This Disgusting Feeling

This Disgusting Feeling

It’s 12:10 am midnight, I am in my room, not feeling very sleepy yet and not even in a very good mood to watch a movie on laptop. In this dilemma of what should I do with my time, I realized I have not been studying since two weeks, I have some very crucial exams on scheduled in a month and here I am wandering and wasting my time.

So the strange thing it occurred to me why the hell I am not studying, what’s keeping me away from my studies, from my books? Although I have every prerequisites for a proper study, books, food at time, in good health. On narrowing down all the excuses, it occurred that all the excuses I was trying to put were superficial or not reasonable. In short I was not able to find one genuine excuse which should keep me away from my books. So what’s it that keeping me away from books.

I guess this is the same feeling which, the same cause which is not letting hundreds of students study. A virtual barrier or infact a mental barrier which gives this disgusted disliking feeling to even touch our books. Even if we touch the book and leap through some problems/pages there’s this call somewhere inside our mind, a pull down which cry loud in our head stop … stop … Stop studying and we throw away our book away and resort to easier task like whatsapp and facebook.

We must understand that this mental barrier which keeps us away from our books are not worst than our greatest enemy. We are bogged down by this feeling, by this poison. We have become a slave of this disgusted feeling.

There was this analogy, may be in some movie I am not sure, that there are two kinds of dogs in us. Good and Bad one. The more we feed the good dog (Feeling, Stimuli) the stronger it becomes. Now if we let down ourselves again and again ruthlessly by this disgust feeling, which keeps us away from our books, hence from our goals. We are unconsciously feeding this bad dog and making it stronger day by day.

Until one day we become salve of such feeling,

Until one day we wander here and there like a lost soul with no sense of direction and time,

 Wasting our days into months and sometimes even years,

Until one day we have no control over our senses,

Until one day we have surrendered ourselves and gave up.

But winners are those who break such barriers repeatedly each time they occur until that disgust feeling is no more, that pull down is vanished completely.

Moreover it is also found that the monotonous way of our studying 

A story with Vipassana

A story with Vipassana

Vipassana is one of Meditation technique that was actually used by Buddha to get Enlightenment. Before I explain what’s the core philosophy of it, it is important to mention that one of organisation which have preserved this tradition (of meditation) exactly it was around 2500 years back is Goenka organisation. Which at present is operating all around the world completely on Donations from the followers.

It was one of those time when you are fed up with the monotony and you have this big requirement of a refresh, kindof formatting our system, provided all the old drivers are saved J

Joining the Goenka centre is very easy, we have to register in the upcoming course (10 days) in their simple yet effective website. And then we’ll get a confirmation reply from them whether they have seat available or not.

Before we jump to the meditation technique one more important thing to understand is one of Buddhist core philosophy i.e Anicha (In pali) and in Mahayana tradition this philosohpy is called “Impermanent nature of reality” It says .. all conditioned existence without exception is in constant state of flux, in lay man’s language everything in this world is impermanent, in a state of change..Whether it is material or an emotion it is completely impermanent. (It’s a good news!!). One analogy could be a light from a Fluorescent bulbs, to our naked eye it appears to be a constant light but in reality it is blinking at 40 khz per second i.e 40,000 blinks in one second it’s continuously changing but it appears to be constant light to our naked eye.

So cutting further crap lets jump to the core process to which we call Vipassana. It is a meditation technique where we focus on our thoughts; any thought could be a positive or negative one. In our everyday life if a thought is positive (or pleasing) we tend to cling on it for more because it makes us feel good. A positive thought could be a desire for a choclate to thought of some sensual pleasure or something else which makes us become slave of it by clinging on to it, and negative (Unpleasant) thought could be dislike for a particular person, place, thing or a feeling to a thought which is so unpleasant that we better not think of it,  which completely shakes us or takes us into some darkness, so in our daily life when we come across such negative feelings we tend to avoid it.

So when we sit for Vipassana meditation, when these two thoughts come into our mind. Unlike our everyday life neither we cling to positive (pleasant) feeling/thoughts for more nor we avoid or shoo away the negative (unpleasant) feeling. We just let it come to us and observe it. We let it stay, without attaching or detaching from it, knowing both the thoughts can’t stay forever based on Buddha’s (or nature’s) “ Impermanent nature of reality”. We try to be equanimous on this pleasant and unpleasent thoughts (sensations they call) giving a neutral reaction to it.

So in very short this is what Vipassana is all about giving a neutral (equanimous as they call) reaction to these thoughts, living in complete equanimity. So that next time in our mundane life, when we come across both unpleasant and pleasant we can maintain an equanimous life i.e not easily elated or depressed.

So next time when we face serious/shocking news or accident we can have a calmer reaction to it, or when we get this job you always dreamed for we will not get too excited with it and handle it with a calm mind. 

Arvind Kejriwal of AAP is practioner of Vipassana, atleast that we can make out by his calmness, Abhinav Bindra (Indian famed shooter) is also very old practiioner of Vipassana, SECMOL Sonam Wangchuk also practice Vipassana, Priyanka Gandhi Vadara and there are many who are serious practioner of Vipassana.