If material success is not filling you up— you might be enslaved by your `master’ mind. You need to find a way to your `heightened self’.
On the summit of my success, i found the unclimbed mountain of my self.
…I had this shocking realization at the height of my material success.
I am one of those men who spent his youth dreaming of becoming a multi-millionaire. But when I got there I found a spiritual hole. I tried to enjoy the trappings of success for a while but the longer I tried to hold onto my shell, the more I shrank. And the smaller I felt…the more I craved the length of my shadows. I had become dangerous to those I loved.
I had to choose.
Either to keep listening to that `master’ voice that screamed “don’t you give up! harden your resolve! get that next title, and earn that next million!…
Or this time, try to make a break for it…and escape my `slave master’ mind.
One thing led to another and here I am, two years later, living the life of a writer /entrepreneur, slowly building a new self-identity on my own terms.
Looking for answers on how to live my next life I came upon the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher that gave me a lot of encouragement. He too had fought this repressive, incessant force and proposed his own dual mind duel resolution. His work has influenced the minds of luminaries like Einstein, Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche to name a few.
He called this `master’ mind — the `Will to life’ — A universal metaphysical force that inherent in all life forms and humanity and is evidenced by a universal desire for restless, insatiable striving. This force is incessant and even after all our desires are met, we cannot relax in a state of peace and happiness. But instead, the Will must find new ways of satisfying new desires that keep us enslaved in a lifelong state of anxious striving.
“All Will springs from lack, from deficiency and thus from suffering.”- Arthur Schopenhauer
He believed that once we achieve the goals we desire, what we experience is not happiness but a relief from the pain of suffering, the lack in us. He went on to paint a picture of life as essentially a desire of the Will to overcome our boredom with the achievement of new goals. (A bit too pessimistic a view of life in my personal opinion but still frames the problem urgently enough to warrant a worthy solution.)
His panacea was to redirect our intelligence to see through the compulsive rigidity of the Will and transcend it in a three-fold manner- With the power of Creativity through art and music; practicing Compassion and ultimately material Renunciation. I was pleasantly surprised and inspired by how much of his thinking bridges ancient Vedantic Hindu and Buddhist teachings with modern neuroscience.
I will just focus on one of his paths for the rest of this blog- that of Compassion and call out its value in living as a `heightened self’.
Compassion can be defined as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. There is enough scientific evidence now that proves that experiencing Compassion rewires the brain that leads to mental wellbeing.
The Dalai Lama has said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
As quoted in the Atlantic, The Dalai Lama requested Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist who founded the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his colleagues to find out the benefits of compassion thinking on the mind and body.
This led to a simple experiment on eight “long-term Buddhist practitioners” who had spent an average of 34,000 hours in mental training. They asked the subjects to alternate between a meditative state and a neutral state to observe how the brain changed. One subject described his meditation as generating “a state in which love and compassion permeate the whole mind, with no other consideration, reasoning, or discursive thoughts.”
“When we did this, we noticed something remarkable,” Davidson said. “What we see are these high-amplitude gamma-oscillations in the brain, which are indicative of plasticity” — meaning that those brains were more capable of change, for example, in theory, of becoming more resilient. This is really a kind of exciting neuroscientific finding because there are pearls of wisdom in the contemplative tradition — the Dalai Lama frequently talks about this — that the best way for us to be happy is to be generous to others through compassion. And in fact, the scientific evidence is in many ways bearing this out, and showing that there are systematic changes in the brain that are associated with acts of generosity.”
Living a Compassionate life means shifting from a Selfish to Selfless state of being where one `co- suffers’ with their external world. (The etymology of “compassion” is Latin, meaning “co-suffering.”)
In another study by Prof Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University who has been studying the brain activity of Buddhist monks have found how some meditators achieve a state of “nonduality” or “oneness” with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment. “When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr. Josipovic added that those harnessed skills can help create a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings leading to a more tranquil and happier way of being.
How to apply this in your life.
We are all capable of ascending into our heightened compassionate selves. Even if it must be a solo climb. You do it for the sake of the journey. You choose your own mountains. You just have to keep your mind on the goal and face everything on the way as a tool to get there. Here are a few first steps I took that might help…
1. Stop looking for comfort.
The first step to free yourself from your `master’ mind is to stop looking for comfort from external things. The outside includes your material desires and possessions and relationships and masks you wear. It includes everything you stand for to the outside world…
however flashy that might be. You have to look away from that view. You have to stop moving towards that path. No new lover, job, house, religion, location will have the key to your chains. You have to look for the key inside yourself. You have to decide that first.
This small single decision will eventually transform your life.
But in a way, you cannot yet fathom.
2. Look inside with Compassion.
Get ready for the familiar voice to get louder: You will hear the voice in your head that warns you that nothing good will come out of this. It will threaten you that you will lose everything. The voice will mock you for giving up. The voice will coax you to come back.
Don’t.
Get ready to get used to the dark: You will soon be entering a very dark place in your mind. Get ready for your life becoming pitch dark. Get ready to lose all your `social’ friends. Get ready to meet the barking packs of panic. They will come when you least expect it…in your dreams. Get ready to be lashed with guilt, regret, confusion, and insecurity.
Be prepared for desperate urges to turn back and give up and return to the comfort of your nagging mind.
Don’t.
It’s part of the process. It’s how this plot unfolds.
3. Don’t stop. Enjoy the climb of Compassion.
No matter how hard it feels. Keep moving towards your higher state of compassion. Inch by inch. Day by day. Practice compassion in all your acts. Look for how your life can be a service to others. And then act on those strategies.
Coda
Your Mastermind is your default state of mind. It exists as a running critique organizing conscious experience. Telling stories to ourselves (often about ourselves).
Science and Spirituality agree that Compassion is a proven way to turn this mind away from this self and move towards a higher self that is free from suffering. Slowly but surely.
We just have to want it badly.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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