Mindfulness: Connecting with the Real You

Preface

‘D

o you have something that will help me stop my thinking?’ asked a participant in my workshop on innovation. He then added, ‘On my way home after work, I am still in the office mentally even after an hour’s drive. When my mind is so full of thoughts, how do you expect me to be creative?’ This question was one of the triggers to start thinking of a workshop addressing a mind that is full of wasteful thoughts.

This was 2014. By this time, it had been almost two decades since I began a journey of self-discovery. I have vague memories of this period. I was a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in computer science at the State University of New York, Buffalo, United States. My PhD work was in the final phase, there was no coursework, and perhaps there was more time to reflect. I began to read books on philosophy and spirituality. One book that created a lasting impression was Freedom from the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti.¹ My father, after his retirement, was studying Krishnamurti’s teachings and he had given the book to me. I remember borrowing a few more Krishnamurti books from the university library and reading them. The Krishnamurti quote ‘Truth is a pathless land’² has stayed with me since then.

Another Krishnamurti book I remember reading like a thriller is The Ending of Time.³ It is a dialogue between Krishnamurti and David Bohm, a physicist. On the first page of the first chapter, Krishnamurti makes a bold claim. He says that the process of becoming could be the root cause of human suffering. I must have taken the claim to be a serious possibility because I was able to see how my journey till then was actually about becoming somebody—a researcher, a person of reputation and so on. How could this sense of becoming be the cause of conflict? I was not sure but a seed of suspicion was sown.

I finished my PhD and moved to Austin, Texas where I got a job. Soon my wife Gauri found a job there as well. The dual income put us in a financially comfortable situation. In Austin, I read Wholeness and the Implicate Order by Bohm,⁴ the same person whose dialogue with Krishnamurti I had read earlier. Bohm’s presentation style appealed to me for multiple reasons. One, coming from a scientific background, his language was relatable. Second, he had an excellent way of using scientific experiments as visual metaphors to explain abstract concepts like implicate order. Little did I know that within a decade some of the experiments Bohm presented in the book would be freely available in the form of videos on the internet.

During our two-year stay in Austin I got introduced to the teachings of two masters of Advaita, or the spiritual tradition of non-duality, from India—Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta Maharaj. I was deeply moved by the dialogues in the book Talks with Ramana Maharshi.⁵ While answering questions posed by visitors to his ashram in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu Ramana Maharshi kept hammering the same point—self-awareness is more important than world improvement and self-improvement. In fact, according to Ramana Maharshi, everything is ever perfect. This view was very different from what I experienced. However, looking back, I was ready to consider it a possibility.

After two years in Austin, we moved to Bangalore, India with our six-month-old son. Over the next decade, I got busy with corporate and family life, and self-discovery took a back seat. Over the years, I got promoted in my place of work and yet remained sceptical of my apparent progress.

During this period, I began to study the process of automatic and intuitive thinking, starting with the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.⁶ This thread led me to a YouTube video of a lecture by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, entitled ‘Explorations of the Mind’, which he had delivered at the University of California, Berkeley.⁷ Here, Kahneman talks about the biases and systematic errors of judgement that the human mind is subjected to. I might have listened to the lecture dozens of times. After a few years, Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow got published⁸ and I studied the book, at least the initial chapters, very carefully. Kahneman had not only brought the term ‘cognitive illusion’ to the mainstream but also presented short experiments to test it on oneself. I began to experiment and started to notice my biases.

The corporate world demands that you keep running faster and faster. I realized that I was not comfortable doing that. So I quit my job and started to freelance. I was lucky and kept getting projects. I was also fortunate to find collaborators like Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan of Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) with whom I co-wrote 8 Steps to Innovation: From Jugaad to Excellence. The book was well received by both industry experts and academia.

A turning point in my journey came when I visited Ramanashram in Tiruvannamalai for a couple of days in 2011. We had just finished the first draft of the book and I needed a break. The visit foregrounded the process of self-discovery. After I returned to Bangalore, a question was raised: How to experiment in exploring the real nature of self? A Google search led me to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.⁹ Thanks to my father, the book was lying on a bookshelf nearby. On page 255, Eckhart says, ‘I suggest you conduct an experiment.’ He then describes the experiment. I was thrilled. I jumped into experimentation mode with a newfound vigour. I also listened to Eckhart’s ten-part interview with Oprah Winfrey dozens of times. Each session was based on one chapter of the book and it had viewers video-calling from all over the world.

In some of the interviews, Eckhart talks about movies to illustrate his point. For example, he has talked about A Beautiful Mind and The Groundhog Day in his interviews.¹⁰ I found these metaphors appealing. Slowly, I began to discover more such metaphors from movies, magic shows and other videos made available on the internet. I began to write about my experiments in my blog.

This was in 2014, the same year I was asked about how to clear a cluttered mind in my innovation workshop. That year I also attended my first seated meditation retreat, a ten-day vipassana course held in the outskirts of Bangalore.¹¹ It was anchored in a Buddhist practice carried over for centuries in Myanmar (erstwhile Burma). The course was designed by S.N. Goenka, a Burmese­–Indian teacher of meditation. The retreat was rigorous, disciplined and without a teacher. While I enjoyed the solitude, I remained sceptical of the necessity to do long hours of seated meditation.

In the same year, my father gave me Bohm’s Thought as a System¹² to read. The book is an edited transcript of a seminar held in Ojai, California in 1991. In it, Bohm proposes that thought can be viewed as a set of conditioned reflexes, which presents representation as perception. The representation gets treated as reality and eventually becomes a set of absolute necessities. I found the concept of absolute necessities helpful in experimentation.

In 2015, my friend, Zunder Lekshmanan suggested that I conduct a half-day workshop on mindfulness for his colleagues. That gave birth to the workshop ‘Mindfulness On The Go’, which is currently in its fifth year. For the past few years, I have been facilitating these workshops in our house and Gauri has been instrumental in taking care of the logistics and refreshments.

One key complaint people had was that they didn’t fine time for meditation or reflection. Hence, experimentation that can be done ‘on the go’ became an important aspect of the workshop. Moreover, an experiment carries a spirit of investigation. You can’t carry out experiments like a mechanical routine. Thus, mindfulness as an investigation became another aspect that was emphasized.

Towards the end of 2017, I had written about fifty blogs on this topic. I felt I was ready for a book. After writing the first chapter I sent it to Krishan Chopra of HarperCollins, along with an outline of the manuscript. I had interacted with him while working on the book on innovation. His prompt and encouraging reply provided the impetus needed to go ahead with it.

That is the story of this book. I feel I should mention a few things that are conspicuously missing here, which are usually present in a similar story. One, my life here hasn’t had any major setback. On the contrary, it has been peaceful and smooth as far as I can remember. Even a career change from a full-time job to freelancing didn’t result in any financial difficulties. Two, my life didn’t get anchored in any guru, tradition, rituals, practice or spiritual institution. Traditional Hindu scriptures, Buddhist texts or any other practices didn’t play a major role. This is not to undervalue the influence of several spiritual teachings mentioned earlier and many others omitted for brevity, nor to undermine the wisdom of these ancient texts. It is just that they didn’t play a role directly. Perhaps they played a role through the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and Goenka.

The book is tentative in its approach. It speaks the language of hypotheses and their testing. Some of them may not be surprising. Stepping out of the train of thought to feel your breath is something you may have tried earlier. The book will prompt you to do it more often and in more ways. For some hypotheses, you may have carried an intuition but never really experimented with them. You may have felt at times that continuous and repetitive worry is wasteful, but not experimented with recognizing its nature while worrying. This book will suggest you try it. It is possible that you may find some hypotheses far-fetched—almost impossible. Depending upon your readiness, you may try to experiment with it now or park it for later. Either way is fine.

I have a request for the reader. The book uses a number of stories to illustrate its points. Many of them, or the specific movie scenes, are available on the internet in the form of video clips. My request to you, dear reader, is to see these clips as you go along reading the text. It will be more enjoyable.

Similarly, we used several stories to illustrate our concepts in the book on innovation. One of the comments we get from readers is, ‘Nice stories.’ That is the danger of such accounts. They can grab all the attention and the message may get lost. See if you can read between the stories, like reading between the lines.

The book deals with a subject that is closer to cycling than cycology.¹³ You don’t learn cycling by reading a book, you learn by trial and error. I have given a few experiments at the end of each chapter for readers to try out. Most of them demand a short time, say, a few minutes, and can be done any time anywhere. I hope you are able to grab a few moments and check them out for yourself.

What is the significance of this story? The book attempts to say that the significance is zero. Nothing. Every story, including the story of Vinay, is riding on an implicit assumption that there is an independent entity called Vinay making good and bad decisions. The assumption looks reasonable, given the experience of life. However, what looks reasonable isn’t necessarily true. One key thread that weaves together every life story is time. Every life stretches from birth to death, and a key hypothesis the book explores is that the experience of time is an illusion.

Vinay hasn’t made any progress and Vinay’s isn’t successful because Vinay never existed as an independent entity in the first place. That’s the proposal. However, we are jumping ahead to the final chapter of the book. Not all hypotheses are as extreme as this one. Hope you enjoy experimenting with them.

Vinay Dabholkar

Bengaluru

8 July 2019

1

Balancing the Bicycle of Life

Unfortunately, most of us are slightly off balance. No?

– JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI¹

Berry-picking vs bookkeeping

Like several other Hindi films, Paheli² (Puzzle) begins with a song-and-dance routine in a wedding. After the wedding, bride Lachhi (Rani Mukerji), groom Kishan (Shah Rukh Khan) and Kishan’s family are all travelling from Lachhi’s village to Kishan’s village, Navalgadh. The wedding procession is travelling on camel carriages through the beautiful desert land of Rajasthan in western India. Kishan’s father is a successful trader and has groomed his son for the family business. While many are catching up on sleep, Kishan is busy balancing accounts: ‘phal, phool, gulab, jal’ (fruits, flowers, roses, water). Unaware of his newlywed bride, he is deeply engrossed in tallying the accounts. Numbers do not match, and he cannot find the missing items. Lachhi watches with amusement the person she has to spend the rest of her life with. Perhaps her husband’s fascination for accounting is not surprising to her because, in all likelihood, she also comes from a family of traders. And perhaps she has seen men married to their business. Completely oblivious to his surroundings, Kishan continues with his account balancing. In fact, the only thing he notices about Lachhi is her fiddling with her wedding ring. ‘Give it to me, or it will fall off,’ Kishan warns her in a paternal tone and she dutifully surrenders her precious possession.

Suddenly, a few kids on a carriage trailing behind Kishan’s notice shrubs filled with berries on the roadside. ‘Look, look, so many berries,’ one of them points out. Lachhi gets excited and tells the kids to grab a few for her. The camels are walking slowly. There is ample time for the kids to run to the shrubs, pluck a few berries, run back to Lachhi and hand them over to her without anyone noticing. Kishan is still lost in his own world and has no clue what’s going on. When they offer him a few berries, he issues a warning. ‘Don’t do it again,’ he says, ‘If father sees it, he would be very upset.’ Poor Lachhi, hearing this indirect comment on her behaviour, drops the the berries from her hand.

On their first night home, Lachhi is sent to her new bedroom, decorated beautifully for the newlyweds, with a glass of warm milk for her husband. But as she enters the room, she realizes Kishan is still engrossed in bookkeeping. She had been told by her experienced friends that she should wait for her husband to lift the veil. After waiting for a while, she realizes that nothing of that sort is going to happen. So, she asks Kishan, ‘Won’t you take the veil off?’ Kishan awakens from his train of thought, goes up to her, takes it off and stares at her face. ‘What are you looking at?’ Lachhi asks coyly. ‘Coconut, I forgot to add the money given for coconut,’ Kishan happily announces his ‘aha’ moment.

This is when Lachhi finally asks him, ‘Listen, accounting all through the journey, accounting here, is this the time for doing accounts?’ Kishan replies, ‘What do you mean? Business and accounting are a trader’s first duty.’

Mindfulness is a process of learning to balance between berry-picking and bookkeeping.

What is berry-picking? Metaphorically, it is about perceiving small and big surprises life offers every moment. For most of us, for the larger part of the day, life in the present moment looks the same as the previous moment. The table, the chair, the clothes, the traffic, the shops or even the news—all look monotonous. There is hardly any surprise. However, there are moments in the day when we notice a bud in the garden or a sunset, or come across a joke or a chocolate that we like, and those few moments give us joy. One characteristic of berry-picking is that it happens in the present moment, not in the past or future. The other is that it carries freshness and newness. It doesn’t feel the same old.

When we are lost in thought, like Kishan, we don’t notice the berries. It is no surprise that berries are noticed first by kids whose thought processes haven’t yet acquired the momentum