Book summary: "Conquest of Mind' by Eknath Easwaran
Take Charge of Your Thoughts & Reshape Your Life Through Meditation
“All that we are,” the Buddha said, “is the result of what we have thought.” The quality of our thoughts and words and deeds, the Buddha says, is what decides our life. Our future life is what we are deciding this very minute.
Easwaran taught the course “theory and practice of meditation” for over three decades at University of Berkeley. This book is a sequel to his book “Passage Meditation”, in which he teaches how to meditate and offers an eight point program for spiritual wellness, irrespective of your faith or none.
Body and mind wellness are independent but they inform each other. I view this book that deals with the conquest of Mind as an equivalent of physical health books which deal with the conquest of the Body around diet, exercise and sleep. Similar to a disciplined wellness program we need for ourselves to take care of our body, we need one for our mind too. Easwaran offers both the theory and practice of mind wellness in this book.
Chapter 1: Thinking in Freedom
Is there a key to our destiny? If so, do we have a say in it, or are our character and fate fixed by the stars?
The Buddha’s answer, set out more than twenty-five hundred years ago, has a very modern appeal. Our destiny, he said, lies in our own hands: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. We are formed and molded by our thoughts.” It follows that what we shall be tomorrow is shaped by what we think today. To this penetrating observation he added a simple twist. “Don’t try to control the future,” he would say. “Work on the one thing you can learn to control: your own responses.”
If we want to grow to our fullest human stature, the Buddha would say, all we have to do is teach the mind how to think differently: how to be calm, kind, and creative in any situation.
CHAPTER 2: Living Skills
Thoughts have to come by invitation. Most thoughts are gate-crashers. And negative emotions like anger and resentment not only come without an invitation, they crash the party early and eat up all the food. When the proper guests arrive the plates are empty, the chairs are upside down, and the place is in chaos. Quality control simply means that when thoughts come you can say, “May I see your invitation?” If they don’t have one, you say, “Excuse me, but this party is not for you.”
For one, everybody knows how painful it is to keep thinking about an unpleasant memory. Actually, the problem is not the memory but the fact that we cannot stop thinking about it. We can spare ourselves the agitation by withdrawing the mind from that memory completely.
Resentment is nothing more than compulsive attachment to a set of memories. If you could peek through the window of the mind factory when you feel resentful, you would see the production line turning out the same emotion-charged memory over and over: “He did that to me in 1983, he did that to me in 1983 . . .” You are dwelling on something that took place in the past – or, more likely, on how you misunderstood that event and reacted to your misunderstanding.
When you keep pumping attention into an event in this way, even a limp little memory gets blown up into a big balloon of hostility. If you can withdraw your attention, the balloon is deflated. There is nothing more to it. Through meditation, by withdrawing your attention from distractions, you can train your mind to the point where no memory can upset you or drive you into compulsive action.
CHAPTER 3 Training the Mind
Meditation is a warm-up exercise for the mind, so that you can jog through the rest of the day without getting agitated or spraining your patience.
The exercise for reducing the ego is simple: put the welfare of others before your own. Pay more attention to their needs. In other words, go against self-will.
Similarly, when your needs conflict with those of others, the exercise is to try to look at their needs as your own.
Often you will discover that it costs you nothing to yield – except, of course, your ego’s gnashing of teeth. Let them gnash. You are growing, gaining great strength for facing challenges more worthy of your steel.
Don’t spend time only with people you like. Now and then, take a walk with someone you dislike; take that person to lunch. And don’t always talk to the same people at work; cultivate relationships with everybody. You will be expanding your consciousness, pushing the frontiers of your world outward.
CHAPTER 4 Juggling
Even after years of training, I assure you, your mind will keep a few harmless likes and dislikes. That is its nature. The difference is that you no longer get compulsively attached to them. You don’t lose your capacity to enjoy life’s innocent pleasures; you lose the capacity to get caught in them like a fly in amber.
Without this flexibility, likes and dislikes can become rigid and ingrained. Strong likes and dislikes lead to strong passions, which are an open gateway to anger. Just contradict someone with rigid opinions and see what happens; you could insert a thermometer into his mind and watch the temperature rise.
Once we have tasted the freedom of juggling at will with our personal preferences, we can face whatever comes to us calmly and courageously, knowing we have the flexibility to weather any storm gracefully. This is living in freedom, the ultimate goal of training the mind.
PART 2 Reshaping Your Life
CHAPTER 5
Learning to Swim
Classical Indian mysticism compares the mind to a lake, which for most of us is continually lashed into waves by the winds of emotional stimulus and response. The real storm winds are four: anger, fear, greed, and self-will. One or another is generally blowing; if it’s not the southerly, it’s a nor’wester. As a result, the water is in a constant state of agitation. Even when the surface appears calm, murky currents are stirring underneath.
Through meditation and the other powerful allied disciplines, however, the lake of the mind can be made absolutely clear. Despite all the words that scholars have written on this subject, we can understand this supreme discovery only when we experience it ourselves. This is the great paradox of mysticism: until you enter nirvana, to use the Buddha’s term, you will not be able to understand what nirvana is.
On the surface level of awareness, everyone seems separate. We look different, wear different clothes, have different speech patterns, different ambitions, different conditioning. This is the physical level of awareness, below which the vast majority of us cannot see because of the agitation of the mind.
Just below the surface is the level of personal, individual consciousness, a comparatively shallow region which is easily stirred by the winds of sense impressions and emotions. The more physically oriented we are – that is, the more we identify with our bodies and feelings – the more caught up we will be in this mind-world of constantly changing forms. In this state it can be quite a chore to get close to other people.
Underlying this level, largely unsuspected, is what the Buddha calls alaya-vijnana: “storehouse consciousness,” the depths of the collective unconscious. There is only one alaya-vijnana; at bottom, everyone’s unconscious is one and the same. The deeper we get, the more clearly we shall see that our differences with others are superficial, and that ninety-nine percent of what we are is the same for all.
CHAPTER 6 All Life Is Yoga
Dwelling on oneself is the root cause of most personal problems. The more preoccupied we become with our private fears, resentments, memories, and cravings, the more power they have over our attention. When we sit down to meditate, we cannot get our mind off ourselves.
Less self-centered thinking means fewer distractions, a clearer mind, fewer outgoing thoughts to impede our gathering absorption as meditation deepens.
When your meditation is progressing well, if your mind goes into a negative mood – about yourself, about your problems, about other people, about the state of the world – you should be able to switch your attention away from the negative and focus it on the positive. By doing this over and over again, you can reach a state in which negative thoughts cannot even appear on the scene.
After the honeymoon with meditation is over, people often tell me, “I have more trouble with my mind now than I did when I started. Am I going backwards?”
I will explain what is probably happening. In the early stages, all of us have a thousand little imps of distraction dancing around.
As we move into deeper levels of awareness, this number is reduced to two or three; but then they are no longer imps. They are big, burly distractions, waiting for an opportunity to knock us to the floor.
These big fellows are not really distractions. They are samskaras: deep, conditioned tendencies to particular ways of thinking and acting, usually negative or self-willed, which have been dug in the mind through many years of repeating the same thought over and over.
When we find ourselves face to face with a samskara in meditation, there is no need to get rattled or try to run away. This is what you have been training for.
Samskaras may originate in the mind, but they express themselves in words and actions. To oppose them, we have to learn not to act on them – not to do what our compulsions demand.
Whatever romantic notions we may have about spiritual growth, it never really happens in a short time. Like the Thirty Years’ War, this war within goes on and on. There is so much to transform! Naturally there come times when the mind gets tired and complains. “Why not call it off for a while?”
This cannot be done. Once we come face to face with a samskara in deeper consciousness, we are in the ring with it until we win. As my grandmother used to tell me, “The Lord will never put on your shoulders even one pound more than you can bear. But,” she would always add, “you will never have to carry one pound less, either.” Otherwise we would not grow.
Sooner or later, the Buddha would say, the way we behave to others has to come back to us. That is the meaning of that much-misunderstood phrase “the law of karma.” If we want people to be kind, the very best way is to learn to respond to others’ needs exactly as if they were our own.
The thread of meditation running through your day can be extended into the evening too. If you want to go forward even in your sleep, I can share a secret which I learned over a period of ardent experimentation. Have your evening meditation reasonably early so that you have time for half an hour or so of spiritual reading before you go to sleep. And choose your reading carefully. It should be positive, strengthening, and inspiring, and it should be more than just good literature or philosophy; it should be a piece of scripture which you respond to deeply, or writing stamped with the personal experience of a great mystic. Read a little, slowly and reflectively, giving the words a chance to sink deep into your consciousness. Then put the book aside, turn out the light, and fall asleep repeating your mantram.
CHAPTER 7 Tremendous Trifles
The Buddha, the most practical of teachers, defined the wise man or woman in a thoroughly practical way: “One who will gladly give up a smaller pleasure to gain a greater joy.” That is discrimination, the precious capacity to see life clearly and choose wisely. When it is understood, every choice becomes an opportunity for training the mind.
This apparently trifling difficulty of getting out of bed in the morning hides a tremendous truth. For most of us, it is a problem built up through little acts of omission. The alarm goes off and we sigh, “Oh, just five minutes more. It’s six o’clock; I’ll still be there for meditation in five minutes.” That is how it begins.
One powerful way to deal with this samskara – in fact, with any samskara – is to do just the opposite of what it demands. This is one of the surest ways to change a bad habit. The Buddha says, “Oppose a negative wave of thought with a positive wave of thought.” It is such a simple, practical, effective strategy!
Once you are out of bed and sitting for meditation, the mind will probably try to distract you. That is the next “tremendous trifle”: tremendous because what is at issue is not whether the subject of the distraction is big or small, good or bad, but the native distractability of the mind.
When someone is unkind to us, we need not take it personally. The rule to remember here is never to react immediately. That is the purpose of training the mind in all these other tremendous trifles. Whenever a negative emotion calls, put it on hold. Do not listen to its arguments. Simply by maintaining a sense of humor and humility, we can teach the mind not to get upset even when a real trial comes.
CHAPTER 8 The Forces of Life
Toward the end of the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita there is a statement so direct, so penetrating, that it should move us to question all external attempts at self-improvement: those who are always trying to satisfy their personal desires will never find peace in this life. Such people are doomed to live in turmoil and isolation.
One of the greatest spiritual figures of medieval India, Ramanuja, throws light on this challenge in words that should be on the walls of every school campus, every statesman’s office, every home: “What we seek as our highest goal depends upon what we believe ourselves to be.”
Through meditation, with the help of the demanding disciplines I followed every day in the midst of a busy life, that belief in myself as a purely physical creature has fallen away completely. Today I do not look upon myself or anyone else as physical. I identify with the Self, pure spirit, the same in all.
Only when I got beneath the surface of consciousness in meditation, many years ago, did I begin to see the play of forces between these two ideals, constantly pulling us toward different goals. Then I began to long more than anything else to win my freedom and escape being banged about on the court of life.
To remake ourselves, we don’t have to bring goodness, love, fearlessness, and the like and stuff them all in somehow. They are already present in us, deep in our consciousness; that is why we can never really rest content with being anything less. If we work to remove the impediments that have built up over many years of biological conditioning, to dislodge all the old resentments and fears and selfish desires, love will flow from us like a fountain, and those we live and work with will come to us to be refreshed.
Of all that is wonderful in human beings, our most glorious asset is this capacity to change ourselves. Nothing is more significant.
Whatever our past, whatever our present, all of us have the capacity to change ourselves completely through the practice of meditation.
PART 3 Strategies from the Buddha
CHAPTER 9 Obstacles & Opportunities
Even those who meditate sincerely and systematically face serious obstacles which must be overcome before they can penetrate the recesses of this vast, uncharted ocean that is the mind.
The Buddha enumerates five such obstacles: sensuality, ill will, laziness, restlessness, and anxiety or fear. Each of these locks us out of deeper consciousness.
Sensuality - Anger is the final development of the Buddha’s first obstacle.
The second obstacle, ill will, is perhaps the most serious impediment in meditation. According to the Buddha, ill will expresses itself in one hundred and thirty-five forms!
Laziness, the third obstacle is easy enough to understand. Just as laziness is our enemy in making money or in gaining prestige or power, it is our enemy in spiritual growth. Hard work is absolutely necessary for excellence in any field, and nothing requires more intense effort than meditation.
The fourth obstacle, then, is restlessness. It can take many forms, but essentially restlessness simply reflects the fact that the mind cannot bear to be still.
The last obstacle is fear. Actually, the word the Buddha uses is a general term that includes all kinds of apprehensive possibilities: not just being outright fearful that something might happen to you or your family, but also feeling uneasy inside, uncomfortable about the future, vaguely worried, more than a little afraid.
One particularly common form this obstacle takes is anxiety.
“More than anything,” the Buddha would continue, “I want you to be free of these five obstacles. I want your physical, emotional, and spiritual health to improve, your life to be always fresh, your relationships always rich, your contribution always valued. And I want you to have the good opinion of the person whose approval is most difficult to win: yourself.”
Then we can say, as the Buddha did toward the end of his life, “I am the happiest of mortals. No one is happier than I am.”
CHAPTER 10 Strategies for Freedom
Buddha’s five strategies for freedom. Simply by observing his own mind with detachment, he has hit upon techniques which people like you and me can employ successfully to follow in his footsteps.
The first strategy is literally “changing one thought for another”: a negative thought for a positive one, an unkind thought for a kind one.
The next strategy is reflection. When you are being propelled by a fierce craving, the Buddha says, stop and reflect on the consequences of giving in.
The Buddha’s third strategy is withdrawing attention. When distractions come in meditation, paying attention to them only strengthens them. That is the time to give more attention to the inspirational passage. We can use the same strategy during the day as well. Many personal problems involve distracted attention: the mind getting caught in an unproductive or negative track. When we learn to withdraw our attention from such problems, we begin to see that even in meditation most distractions have their source in what we do and think during the day.
The fourth strategy is ‘Go to the root.’ The first three strategies are preliminary. Now it is time to remove the real cause of your problems: why you get jealous, why you find yourself in a bad mood so often, why you get resentful with so little provocation.
The Buddha has been building toward a tremendous climax. With the first strategy he starts out tickling us with a feather, as it were. Then he coaxes us along with a branch. Finally, when he is sure we can stand it, he cracks over the head with the whole trunk. That is the Buddha’s way, and he is going to bring it to the trunk right now. “After you have learned to deal with the mind in these four ways,” he says, “prepare yourself for abhinigraha.” It sounds ominous, and it is. Nigraha means “destroy”; abhi, “completely.” “Kill the very source of your difficulties,” the Buddha says, “and then make doubly sure that it is dead.” That is the Buddha for you.
PART 4
Three Spiritual Strengths
CHAPTER 11 Determination
Those who go far in meditation are the ones who keep on plugging. They may not be very spectacular; they may never hear a trumpet. But they keep on trying day in and day out, giving their best in every situation and relationship, never giving up. Such people are bound to reach their goal.
Every morning when you sit down for meditation, renew your determination. If you believe in a personal God, ask for the help of Sri Krishna or Jesus or the Divine Mother to make this decision unbreakable.
Meditation, of course, is only part of the effort. I cannot say too often that everything we do throughout the day has a direct effect on the mind. To keep going forward, we have to go on making our best effort to keep calm and kind throughout the day.
The first stages of meditation are rough going, and the only consolation I can offer is that below the surface of consciousness, the going gets even rougher. As you enter the immense, uncharted realm called the unconscious, there are so many imponderables you have to deal with, so many indecipherable scripts you have to learn to read.
But the rewards are infinite. If you read the annals of the great mystics, they seem to be having the time of their lives – dealing with intangibles, breaking codes that have never been broken, reading scripts that have never been made out. Every day there is a miracle in meditation. You have to fight against an enemy you cannot see, in a battle in which the lines cannot even be drawn. Yet you know you are learning to face these challenges; you know you are moving forward. That is all the inspiration you need, all the thrill you could ever hope to find.
CHAPTER 12 Detachment
Detachment: the art of withdrawing desire from lesser things, letting them fall away, so as to harness their power to reach the heights of what a human being can attain.
If you really want to enjoy life, renounce all the personal demands you make on it. Give up trying to get people and circumstances to go your way. Learn to let go of your desires for personal pleasures and personal profit.
Detachment not only releases joy; it is also the secret of health. It is the best medical insurance in the world, and not only because it can keep us free from physical habits that sap our vitality. Most illnesses have a serious emotional element. While there is an important place for physical measures in the treatment of disease, a mind at peace and a heart flooded with love can release healing powers that strengthen and revitalize the physical system. Strength can be regained even after years of emotional instability.
Detachment is a longevity skill. Freedom from compulsive emotional entanglements is the best insurance against stress. More than that, by opening a window onto a fuller, loftier view of life than is dictated by self-interest, detachment brings a sense of purpose.
Attachment means emotional entanglement, which takes a severe toll on vitality and therefore on health. You can check your detachment by a simple test: take a look at yourself and see how easily you get entangled in things up to your neck.
Detachment gives us the capacity to concentrate completely while on the job and to drop our work completely when we walk out the door.
Kind thoughts, kind words, kind deeds. All these add up, even if we believe in no afterlife at all. The quality of our thoughts and words and deeds, the Buddha says, is what decides our life. Our future life is what we are deciding this very minute.
To love truly, you must be able to love when things are going your way and equally well when things are not going your way. This is the test of detachment.
CHAPTER 13 Discrimination
To grow spiritually, we need both the detachment to see clearly and the discrimination to know what is of lasting value – and, of course, the willpower and determination to put our insight into action. Discrimination is the third of my three Ds, and it flows directly from the second, detachment. Discrimination is pure, detached love in action.
In daily living, discrimination means making wise choices: knowing what to do and what not to do, not so much in moral terms as in terms of where our choices lead.
Discrimination lies in wanting less from the world outside us, and that great dangers can arise from wanting more and more.
Discrimination means understanding that the welfare of each of us is part of the welfare of us all.
We find we need a higher purpose now just to be able to discriminate between permanent values and passing fascinations – science aside, technology aside.
A beautiful prayer from the ancient Hindu scriptures echoes in my heart always: “May all creatures be happy. May people everywhere live in abiding peace and love.” For all of us are one, and joy can be found only in the joy of all.
May that prayer guide each of us in our daily lives.
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Summary of behaviors to practice
Don’t try to control the future; work on the one thing you can learn to control: your own responses.
Teach the mind how to think differently: how to be calm, kind, and creative in any situation
We can spare ourselves the agitation by withdrawing the mind from unpleasant memories completely.
Don’t spend time only with people you like. Now and then, take a walk with someone you dislike; take that person to lunch.
Strong likes and dislikes lead to strong passions, which are an open gateway to anger. Once we have tasted the freedom of juggling at will with our personal preferences, we can face whatever comes to us calmly and courageously, knowing we have the flexibility to weather any storm gracefully.
There is only one alaya-vijnana; at bottom, everyone’s unconscious is one and the same. The deeper we get, the more clearly we shall see that our differences with others are superficial.
Samskaras are the deep, conditioned tendencies to particular ways of thinking and acting, usually negative or self-willed, which have been dug in the mind through many years of repeating the same thought over and over. Samskaras may originate in the mind, but they express themselves in words and actions. To oppose the samskaras, we have to learn not to act on them – not to do what our compulsions demand.
Have your evening meditation reasonably early so that you have time for half an hour or so of spiritual reading before you go to sleep. And choose your reading carefully. It should be positive, strengthening, and inspiring, and it should be more than just good literature or philosophy
Oppose a negative wave of thought with a positive wave of thought. It is such a simple, practical, effective strategy!
When someone is unkind to us, we need not take it personally. The rule to remember here is never to react immediately. Whenever a negative emotion calls, put it on hold. Do not listen to its arguments. Simply by maintaining a sense of humor and humility, we can teach the mind not to get upset even when a real trial comes.
What we seek as our highest goal depends upon what we believe ourselves to be - Saint Ramanuja. If we work to remove the impediments that have built up over many years of biological conditioning, to dislodge all the old resentments and fears and selfish desires, love will flow from us like a fountain, and those we live and work with will come to us to be refreshed.
Buddha’s five strategies for freedom:
changing one thought for another: a negative thought for a positive one, an unkind thought for a kind one.
reflection. When you are being propelled by a fierce craving, the Buddha says, stop and reflect on the consequences of giving in.
withdrawing attention. Many personal problems involve distracted attention: the mind getting caught in an unproductive or negative track. When we learn to withdraw our attention from such problems, we begin to see that even in meditation most distractions have their source in what we do and think during the day.
go to the root. The first three strategies are preliminary. Now it is time to remove the real cause of your problems: why you get jealous, why you find yourself in a bad mood so often, why you get resentful with so little provocation
Abhinigraha. Nigraha means “destroy”; abhi, “completely.” “Kill the very source of your difficulties”.
Determination: Every morning when you sit down for meditation, renew your determination. If you believe in a personal God, ask for the help of Sri Krishna or Jesus or the Divine Mother to make this decision unbreakable.
Detachment: Give up trying to get people and circumstances to go your way. Learn to let go of your desires for personal pleasures and personal profit. Detachment is a longevity skill. Freedom from compulsive emotional entanglements is the best insurance against stress.
Discrimination: make wise choices: knowing what to do and what not to do, not so much in moral terms as in terms of where our choices lead.