm, he surmised.
But a fine stretch of virgin land tempted him and he went over it to mark it. He made some calculations of the returns it will bring him in future. By now he had bruised and cut himself in a large measure and the sun hung precariously inclined. And he couldn't see the mound also from there. He said to himself that the arm will become lopsided but he must return . As he turned his back, it looked the sun started mocking him. The faster he walked, the faster the sun went down. Now it became a race between him and the sun. He forgot the symmetry of the field and made straight to the mound. After a while the mound came into sight, but the sun had gone further down. His legs gave way, his mouth was parched, but how could he give up the race ? He collected all his strength and ran yet faster. He became breathless and seized with panic.
The mound was quite near but the sun had only a few rays to spare. And suddenly it became dark. He saw his dreams collapse before his eyes. His world was gone to pieces. But then he heard the Bashkirs calling him and gesturing to him that the sun was still visible to them from that elevation. A new life surged in him . He made a last ditch effort and started climbing up the hillock. Though his legs had become heavy, he heaved himself up. He saw the cap and the sun's last rays falling on it. He fell down and touched the cap. The Chief remarked : Ah, that's a fine fellow. He has gained much land. Pahom's servant rushed to him to help him rise up. But Pahom was bleeding from his mouth and was dead. His servant dug a grave and buried him in. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.
Watchfulness stops the drain on energy caused by mindless indulgence in fruitless pursuits. Proper harvesting and management of our life energy is the first step in the art of wise living. When we are awake to the moment, our energy quanta, sort of, hit a spring board and bounce back to us. We can literally feel the build-up of energy inside us. But when our mind wanders off, it is like the sun's rays hitting a gradient and bouncing off, never to return again. We have to be mindful not to allow this sapping of energy, become routine. We are living in times of great expectations. The West is meticulously looking for the remnants of ancient wisdom of the East. The East is trying to catch up with the West in matters of innovation. A process of homogenization has started. Before long we may expect a fine crop of harmoniously developed human beings.
Elizabeth Landau has built her thesis on mindfulfulness by dwelling on cases of pain, eating disorders, depression and anxiety . She says that mindfulness helps bulimia patients by making them aware of their habits. In this way they learn to sit with their emotional pain and tolerate it, rather than try to numb it through binging. She mentions Susan Albero, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who explains that mindfulness means being present in the moment, and observing in a nonjudgmental way. Accordingly, Jo Selle Vanderhooft, a writer/editor from Salt lake City, Utah who suffered from a constant barrage of negative thoughts earlier, found to her happiness that Being in the moment with those thoughts and recognize them for what they are has really helped me to kind of shove them aside, or to kind of diffuse them.
Mindfulness, as the term so clearly suggests, means watchfulness. To be mindful is to be watchful or careful. We may as well ask us to be conscious or aware. In Sanskrit it goes by the name of dhyan. Buddha, who spoke Pali, called it jhan. In China it came to be known as ch'an and in Japan it flourished as zen. Though the popular term for dhyan in English is meditation, it doesn't fill the bill properly. Meditation implies concentration, which dhyan is not. Concentration anticipates focusing, focusing on one object to the exclusion of everything else. In dhyan we are not looking for any particular object. In fact we are not thinking in terms of an object at all. We simply try to become conscious to be aware. Therefore the correct injunction is not dhyan karo. It is dhyan rakho. Clearly, one has not to do anything; one simply has to be-- mindful, that is, aware.
With due regards to Elizabeth Landau, I would like to put the frame of reference rather differently. I feel that showcasing mindfulness as an aid to alleviating pain, whether physical or emotional, or depression and anxiety, is to limit its domain ceremoniously. Mindfulness is woven in the fabric of the cosmos. Nay, it is the fabric of the cosmos. The living elegance of the universe is what Einstein once called the cosmic religious feeling. Science is hesitant. It takes one step forward and two steps back to admitting that the blueprint of the universe is embedded in Consciousness. Consciousness is the immanent architect of the universe. It is the causa sui, the cause of itself. Yes, mindfulness is the stuff we are made of and therefore it is also our natura naturata, our created nature.
Is it not an irony that mindfulness comes at a premium ? In the backdrop of the First War, Ouspensky questioned Gurdjieff : Can war be stopped ?, to which Gurdjieff responded Yes, it can. But first you will have to understand man, Gurdjieff cautioned. By man, you mean the psychology of man, Ouspensky asked. No, I mean the mechanics of man. Psychology is a far cry yet, Gurdjieff agonized. Psychology is for human beings, not for machines. We must first understand the mechanics of machines, Gurdjieff pointed out. Machines don't think, cannot think, but they are most efficient. Unwittingly we are competing with them. Machines are run by external influences. Computers are fed with memory and they work relentlessly with utmost reliability. The same principle applies to man-machines.
Gurdjieff bemoaned : Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences. What Gurdjieff is trying to hammer in is that the role of Consciousness is limited only to keeping our bodies and minds alive. Our bodies and minds do all the jobs by making the most use of memory. Don't confuse mind with Consciousness. Mind is hyphenated with body. We build houses and bridges, fight fires and do complicated surgeries on a shoestring budget of Consciousness but robots can do the same with greater efficiency even without a trace of Consciousness. So we step on the gas to increase our efficiency and end up shrinking further our Consciousness to entry-level. Aren't we competing with machines for more mechanicality ?
In mechanicality the level of awareness becomes picayune. Efficiency and knowing can work--infact they do work, not as an exception but as a rule-- on two-bit awareness. Awareness is available/ unavailable equally to anyone irrespective of he/she being lettered / unlettered. It depends upon us to be erudite with/ without awareness. Ouspensky mouths Gurdjieff's words in this regard thus : And especially in Western Culture it is considered that a man may possess great knowledge, for example he may be an able scientist, make discoveries, advance sciences, and at the same time he may be, and has the right to be, a petty, egoistic, caviling, mean, envious, vain, naive, and absent-minded man.
Not only do men have the right to be absent-minded, they are totally oblivious of their unmindfulness. They are asleep. We live and act and reason in deep sleep, not metaphorically but in absolute reality, lamented Gurdjieff. Almost the same conviction was expressed ruefully by Axel Oxenstierna, who had governed Sweden as Chancellor for 42 years, from 1612 till his death in 1654. In 1648 he wrote to his son : Behold my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed. Socrates come alive ? Such a candid self appraisal can come only from a Socrates. All our decisions from building WMDs or toppling governments to rolling the bottoms of our trousers or parting our hair, are made in sleep. That is to say, they are not made, they just happen. Everything happens--popular movements,wars, revolutions, changes of government, all this happens, Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff in In Search Of The Miraculous.
All life is intertwined, inter-dependent, connected intricately with each other. One cannot even yawn without sending a frisson across the infinitude. The cosmos has endless triggers and no one has the software to engineer them. Therefore events just happen. Nobody does anything. Man is born, lives, dies, builds houses, writes books, not as he wants to, but as it happens. Everything happens. Man does not love, hate, desire--all this happens, declared Gurdjieff. Men are simply not able to see that they are nothing more than tiny cogs in the Cosmic juggernaut. It was an affront to man's egos but Gurdjieff used shock exercises to shake people out of their irresistible slumber. He told them that In order to do, it is necessary to be. For doing, it is obligatory to crystallize the being.
What Gurdjieff calls being, Vedas define as brahman. Hindus remember it as atman, which is translated as self in English, but Buddha called it anatta, that is no-self. The difficulty is not because of names, but because of the attributes of this entity. It is invisible, infinite and hence inconceivable and immeasurable, sui generis because it is unborn and therefore deathless, immanent and unknowable. Its complexion is consciousness. In order to come out of our mechanicality, our sleep, so that things don't just happen, so that Niros don't strum while Rome smolders, so that people don't discard spouses like dirty clothes, so that children are not refused, so that humaneness is not sacrificed at the altar of Mammon, so that wars don't dehumanize, one has to be aware of Consciousness.
Gurdjieff used crystallization of being to describe awareness of Consciousness. To attain to this state, Buddha taught samma jhan or right mindfulness. Mindfulness is now quite popular in the West primarily because of the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Gurdjieff, however, popularized the terms self-remembering and self-observation , for mindfulness. Buddha taught anapanasati or remembrance of breath as a first step in mindfulness. Gurdjieff devised works or situations where one is obliged to become alert. He started the Institute For The Harmonious Development Of Man at the Prieure in Fontainebleau, about 35 miles south of Paris to prepare man such as not known in modern times, particularly in Western world.
While practicing self-observation, one was expected to observe one's mechanical, robotic, automatic behaviour as somebody else would see it. It was like the sun watching the dawn. It enabled one to see oneself objectively. This exercise was intended to be performed at all times, whatever the nature of the physical work involved was. One was not to make any attempt at judging or changing the behaviour. Fritz Peters, an American teen who spent four years at the Institute, quotes Gurdjieff, without editing his English, in his book Boyhood With Gurdjieff : If change, then will never see reality. Will only see change. When begin to know self, then change will come, or can make change if wish--if such change desirable. Only when the self, the being, builds itself up significantly can one hope to bring about changes in oneself. Such a person can distance himself from the body and see any thing that happens to the body quite objectively.
When we look at an object, we have to part with our energy. We have got to consume energy. Our consciousness is the source of our energy. By redirecting our gaze on ourselves, we conserve our energy which helps us in the crystallization of our being. Once we are endowed with a significant core of this subtle entity, the next step is to view every object from the strong base of this core. This is described as antarlakshyo bahirdrishti, that is, looking outside, but rooted inside. Gurdjieff had spent twenty years of his youth, crisscrossing dangerous ravines, heartless deserts, inaccessible mountain folds, in search of what he called remarkable men. He met with many remarkable fakirs, monks, and yogis and learnt their ways, but he did not make any of them his role model.
The reason was that all of them prescribed renunciation and severing of relations from their families and homes which was not compatible with the Western psyche. He therefore cobbled his own Way with emphasis on self-remembering of the Buddhists and whirling dervish dances of the Sufis. He christened his Way, the Fourth Way. It did not require any renunciation and it could be practiced in the midst of the world, without setting aside any special time for puja or worship. For self- remembering is just another name for being in the present, that is, being aware of Consciousness, that is, being aware of our Essence. Call it God, Ishwar, Allah, or the Creator. If all work is done with awareness, one is all the time with one's Creator. But this, like learning any thing new, requires effort.
For crystallization of the being, relentless effort was needed. Gurdjieff was unsparing with his students. Whatever may be the other reasons, but this was the trigger that sent his two best disciples, Ouspensky, the Russian mathematician and philosopher and Orage, Editor of the prestigious magazine The New Age, packing. Fritz Peters was once witness to the dressing down given to Orage. Gurdjieff insisted that civilized and cultured people had exactly the same interests that the most ignorant savages had. Civilization consisted of violence, slavery, and fine words, according to him. Osho sums it up succintly : Our whole civilization is a pretension. Progress, in the real sense of the word could happen only with the crystallization of consciousness. Real man only conscious", Gurdjieff ordained
The best way of helping a man free himself of his bondage is to make him aware that he is in bondage. For example, if you want your buddy to get rid of his smoking, just let him be aware that you are watching him when he strikes a match. Let no words pass between you and him. Let only awareness exist--awareness that he is striking a match while you are watching him. You will see he can't smoke. After some time he will learn to watch himself without your help and that will be the end to his smoking. So whenever you are angry or greedy, prideful or lustful, resentful or deceitful, just be watchful. Mindfulness is a forerunner to good fortune. To be mindful is to break away from one's conditioning so as to be present in the present and experience the awareness of Consciousness.
I would like to wrap up my write-up with a summary of Leo Tolstoy's famous story How Much Land Does A Man Need ? In this story Pahom is a landless peasant who tills a certain landlady's land. He is unhappy because of the behaviour of the lady's steward. He curses himself for being landless. Meanwhile the landlady decides to move away from there and puts her land on sale. Pahom manages to buy forty acres of land for himself. For a landless peasant to become a landowner was a big jump and he became overjoyed. But soon he discovered that all around him were big landowners and he had a measly holding. So he became unhappy again. Then he heard that a commune was being set up beyond the Volga and people were being granted land there. He tried his luck there and he was granted 125 acres of arable land with enough pasturage.
He was extremely happy. The land was fertile and he had bumper harvests. But after a couple of years he felt that there was nothing like having free hold land. He came to know from a passerby that there was enough land available in The Steppes, just for a song. One had only to humor the Bashkir Chiefs who owned the land, with robes of silk, bags of tea and cases of wine. As he was modestly moneyed now, he set out in a cart of his own with a servant and the provisions. After a long journey he reached the land of the Bashkirs. He found that the Bashkirs were as simple as the sheep they reared and the land could be had almost for nothing. It was one thousand rubles a day. Do you understand their measure ? As much land as you covered on foot, running or walking, from sunrise to sundown, was yours for 1000 rubles!
Pahom plied the Chief with the gifts he had brought with him and the Chief was won over and the deal struck. Next morning everybody gathered on a mound. The Chief took off his fur cap and placed it on the ground. Pahom put 1000 rubles on the cap. He was to make a round trip that began and ended there. The only rider was that if he couldn't make it before the sun set, he would forfeit the money. Pahom braced himself for the day's schedule and as the sun broke out , he started on his journey with a flask of water and some bread. He headed in the direction of the rising sun and after covering three miles, dug a hole and piled some turf. He went on repeating the process till the sun stood in the middle of the horizon. He then turned left. He found that he was becoming tired and the sun was sliding rather fast now. It was not possible to make this arm equal to the first arm, he surmised.
But a fine stretch of virgin land tempted him and he went over it to mark it. He made some calculations of the returns it will bring him in future. By now he had bruised and cut himself in a large measure and the sun hung precariously inclined. And he couldn't see the mound also from there. He said to himself that the arm will become lopsided but he must return . As he turned his back, it looked the sun started mocking him. The faster he walked, the faster the sun went down. Now it became a race between him and the sun. He forgot the symmetry of the field and made straight to the mound. After a while the mound came into sight, but the sun had gone further down. His legs gave way, his mouth was parched, but how could he give up the race ? He collected all his strength and ran yet faster. He became breathless and seized with panic.
The mound was quite near but the sun had only a few rays to spare. And suddenly it became dark. He saw his dreams collapse before his eyes. His world was gone to pieces. But then he heard the Bashkirs calling him and gesturing to him that the sun was still visible to them from that elevation. A new life surged in him . He made a last ditch effort and started climbing up the hillock. Though his legs had become heavy, he heaved himself up. He saw the cap and the sun's last rays falling on it. He fell down and touched the cap. The Chief remarked : Ah, that's a fine fellow. He has gained much land. Pahom's servant rushed to him to help him rise up. But Pahom was bleeding from his mouth and was dead. His servant dug a grave and buried him in. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.
Watchfulness stops the drain on energy caused by mindless indulgence in fruitless pursuits. Proper harvesting and management of our life energy is the first step in the art of wise living. When we are awake to the moment, our energy quanta, sort of, hit a spring board and bounce back to us. We can literally feel the build-up of energy inside us. But when our mind wanders off, it is like the sun's rays hitting a gradient and bouncing off, never to return again. We have to be mindful not to allow this sapping of energy, become routine. We are living in times of great expectations. The West is meticulously looking for the remnants of ancient wisdom of the East. The East is trying to catch up with the West in matters of innovation. A process of homogenization has started. Before long we may expect a fine crop of harmoniously developed human beings.
For more on dhyan please go to December 8, 2009 blog on Prosperity Follows The Natural Course.
Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi
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