The Katha Upanishad poses a question: what is it that everybody knows but nobody believes? Answer: that you are going to die.
Whether we like it or not, sooner or later we have to think about death. In the four years since I retired, there have been six deaths of people of my generation in my circle of friends and family. All due to natural causes. That’s a death rate of 1.5/year, not counting an impending seventh, a friend who has recently been told he probably doesn’t have long to go. The rate during my working life was around 0.1/year, pretty steady even if you break it down by decade.
A 15 fold jump. That gets your attention. What is the correct response? A close relative lost a sister in her 70s, and was so shocked and traumatised that she did not go to the funeral or ever talk about it. It was like it never happened. Another person was so scared her husband would die that she lived in constant fear and depression for the last few years of his life. And then he died, driving her even nuttier. Death can throw anyone for a loop. Even the clear eyed Joan Didion slid out of reality when her husband died - read her excellent monologue 'A year of magical thinking'.
Can we, should we, come to terms with death? Does it make sense to even think about it? Can we come to regard our death or the death of our loved ones with equanimity?
Nobody understands death, yet everybody knows enough to be scared. The most incomprehensible part of life, scary because we don’t know what lies beyond. The loss is horrific when it takes away someone really close like a spouse or a child, chilling, ultimate loss. If it’s sudden, the irretrievable finality of it can be bewildering and disorienting. There is the physical aspect of dying, but that really isn’t the issue. We would all prefer it to be quick and relatively painless, but even any other way the physical aspect is actually not so frightening, especially if we are clear what we define as our terms for living, strike our own balance between quantity and quality. The real issue with death isn’t physical, it’s emotional and beyond, metaphysical.
Being exposed to death at close quarters in our formative years doesn’t help build resilience either - it can in fact go the other way. I lost my father when I was 15, and it quietly numbed me at depths of emotion that I wasn’t even aware of. I was unable to talk about it until 25 years later. It abruptly altered my life and my life view. I became fatalistic, regarding all things and relationships as transient, a sort of reflexive yet destructive recoil meant to protect me from future loss. I plunged deep into philosophy and metaphysics, moving on to a spiritual search to determine the truth about God and death, in the process losing whatever little faith I had, or more to the point, realising I didn’t really have any.
Having been spurred by the rising drumbeat of deaths to revisit the issue once again at this stage of life, I have come to realise that paradoxically, coming to terms with death really has more to do with living than with death. The two examples I gave earlier illustrate two dud options of dealing with death, because both focus just on death. First option, it can be ignored, with the intention of facing it when necessary. That's feckless, it just means risking being thoroughly unprepared and unable to cope properly in a healthy fashion. As I was, as I did. Second option, just succumb to dread of it. Destructive, as fear of death will cast a brooding, unsettling shadow over life.
Which brings us to the third option. Which is to actually regard death as liberating. Liberating, because in comparison to death nothing really matters. To that extent thinking about it and coming to terms with it can be valuable, can actually improve the quality of life, if done wisely. This is nothing nothing new and revolutionary, it’s been said many times before. There is even the catchy pop version that says 'Live every day as though it were your last'. Well, that's a little cute and really doesn’t work, or all our days might look the same (probably involving the same people who will pretty soon turn around and advise you to forget about death and get a life), and even any other way the concept would lose novelty and bite soon. This liberation is just something we have to discover for ourselves. Like love. Once you 'get' this, and it goes in deep, the journey begins.
Liberation from what? Liberation from the attitudes and stances we are forced into by circumstances in life, that compromise who we really are. Knowing at the very depth of our consciousness that we are going to die, that nothing is really crucial and everything is transient can help gradually thaw out the frozen rigidities of learned behaviour, help loosen things up. Slowly, meditatively, over time it is possible to start to make choices of behaviours, attitudes, activities, and people, distancing ourselves from those we are not comfortable with, getting closer to those we like, forming a new equilibrium and becoming more comfortable with our lives and ourselves. Relationships are central to life - family, friends, colleagues, all swirl differently at different stages of life. People change, yet our relationships remain hostage to earlier impressions and dynamics. I have learnt that it is possible to reset relationships, thoughtfully, individually, with updated versions of oneself and others. The relationship can go either way as a result ... it can improve, or one can realise it's time to distance oneself. Both have happened to me, and both are a step forward. To get this in perspective, think of what your relationship to people will be in a possible afterlife...your servant, your boss, the prime minister, the beggar on the street. What will survive death, what will dissolve, what will emerge?
All this makes sense and can be done anytime, but is easiest in retirement. It’s the final lap of life when, as has happened to me, death starts to play a major hand. Compulsions arising from building our lives and our careers are absent yet we cling to old attitudes in a Pavlovian fashion. We can start to soften the 'musts' of our lives - must do, must be, must have... will it matter if we havent lived up to our musts, once we are dead? Recognise that the 'shoulds' we impose on the world are not going to change it, are part of a defective coping mechanism, are not going to outlive us, are just going to make us unhappy and uncomfortable.
With the liberating consciousness of death we can start to move in directions where our spirit and the winds of circumstance intersect. Maybe death is the secret catalyst for life, a natural way of keeping us honest about life, a plausible way of creating positive change in ourselves and our lives - otherwise a nearly impossible task. Consciousness of death is not necessarily the starting point or the only driving force for these changes, one could already be working on some of these in different ways, but it is the vector that focuses all other efforts, enhances them, makes them work.
This approach also works in a more subtle manner. While the focus is on the attitude to living, the attitude to death also changes, bringing us back full circle. The issue of death is now out in the open, no longer ignored, no longer hidden in the dark; over time fear reduces, yielding to some measure of equanimity. Also, the 'reset' of attitudes and relationships helps release regret, a big win and a fundamental need in dealing with one's own life - and death. Just don’t expect miracles, it’s all very slow, but you can feel it happening, slow, but faster and better than before.
This can sound a lot like a headlong plunge into existentialism, but it need not be. Existentialism springs from living with the knowledge that you are going to die, period. It can lead to unmitigated selfishness, as it views the here and now as all that exists. That's limiting. Dealing with both life and death has to be part of a larger, a more transcendent view of life as part of a bigger reality. I have found that spirituality and death consciousness work in harmony in dealing with life's traps. If one has some sense of the continuity of one's soul, some sense of karma, then selfishness is no longer a viable option. For selfish actions will come back to exact a price later in this life or after. If we keep that in mind, our world view will become more inclusive, more connected to others. Even current psychology and neuroscience accept that doing good for others makes us feel better. Selfishness isolates us emotionally and spiritually, making life more arid.
A belief system that doesn’t see death as a finality can also help in contemplating the death of a loved one....seeing it as a change of phase, like water evaporating. The person won't cease to exist, there will just be a change in form and dimension.
And finally faith, if you have it, provides a safe haven when coping with acts of God.
As someone said: everyone dies, but not everyone lives. Death can help with living.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Introducing SQ: Spiritual Quotient
First there was IQ, and then came EQ. When Daniel Goleman wrote 'EQ' in 1995 he brought to fruition a line of thinking started in the early 20th century that non-cognitive aspects of thinking were essential components of intelligence. Until then it was cognitive thinking such as reason and memory that dominated the field of thinking on intelligence. Yet, EQ is actually older than IQ. Emotional intelligence existed well before we, as a species, developed our IQ. It’s just that we were painfully slow to recognise its existence and importance. Today it is well accepted that EQ is critical to leverage your IQ for success.
And now comes SQ - which actually is the oldest of them all. Observe carefully and you will see evidence that everyone is born with a different level of spirituality, or spiritual quotient. Some have a truly high SQ, and it shows from a very early age. They are conscience driven, sensitive to the world around them and the sufferings of the less fortunate, and seem born with some innate sense of spiritual awareness. Others, with low SQ, range in behaviour from just lacking these qualities to being quite the opposite. And these attributes can defy birth and upbringing. A sensitive, high integrity person can grow up in a pretty rough family - and vice versa; a god loving (not god fearing, fear is used by organised religion and has little to do with spirituality) meditative person can grow up in an atheistic family. It becomes more obvious when you look at the extremes of behavior and spiritual attainment - the difference between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, Jesus and Caligula, Mother Teresa and Hitler, Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung or Stalin.
What is SQ and what determines it? To me, spirituality in its simplest terms means your connect with your creator, the understanding that reality as we know it is just a part of a larger reality, all controlled by the first cause uncaused, the prime mover unmoved - God. I have come to believe in rebirth and the theory of karma and think that SQ is actually based on accumulated karma, which leads us into the spiritual realm. In addition to the testimony of spiritual masters, there seems no other way for your SQ (or the parameters of your birth/life) to be different to anyone else’s other than accumulated karma of past lives. The spiritual realm is like another dimension to life, which can open up depending on your karma. There are other ways to develop your SQ, like intense meditation, but you cannot get good SQ with bad karma any more than you can get roses from weeds. Good karma is a pre-requisite for success in the spiritual dimension. Once we are on the right path, our karma improves and the parameters of our next birth further improve to position us for even greater spiritual success. Spiritual development ends in transcending the limited reality we live in, moving on to a much greater reality, a transcendence that has been called moksha or nirvana. And if that is the end of the spiritual path for humans, the entrance to the path is through good karma.
So if we humans have a spiritual dimension, why is the world so messed up? Why do we see so much greed, dishonesty, selfishness and evil and so little spirituality? The truth is, spirituality doesn’t come easy. It is actually quite slippery and elusive, difficult to attain, and even if attained, difficult to sustain. There are some formidable challenges that stand in the way of spiritual development.
First and foremost, we can remain totally ignorant of our SQ, and live a life of total lack of spiritual awareness, seduced by the pursuit of material and sensory comforts, perhaps even choosing wrong actions and going backwards SQ-wise. IQ comes naturally though it does require cultivation, EQ sometimes needs a little more effort, and SQ seems to require the most. It’s a strange inverse proportionality. However, a spiritual guru can help you get in touch with your spirituality. In 'Autobiography of a Yogi' Yogananda describes how his guru Lahiri was just a normal government servant (though no doubt a good human being), until his guru Babaji who he had never met before contrived to meet him and awaken his awareness of his latent, very advanced spirituality. I once met a very remarkable swami who had an unremarkable childhood, and grew up as a non-believer. After graduation in electrical engineering from Jadhavpur university in Calcutta he went on a wander around India with a bunch of his college buddies. When in the south they visited Ramana Maharshi's ashram, and he who had never bowed to anyone in his life prostrated himself before Ramana Maharshi and never left the ashram till Ramana Maharshi died. So if even people with very high SQ can be unaware of it, and can need a guru's help to get in touch with it, what about the rest of us? And while a guru's help is the easiest and surest way to get in touch with your SQ, not everyone is lucky enough to find or be found by a guru. Or maybe it is a question of having enough SQ to merit a guru - according to the Upanishads, you don’t find a true god-realised guru, he finds you.
I recently attended a 10 day vipassana course in Kathmandu. Vipassana is a buddhist practice said to be the meditation technique the Buddha developed to gain enlightenment, and it is tough. You cannot speak for 10 days, cannot make eye contact with anybody, cannot read, write, sing, hum, watch TV, listen to radio or music. You meditate about 12 hours a day stretching from 4.30 am to 9 pm. So who goes for this? Hard core buddhists looking for nirvana? Not at all. The average age of the about 100 strong group was below 30, and more than 70% were foreigners, not Indian or Nepali. Apart from buddhist Japanese, there were Russians, some of them huge hulking guys who looked like they could be KGB agents fighting James Bond, there were Brits, Americans, French, Norwegian, Chinese, a catholic priest and a muslim from a very islamic country. All these people felt some inner urge to do this course. Nothing about it was aligned to their culture or religious beliefs. It required sitting cross legged on the ground 12 hours a day. You have to wonder why they came - it couldnt be just for the novelty factor, vipassana is too tough for that. People with an undefined inner yearning for spirituality are drawn to all kinds of places and practices which they think will help them. There are any number of supposed spiritual centres and gurus with tall claims, but so many are dilettantes or frauds and actually mislead people. Finding the right spiritual path can be a pretty bewildering challenge.
Another major stumbling block in spiritual development is that getting in touch with your SQ doesnt mean you will then stay on the path of spirituality. You can easily lose the plot and barrel on in your old ways, part of the herd in the headlong pursuit of material well being by any and all means. Not that there seems to be any intrinsic clash between material well being and spirituality. Living a good life is not intrinsically spiritually bad. The question is how you pursue material success. Its the means you use that determine your karma. Spirituality isn't easy and has to be carefully, consciously cultivated. It requires a measure of dedication, rigour and discipline, otherwise it can lapse, or dissolve into ritual and superstition. People frequently lead lives fueled by selfishness, greed, and dishonesty and expect to propitiate their god through religious ritual. Religion is sadly most often the enemy of spirituality.
People on the spiritual path are not necessarily brighter than average. That can also be a hindrance, as the simple minded can be gullible and easily fall prey to ritual and superstition. But if low IQ is a handicap, so is high IQ which often seems to present a blockage born of intellectual arrogance. Yet, spiritually enlightened people do appear to be very bright and articulate, but that could in some cases be a product of enlightenment not a cause of it. SQ does after a point seem to drive IQ. In his autobiography Yogananda explains the unleashing of knowledge using techniques like meditation. And, if you want to progress spiritually, you have to consciously use SQ to drive EQ: you have to behave better with people, show greater tolerance, greater compassion, greater equanimity. That requires change in behaviour, which as we all know is far easier said than done .
Faith is a major factor in spiritual development, but the faith has to be genuine, heartfelt, not fake and self serving, not inherited or based on superstition. The faith factor is part of the problem for people with high IQ. Acceptance, even partial acceptance without upfront demonstrated proof requires a great deal of intellectual humility and is difficult, but comes quite naturally once it ‘takes’ and demonstrates its logic and validity. Faith can and does develop slowly, not all in a rush in one epiphanic 'aha' moment. Like us, faith isnt born fully grown.
Ego is actually the biggest hurdle of all, and partly drives some of the other hurdles too. Ego distances you from the rest of creation and your creator. It basically puts you at the centre of your world, a fatally false premise. That place belongs to your creator. Overcoming ego is the supreme challenge.
Meditation is definitely helpful in getting in touch with your SQ and also in developing it. Stilling the mind allows our innermost spiritual impulses to surface. At the end of the vipassana course they showed us a film of the first vipassana course run at Tihar jail in Delhi, and the alchemic change it wrought in some of the most violent of prisoners. At the end of that course there were scenes of murderers weeping like children. There were stunning 180 degree turns in the attitudes of some. One man, who had killed five men in a few minutes in a gang fight, wrote to their families begging forgiveness. He was adopted as a rakhi brother by one of the widows in time, after he started helping out the families he had harmed, while still in prison. That expression of conscience was the awakening of latent SQ – not by any teaching about right and wrong but by an intense burst of purposefully designed meditation over 10 days.
I feel that my EQ has risen since I retired (not everyone in my family agrees). In the rush and tumble of working life you can develop a crust. Spirituality is an even further horizon. Now since retirement, with unspoken help from the one who became my guru, I am getting in touch with my SQ. I have moved from agnostic to believer, and can now relate my spiritual journey to spontaneous spiritual experiences in my childhood. These experiences were intimations of the SQ I was born with and which I ignored, which I never allowed to develop, which I consigned to the recesses of my consciousness and memory during my working years - though I never forgot them. While I have had transformational help getting in touch with my SQ, it was necessary for me to retire (and thereby hangs a tale), thus stilling my mind to an extent to be able to explore the terrain of spirituality. I do not believe I could have made any sense of the Upanishads for example, while I was working. You need a sense of repose to be able to comprehend and contemplate the spiritual dimension, to get in touch with your SQ. That’s when the journey begins.
And now comes SQ - which actually is the oldest of them all. Observe carefully and you will see evidence that everyone is born with a different level of spirituality, or spiritual quotient. Some have a truly high SQ, and it shows from a very early age. They are conscience driven, sensitive to the world around them and the sufferings of the less fortunate, and seem born with some innate sense of spiritual awareness. Others, with low SQ, range in behaviour from just lacking these qualities to being quite the opposite. And these attributes can defy birth and upbringing. A sensitive, high integrity person can grow up in a pretty rough family - and vice versa; a god loving (not god fearing, fear is used by organised religion and has little to do with spirituality) meditative person can grow up in an atheistic family. It becomes more obvious when you look at the extremes of behavior and spiritual attainment - the difference between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, Jesus and Caligula, Mother Teresa and Hitler, Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung or Stalin.
What is SQ and what determines it? To me, spirituality in its simplest terms means your connect with your creator, the understanding that reality as we know it is just a part of a larger reality, all controlled by the first cause uncaused, the prime mover unmoved - God. I have come to believe in rebirth and the theory of karma and think that SQ is actually based on accumulated karma, which leads us into the spiritual realm. In addition to the testimony of spiritual masters, there seems no other way for your SQ (or the parameters of your birth/life) to be different to anyone else’s other than accumulated karma of past lives. The spiritual realm is like another dimension to life, which can open up depending on your karma. There are other ways to develop your SQ, like intense meditation, but you cannot get good SQ with bad karma any more than you can get roses from weeds. Good karma is a pre-requisite for success in the spiritual dimension. Once we are on the right path, our karma improves and the parameters of our next birth further improve to position us for even greater spiritual success. Spiritual development ends in transcending the limited reality we live in, moving on to a much greater reality, a transcendence that has been called moksha or nirvana. And if that is the end of the spiritual path for humans, the entrance to the path is through good karma.
So if we humans have a spiritual dimension, why is the world so messed up? Why do we see so much greed, dishonesty, selfishness and evil and so little spirituality? The truth is, spirituality doesn’t come easy. It is actually quite slippery and elusive, difficult to attain, and even if attained, difficult to sustain. There are some formidable challenges that stand in the way of spiritual development.
First and foremost, we can remain totally ignorant of our SQ, and live a life of total lack of spiritual awareness, seduced by the pursuit of material and sensory comforts, perhaps even choosing wrong actions and going backwards SQ-wise. IQ comes naturally though it does require cultivation, EQ sometimes needs a little more effort, and SQ seems to require the most. It’s a strange inverse proportionality. However, a spiritual guru can help you get in touch with your spirituality. In 'Autobiography of a Yogi' Yogananda describes how his guru Lahiri was just a normal government servant (though no doubt a good human being), until his guru Babaji who he had never met before contrived to meet him and awaken his awareness of his latent, very advanced spirituality. I once met a very remarkable swami who had an unremarkable childhood, and grew up as a non-believer. After graduation in electrical engineering from Jadhavpur university in Calcutta he went on a wander around India with a bunch of his college buddies. When in the south they visited Ramana Maharshi's ashram, and he who had never bowed to anyone in his life prostrated himself before Ramana Maharshi and never left the ashram till Ramana Maharshi died. So if even people with very high SQ can be unaware of it, and can need a guru's help to get in touch with it, what about the rest of us? And while a guru's help is the easiest and surest way to get in touch with your SQ, not everyone is lucky enough to find or be found by a guru. Or maybe it is a question of having enough SQ to merit a guru - according to the Upanishads, you don’t find a true god-realised guru, he finds you.
I recently attended a 10 day vipassana course in Kathmandu. Vipassana is a buddhist practice said to be the meditation technique the Buddha developed to gain enlightenment, and it is tough. You cannot speak for 10 days, cannot make eye contact with anybody, cannot read, write, sing, hum, watch TV, listen to radio or music. You meditate about 12 hours a day stretching from 4.30 am to 9 pm. So who goes for this? Hard core buddhists looking for nirvana? Not at all. The average age of the about 100 strong group was below 30, and more than 70% were foreigners, not Indian or Nepali. Apart from buddhist Japanese, there were Russians, some of them huge hulking guys who looked like they could be KGB agents fighting James Bond, there were Brits, Americans, French, Norwegian, Chinese, a catholic priest and a muslim from a very islamic country. All these people felt some inner urge to do this course. Nothing about it was aligned to their culture or religious beliefs. It required sitting cross legged on the ground 12 hours a day. You have to wonder why they came - it couldnt be just for the novelty factor, vipassana is too tough for that. People with an undefined inner yearning for spirituality are drawn to all kinds of places and practices which they think will help them. There are any number of supposed spiritual centres and gurus with tall claims, but so many are dilettantes or frauds and actually mislead people. Finding the right spiritual path can be a pretty bewildering challenge.
Another major stumbling block in spiritual development is that getting in touch with your SQ doesnt mean you will then stay on the path of spirituality. You can easily lose the plot and barrel on in your old ways, part of the herd in the headlong pursuit of material well being by any and all means. Not that there seems to be any intrinsic clash between material well being and spirituality. Living a good life is not intrinsically spiritually bad. The question is how you pursue material success. Its the means you use that determine your karma. Spirituality isn't easy and has to be carefully, consciously cultivated. It requires a measure of dedication, rigour and discipline, otherwise it can lapse, or dissolve into ritual and superstition. People frequently lead lives fueled by selfishness, greed, and dishonesty and expect to propitiate their god through religious ritual. Religion is sadly most often the enemy of spirituality.
People on the spiritual path are not necessarily brighter than average. That can also be a hindrance, as the simple minded can be gullible and easily fall prey to ritual and superstition. But if low IQ is a handicap, so is high IQ which often seems to present a blockage born of intellectual arrogance. Yet, spiritually enlightened people do appear to be very bright and articulate, but that could in some cases be a product of enlightenment not a cause of it. SQ does after a point seem to drive IQ. In his autobiography Yogananda explains the unleashing of knowledge using techniques like meditation. And, if you want to progress spiritually, you have to consciously use SQ to drive EQ: you have to behave better with people, show greater tolerance, greater compassion, greater equanimity. That requires change in behaviour, which as we all know is far easier said than done .
Faith is a major factor in spiritual development, but the faith has to be genuine, heartfelt, not fake and self serving, not inherited or based on superstition. The faith factor is part of the problem for people with high IQ. Acceptance, even partial acceptance without upfront demonstrated proof requires a great deal of intellectual humility and is difficult, but comes quite naturally once it ‘takes’ and demonstrates its logic and validity. Faith can and does develop slowly, not all in a rush in one epiphanic 'aha' moment. Like us, faith isnt born fully grown.
Ego is actually the biggest hurdle of all, and partly drives some of the other hurdles too. Ego distances you from the rest of creation and your creator. It basically puts you at the centre of your world, a fatally false premise. That place belongs to your creator. Overcoming ego is the supreme challenge.
Meditation is definitely helpful in getting in touch with your SQ and also in developing it. Stilling the mind allows our innermost spiritual impulses to surface. At the end of the vipassana course they showed us a film of the first vipassana course run at Tihar jail in Delhi, and the alchemic change it wrought in some of the most violent of prisoners. At the end of that course there were scenes of murderers weeping like children. There were stunning 180 degree turns in the attitudes of some. One man, who had killed five men in a few minutes in a gang fight, wrote to their families begging forgiveness. He was adopted as a rakhi brother by one of the widows in time, after he started helping out the families he had harmed, while still in prison. That expression of conscience was the awakening of latent SQ – not by any teaching about right and wrong but by an intense burst of purposefully designed meditation over 10 days.
I feel that my EQ has risen since I retired (not everyone in my family agrees). In the rush and tumble of working life you can develop a crust. Spirituality is an even further horizon. Now since retirement, with unspoken help from the one who became my guru, I am getting in touch with my SQ. I have moved from agnostic to believer, and can now relate my spiritual journey to spontaneous spiritual experiences in my childhood. These experiences were intimations of the SQ I was born with and which I ignored, which I never allowed to develop, which I consigned to the recesses of my consciousness and memory during my working years - though I never forgot them. While I have had transformational help getting in touch with my SQ, it was necessary for me to retire (and thereby hangs a tale), thus stilling my mind to an extent to be able to explore the terrain of spirituality. I do not believe I could have made any sense of the Upanishads for example, while I was working. You need a sense of repose to be able to comprehend and contemplate the spiritual dimension, to get in touch with your SQ. That’s when the journey begins.
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