Zen: The Art of Nothing

One of my students over time, kept asking for recommendations on what to read or watch and finally compiled a list of everything on my request. It’s not just spiritual stuff, since I’d also share anything I enjoyed, or in case of books, a couple which I hadn’t read but came highly recommended. So in case you’ve been wondering what I like to read or watch, here’s a list of stuff I enjoy, not listed in any particular order.

Books:

Spiritual Fiction/ Romance
Chocolat- Joanne Harris
Shantaram – Gregory Davis Roberts (not a traditionally spiritual book, this is fiction but so many powerful underlying lessons)
Whip of the Wild god- Mira Prabhu (this is for you if you love Shiva)
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The Witch of Portobello – Paulo Coelho
Brida – Paulo Coelho
The Forty Rules of Love- Elif Shafaq

Fiction
Before We Visit the Goddess – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (a magical book that takes you through 3 generations)
Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens (I lived in this book for the 3 days I read it. Real world felt like fiction)
The Illicit Happiness of Other People – Manu Joseph – (an excellent book with a crazy brilliance)
Perry Mason and Donald Lam series
P.G. Wodehouse series

Romance
The Red-Haired Woman- Orhan Pamuk
Love Story – Eric Segal
Acts of Faith- Eric Segal
The Bridges of Madison County – Robert James Waller

Soul Journeys
Destiny of Souls – Michael Newton
Life Between Lives – Michael Newton
Journey Of Souls – Michael Newton
Memories of the afterlife – Michael Newton
You have been here before – Edith Fiore Ph.D.
Life afterlife, The light beyond- Dr. Raymond Moody

Spiritual
The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle
Tao Te Ching- Lao Tzu

Mind/ Psychology/ Self-Work
Your Erroneous Zones- Dr. Wayne Dyer (This is the first book that changed my life)
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – Lindsay C. Gibson
Metaphors we live by – George Lakoff
The Dark Side of the Light Chasers – Debbie Ford
Nonviolent Communication – Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD
The Intelligence Paradox – Satoshi Kanazawa – Very important to read if you identify with your intelligence
Becoming Indian – Pavan Varma – a highly essential read for every Indian
Mind to Matter – Dawson Church
The Road Less Traveled – Scott Peck

Science + Spirituality
Code Name God- Mani Bhaumik
The Yoga of Time Travel- Alan Wolf (Truly eye opening, the science is just so easy to read)
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins (only buy this if you are comfortable with boring scientific language)

Healing/ Pharma
Anatomy of an Illness – Norman Cousins
Side Effect: Death: Confessions of a Pharma Insider – John Virapen (Download)
Anatomy of an Illness – Normal Cousins (ask me for pdf)
Blinded by Science (Download)

Movies:

Spiritual/ Esoteric:
The Peaceful Warrior (all time favourite)
Lucy
Kumare (HIGHLY recommend this!)
Push
Soul

Magical Movies (just the energy of it)
Chocolat
The Book Thief
The Hundred-Foot Journey
August Rush
Wild Target
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (I blissed out for 3 days after this lol)

Intense:
Interstellar
Gravity
Black
Fashion

Other Favorites:
Bridge of Spies
A Beautiful Day in the neighborhood
The Imitation Game
Dangerous Beauty
Intouchables
Burlesque
Karate Kid (love both versions)
The Devil Wears Prada (I rarely watch movies a second time, this I’ve watched many times)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Pocahontas

Series:

1) Lucifer (all time favorite)
2) Made in Heaven
3) The Trip
4) White Collar
5) Castle
6) Nikita
7) Proof
8) Criminal Minds
9) The Mentalist
10) Lie to me
11) Sherlock
12) Big Bang Theory
13) Young Sheldon
14) Blind Spot
15) Boston Legal
16) Modern Love
17) Alias (the first few seasons, though I don’t know if this is still available)
18) Beastmaster (also a childhood favourite, probably not available lol, but I had to put it in here)

Nothing is insignificant – a little burn on a small but critical area of my hand has limited so much movement, I would never have otherwise been grateful for these tiny muscles and the stretchiness of this part of my hand – I didn’t know that it was that central to my existence, my functioning. So while on the one hand i do believe that nobody is irreplaceable, this has taught me that nothing is really replaceable either.

And if you ever feel like you might be useless or dispensable in the world, just remember that the injury of a tiny never-thought-of muscle in one’s body can render a person quite dysfunctional sometimes. (PS: Nothing to worry, I am fine now, this happened a week ago and it has healed a lot)

The second one pertains to the good-bad people business, I just wanted to share because I know a lot of us here struggle with identifying the people in our lives that put us at some sort of risk. I realised that this had to do with my ‘good-person syndrome’. I knew that certain people were…. not good. But I judged myself for labeling them as bad, which prevented me from actually being in touch with reality, and therefore made me careless around people I should have exercised caution around.

I guess it was my own lack of understanding around the fact that nothing is replaceable, but also that not everything is ‘equal’ and interchangeable. Shit has its place – but in the garden, not on your porch. Fresh fruits belong on your plate, not as decorative items in your showcase. In the wrong place and the wrong association, everything is toxic.

This is how we allow for toxic relationships in our own lives, creating space for US becoming toxic to others – by not assessing properly if a person belongs in our lives or whether it’s a bad combination. Could be a person. Could be a habit. Could be things we ingest, like food or information. The wise thing to do is to exercise discernment and not be afraid of calling a spade a spade, while not judging it at the same time for being what it is.

One of the confusions we can sometimes have is ‘how could this person behave like this?’ – when the ‘good’ people in our life turn out to be harmful to us in some way.

This I’ve mentioned before – there are two kinds of ‘good’ people – those who are good because they genuinely care, and those who are good because they’re afraid to be bad – and almost all ‘good’ people fall under the second category. And this is the key when we get hurt by the good people in our lives, and also when we end up hurting people.

Why are the good people good and the bad people bad? It is simply conditioning, their core is both the same. The ‘good’ people learned as children that they can use people better by being nice to them, by smiling, by being kind and polite. This pattern is reinforced a lot more strongly if being sweet was a way to escape punishment or abuse. ‘Bad’ people are simply those who got their way and escape some level of abuse through a display of aggression. So we’re all just slaves to our patterns – this is why bad people find it hard to be good – because as a child when they were good, they got punished for it, and good people find it hard to be bad (as in, be aggressive in the right circumstances, stand up for themselves, etc) because that was punished and is still scary. Do you see now how we’re all exactly the same?

You’re different if your emotions don’t sway you. Look at your biggest weakness – If you feel hatred but don’t act on that hatred (and feel that hatred instead of suppressing, of course), if you get angry but choose not to act on your anger, if you feel afraid but speak up for yourself regardless… THEN you have progressed. Otherwise we are barely different from the ‘bad’ people we know.

Anyhow the insight was… we have our patterns, and we seek out people who accommodate and feed those patterns in a way that makes us comfortable. What we actually end up doing is choosing the ‘good’ people who are good due to fear. We assume goodness here, but really it’s just disguised selfishness, because the person will turn, for sure, when there is a conflict of interest. (We’re the same that’s why we attract them, no need to judge them for this). If we want to get out of this, there are two steps –

1) Learn to love ourselves more deeply. This means standing up for ourselves, and doing whatever is needed for our physical, mental and spiritual upkeep and maintenance. When we love ourselves more, we can love others more sincerely.

2) Learning to identify fear-based goodness from love-based goodness within ourselves – this helps us discern it better in others too.

I hope this also clarifies why so many teachers including Eckhart Tolle say that the ‘bad’ people are more likely to make progress on the spiritual pathway because they have more incentive to disassociate from their crap personality. The ‘good’ people love who they are and represent, so much less incentive here.

Yesterday in my Contemplation group, there was a question requesting a clarification of my statement ‘Greater love brings greater responsibility’. How, they asked.Does it mean responsibility in relationships? But I wasn’t talking about external responsibilities at all.

I have maintained for a long time, that the reason we are not better, bigger, happier individuals is because we don’t want to take on the responsibility that comes with being that better person. What responsibility am I talking about?

Do you want to be healthier? If you overeat, eat junk food, don’t exercise properly, you haven’t taken responsibility for your body.

Do you want to be happier? If you indulge in negative thinking, gossiping, social media addiction and news watching, you haven’t taken responsibility for your mind.

Do you want to be more emotionally stable? If you allow crap relationships into your life, you haven’t taken the responsibility for your emotional well-being.

Do you want to be more present? If you waste time, you haven’t taken responsibility for your existence.

Do you want to ‘have’ more? If you ignore things that need fixing, you haven’t taken responsibility for what you possess.

Do you want to be more free, spacious and expanded? If your spiritual practice is not strong, then you haven’t taken responsibility for your spiritual well-being.

Greatness lies on the other side of that responsibility we’ve been avoiding till now.

I’ve had discussions with young as well as old people in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve found one disturbing trend that I want to talk about.

I’m finding that people imagine they’ll live until 60ish. Now, unless you die an accidental death or you came here with a really short life plan, chances are high that you’ll cross 100. Right now the average life span of the wealthy Indian is easily 80-90. What do you think that number will be in another 50 years? We’re likely to hit 120 easily. The only question is, are you going to spend the second half of your life healthy or sick.

If you live as if you’re going to die at 60, you will still energetically die – you age faster, you’re more careless with your body, and you’re going to have a lot less energy. And when you hit 60, ‘life’ is over. So you’re essentially living as a corpse.

If you want to be healthy till you die, wake up. You’ve got to approach life asking yourself, how would I treat my body if I had another 80 years to live? Because you likely do. You’ll leave your body only when the time comes, regardless of how badly you want to die. But you might stop living many years before that happens, if you are not careful and sincere about your journey.

Here’s a question I received on my student group recently – I’m curious about if astrology can be used to recommend certain types of sadhana to people. What would be a framework for that?

Also about consistency in sadhana. Whether a single path should be followed or a combination of things depending on one’s nature and situation. What does commitment to a sadhana entail?

Sadhana can be of many types -even atheists are often on a spiritual pathway, following karma yoga (when they are sincere in believing work is worship and doing their best to grow as a person, they are on the spiritual pathway even though they may say I don’t believe in God). At the same time the most ‘devout’ sadhak might be completely off-track because he has relinquished all responsibility and thinks the sadhana is enough and that his own personal effort on a day to day basis is not needed.

So if you want to know whether raja yoga, bhakti yoga, karma yoga or jnana yoga is the best path for you, astrology can help, but if you need astrology for this kind of guidance, then maybe you are not really ready for a spiritual pathway because it would indicate a very poor knowledge of oneself. It should be obvious by this age which one you are most drawn to, based on your temperament. Most of us use a combination, but one might be predominant.

What you are probably referring to as sadhana is probably a raja yoga or a bhakti yoga practice. This, yes an astrologer can help you especially if it is a Bhakti yoga practice, because you would have a pre-disposition towards certain deities and will progress faster if you are turning to them for help. But there again, if you are ready for a serious practice, you will already be praying to them because you’ll just feel drawn.

Consistency is highly essential. Regardless of whether you are following a single path or a combination, you would still need a strong daily consistent practice. Doing one thing today and something else tomorrow is not going to take you anywhere, doing new things all the time, again pretty useless. Pick one thing and stick with it. It is possible that you might find new tools that you might use for a short while and then discard, but you’ll need to have a level of awareness to be able to tell the difference between distraction and enhancement. That would need brutal honesty with the self, something I see as a very critical element of one’s spiritual practice, without which one is going to really get mis-led.

Yesterday my yoga teacher compared Dhritarashtra with the blind mind, and Gandhari, the intellect, blinds itself in service to a stupidly blind mind. This is how most of us live. The pathway involves opening our eyes and what we start to see is not pretty at all, it is frequently depressing for most of us and many times the truth is just going to make you realise what a horrible person you can sometimes be. So willing to be honest with yourself regardless of the consequences is the most important element along with a strong daily practice, in my opinion. The rest will fall into place.

You can be drawn to something on account of your nature but need a balancing counterpoint you aren’t drawn to. What to do about this?

Yeah that’s where I find a guru to be the most valuable. It’s not just a counter-point, it is also little things we forget. In my experience a guru/ teacher is needed more than anything else to simply remind you of the basics over and over again. I remember for the first 2 years every time I reached out to Jacqueline (my spiritual teacher), she would say the same thing. ‘Don’t mistake the weather for the sky of your being’, ‘everything that comes and goes is not who you are’. That’s it. I felt so ashamed after 6-7 times, that you value this woman so much and yet you cannot even remember the ONE thing she teaches. But I’d still forget. My students forget too, ultimately I’m saying the same thing to people over and over again.

The second thing that a teacher can do is to correct you when needed. There will be times when you go off-track and a good tight slap (metaphorically speaking) in those circumstances is a significant boon. This is what I loved about her the most – that she’d very easily very non-judgmentally and yet very firmly point out my nonsense.

So I think it is not so much on account of the sadhana – because we can always find a way to work around things and make them more ‘pleasant’, but a teacher who’s there to kick you back on to the track when you’re going astray. If you keep your eyes on the goal (brutal honesty) then sooner or later you’ll find your way back. If you’re more dedicated to defending your demons, then sooner or later, even with the best teachers, you will find your way back to blindness.

Q: We keep hearing that everything that comes our way – be it people, a phone call or anything, has a purpose for us, a place in our journey. Are these things always for our good?

Yeah I think of it like this – are you zooming in or zooming out when looking at the ‘picture’ of life. When you zoom out completely – look at all of life in totality, across all time and all space, nothing matters. Everything is perfect exactly as it is, in complete balance.

The more you zoom in, the more things change. Spiritual growth is the journey of learning to zoom out more. Your capacity for maximum zooming out is your.. let’s say.. spiritual quotient. If you’re living life very zoomed in, your vision is very narrow and you can end up suffering a lot. However, you cannot live ‘zoomed out’. Because if you really zoom out, it doesn’t matter if there is no salt in your food. It doesn’t matter if you go to work in your pyjamas. It doesn’t matter if you lose your job, get divorced, lose a loved one, etc. Even if we are stuck in 50 cycles of repeating the same painful story, it’s all fine in the larger picture. But when we zoom in, there is always a possibility to improve and learn faster.

Zooming out, we are learning, we are experiencing. Zooming in, we want to make things as comfortable as we can. It is between these two that the balance lies. This is why I love the proverb ‘Grant us the courage to change what we can, the serenity to accept what we can’t, and the wisdom to tell the difference’.

So… this is something I’ve been I’ve been chewing on for quite a while and I got clarity today.

ANGER

When you’re fuming, are you angry or are you outraged? I’ve had a tough time explaining the difference, but I’ve also known they’re very different. Here’s my understanding of it.

Anger is the energy of change. Something is happening that makes you uncomfortable; you want to trigger a change, you get angry. Of course if you can witness that anger and come from a space of peace, you get much better results, but this is the energy that suggests that change is needed, and comes up with the energy needed to facilitate it. Anger is sharp, light, hot, and fades quickly. Like fire.

RAGE

Rage is heavy, intense, hot and long lasting. Like molten lava.
When you have been allowed to express anger as a child, you learn that anger is enough to facilitate change. You get angry – some even make this a habit because they’re erroneously learned that anger is the only possible agent of change. But when your anger as a child was suppressed – if you were punished for your anger or not allowed to feel or express your anger, then that anger turns to rage. You learn that there are only two choices – to suffer or to make the other person suffer. So your anger does not abate when you have your way, you need to see the other person in pain in order to feel safe. You might have fantasies of hurting other people if this is what you experience. Rage happens when your power was significantly taken away as a child and you have not yet reintegrated it.

You can experience a combination of both, experiencing rage in certain aspects of your life while expressing anger in other aspects. Both parts can benefit from healing, but the approach needs to be slightly different. Look at power issues for healing rage, and look at healing violation/ helplessness/ humiliation. For healing anger, look at feelings of injustice, discomfort and irritation.

When I head the term ‘motivational speaker’, I’m always amused. A person who needs to be motivated is clearly stuck doing something highly unpleasant, because otherwise he/she would have done it without motivation.

Motivation and will power are tools used by people who have objectified themselves. Those who are ‘in alignment’ – they want to do what is good for them because they care for themselves enough. It is when you don’t care about yourself enough that you need external rewards – and motivational speakers to remind you of potential rewards. Essentially you’re still stuck with the carrot-stick parenting you were raised with.

You haven’t resolved your relationship with your parents, so you’re still stuck with the ‘inner parent’ telling you what to do and the ‘wounded inner child’ protesting and focusing on the immediate rewards. And as long as these two parts of you are fighting, the one that wins is the one who has the most incentive. Hence motivation – incentivise the inner child.

‘Living in alignment’ on the other hand – what does that mean? It means your body, mind and spirit function as one unit, not separate parts all trying to use and bully the other into doing something. Do you stand in front of the buffet spread on a full stomach and try to resist that extra piece of cake? That’s you out of alignment. When there’s alignment, there will be no desire. And it’s actually not that hard to get there – although a sincere effort is key.

When you’re living in alignment, you do things because they’re good for you, and you enjoy doing them, even if they are momentarily unpleasant. Motivation is not required, because there’s inner motivation ‘this is good for me/ this is the right thing to do’. When you push yourself through will power, you either hurt yourself directly or indirectly, either by injuring yourself or relationships in some way, or by getting sick as a result of the inner friction you are constantly living with.

So the next time you find yourself stuck in an inner conflict, just pause a moment and ask yourself “What would I have done if I really loved me and wanted the best for me?” and for the long term, heal your inner child, and learn to love yourself more deeply. Because it truly is worth it.

We all know that the external world is a reflection of our inner world. But the opposite is also true. We construct our inner world based on the information we receive from the external world. And this is a problem, because no matter what information we receive, that is not who we are.

None of us can see ourselves – none of us knows exactly what we look like, physically, emotionally, etc. So we use mirrors to determine where we stand and what we’re worth. So when others perceive us as ugly, we think Oh, I’m ugly. When others hurt us, we think Oh, I deserve to be hurt. And this is ESPECIALLY true for us when we’re children. It’s also true for a lot of adults because most adults are still just little children in big bodies. Most people tend to still base their self-worth on what others think of them, or they become rebels and invite judgment – both are equally dependent on opinions.

But you know what, the issue was never that you got judged, or abandoned, or wounded by someone else. When you go deep enough you realise that the real problem is that you decided to judge, abandon or wound yourself when it happened. Whenever I’ve asked a distressed client in the heat of the moment, to simply hug themselves and tell themselves “I love you, I am here for you no matter what” and to mean it, it’s led to a flood of tears. Because you miss no one more than you.

So the next time you feel alone and abandoned, just hug yourself and say the magic words. And mean it. And cry, cry and cry. Until you smile.