Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Spirituality in my daily life

Most of us read spirituality and understand intellectually what it is trying to say. But then an issue that haunts us is that the goal of spirituality appears so distant as to almost make it useless to try and practice the principles of spirituality. I used to think similarly till I started noticing the impact of these spiritual teachings on my life.

Bereavement

My father expired when I was about 37 years old. I was devastated and for several years kept on thinking of the circumstances leading to his death and used to weep inconsolably. A decade later, I lost my mother. But somehow things were different. I did weep as is natural. But calmness came over me pretty quickly. After those initial days of grief, I almost never cried again for my mother. It was the same me who had lost a father earlier and a mother later. But my reaction and the time to get back to normalcy were radically different.

The thing that happened in the interregnum was my involvement with spirituality. As I attended the course on The Vedanta Treatise, one of the lessons that stuck in my mind was about the Life principle which is eternal and the doctrine that we take a body shape to meet our desires and once the body no more meets the need to fulfill desires, the body is dropped and we take a new body. This is also told in the Bhagwad Gita. So I thought and reasoned to myself that my mother saw no more use of her body to meet her desires and had to take a new body to fulfill her desires. Who was I to grieve over the fact that somebody had left a painful village to be in a decent city? That was the intellectual crutch that helped lessen the impact of her death. Secondly, the other concept of spirituality is that whatever we normally do has either a clear selfish motive or certainly an underlying selfishness. Now why did I want my aged, diabetes stricken mother to live? It was because she was a source of happiness for me. Since she was an object that was giving ME the subject happiness by her presence, I wanted her to live inspite of her illness. Once I realized that my source of grief was really because my selfish desire to feel emotionally happy in her presence, the grief was gone. This was the second crutch that helped lessen the grief.

So between the two crutches of the intellectual realization that only the body changed and not the Life principle and the realization that the source of grief was my underlying selfishness, both of which are key spiritual concepts, I could manage the death of a parent.

Loss of a job

I lost a stable job in the aftermath of the dotcom crash and was extremely tensed up. I was jobless for almost a year. Somehow nothing seemed to be working out. I used to get very angry with my family members who bore the brunt of my tension. I used to throw things around in utter rage and have even broken a remote! The TV display did not break because of my lousy aim! I used to hesitate to meet people and kept up a façade of claiming that I was self-employed.

Several years later, the Great Recession took its toll and I was again unemployed. This time I had bigger financial responsibilities; a child in college, a bigger house and my wife was not even working. But in this round, I was calm. I was smiling and mixing around with people. I had no hesitation telling people that I was downsized. The interview requests came like a flood and offers came likewise. Though I was several years older in a market, which was brutal, I had come off this round of unemployment with flying colors.

Again the agent of change was my awareness of spirituality. Spirituality taught me that every situation that I found myself in was a result of some action I had done earlier in this life or before. No tree is without a seed and a mango tree does not grow from an orange seed. So I knew that this situation was not to blame anyone including myself. The main lesson was that in every situation I have to act without getting overwhelmed by a situation. The next lesson regarding how to act was told in the Gita, which said, do the right action without worrying about the fruit of action. So I just kept doing the right action of applying for jobs without for a moment worrying whether it would be successful or not. I went into interviews with the right attitude that I had to do a good job of the interview. But whether I get a job or not is not in my hand. So I focused just on the task and executed it as well as I could and the results followed.

Performing a boring task

When I was working in one of the software companies, as I was using the company’s product I came across a bug. It was not my duty to report the bug. Nothing would have happened to me if I did not report. Reporting the bug was a painful process and in normal circumstances I would not have reported. But then spirituality’s key lesson is unselfishness and doing the right thing, which can help the common good. So I reasoned to myself that reporting this serious bug would help a set of developers and support people from serious customer issues later. So in that spirit of doing something for the common good, I reported the bug.

Facing a nasty passenger

I was traveling in the train once and as I was walking, my bag touched a passenger. It touched some raw nerve in him and he started cursing me using absolutely foul language. Whatever names he called me, I just responded with a YOU. He was a big man almost double my size and I would have been beaten to pulp if he had gone violent. I got down from the train and all the choice curses came to my mind as I walked to office. Then the next teaching of spirituality struck me. People behave in a particular manner because of the predisposition of their 3 gunas (an earlier post of mine). Spirituality teaches us to accept people as they are and not hate the people doing an act, which I do not like. I would not fault a tiger for killing a young calf because I know that cruelty is the tiger’s innate behavior and it cannot do anything. So also, the crassness and foulness of this person probably was innate and he was a helpless victim of his inner urges and had no control over what he did. So rather than cursing him, I forgot the incident, walked into a roadside church and prayed for him and his family. This level of self control and the attitude of letting things go would not have come but for my awareness of spiritual principles.

So in all the situations above I have tried to illustrate how spirituality is helping me cope with difficult situations in my life giving me a calmer life. What better current benefit can any study give? So spirituality in addition to being intellectually stimulating with a promise of endless bliss is also helping to make my current life better.

As readers may be aware, 3 of my books on spirituality are available on Amazon.com.

I invite readers of my blog to try any of the books and give me feedback so that I can make changes in the next edition.

1. My Humble Understanding Of Spirituality

My Humble Understanding Of Spirituality