Happiness

The key to leaving addiction was to understand why people get addicted in this first place. A person who is addicted to alcohol, another person who is addicted to porn and someone who is wasting his time on games, youtube or some other useless tasks, what exactly is common among all these people..... They all are trying to find happiness, different methods yet common goal, some do it consciously in proper way, while others fall to compulsive acts. A person who goes to pub, or a person who goes to temple or a person who is simply trying to contribute to society are all trying to gain same thing, if people are able to generate required emotion as they like, nobody will fall to doing compulsive acts like masturbation. We studied physics, maths, english for almost 6 years in school yet for how many years have we studied mind management, its only natural that people are not able to control their actions nor emotions, since nobody taught them the correct way, when people don't have control over their thoughts and emotions, it's only natural that crime will increase, addiction and other compulsive acts will also increase.
Everyone tells people to focus on studies or concentrate on their work, but nobody actually taught them how to actually focus and concentrate. When we buy a new laptop or phone, we read the user manual, yet we never learned to control our thoughts, emotions and feelings, human mind is the most sophisticated device ever, Bhagwatgeeta says that “A person who has conquered the mind, for him/her, the mind would be his best of friends but if the mind is not under the control then the mind will remain the greatest enemy of the person”. People fall to such extends where they feel committing suicide is more easier than controlling their emotions.

Happiness can be divided into four stages: Sensory < Thought/Emotional < Intellectual < Spiritual

Sensory pleasures like sex, gaining money, watching tv shows etc are lowest form of pleasure. Indulging in these pleasures always leaves you unsatisfied and they have a limit to how much you can enjoy them. After a certain level, it doesn't matter how much money you earn, it will not make you happy, after a certain level, you can't enjoy television shows or movies, you will start to feel like nothing is interesting nowadays, even sex becomes a useless task, you simply do that because you dont have access to a higher level pleasure. You need a cool down period to enjoy them again. Beyond certain threshold limit, you can't gain more happiness from sense objects, they have a cool down time. If a person still tries to gain more pleasure from sense objects, he will end up frustrated and depressed. This is kind of a cycle - you try to run behind happiness, but you are not able to enjoy it after certain limit, then during cooldown time, you become depressed and then to regain your earlier happiness level you again run behind sense pleasure, but again the threshold limit is reached and you again become depressed. The cycle goes on and on.

Thought or emotional pleasure are happiness gained from friends, family, love and bonding etc, they are much better than indulging in sensory pleasure since they can be enjoyed for a longer duration of time without cooldown period, many people fall in love and the entire world becomes a heaven for them, they enjoy their work, they do all small things to make their partner happy, and yet it somehow makes them happy, many people remain in these states for months or even years before becoming normal, friendship also have similar kind of cycle. Because of low cooldown time, it takes you longer before you become frustrated because of these pleasures.

Intellectual happiness is when you are intensely focused on your work, it is when you are in flow state. In this state, sometimes you experience time dilation, like a passionate programmer continuously working on a code, a artist composing a song or something else, the work you enjoy the most, that you even forgot to eat lunch or dinner, sometimes you go like "Oh! It's already 3am, I will sleep after doing this last thing" and yet you are not able to sleep because you keep thinking about what else you will do, that work even comes into your dreams. This type of happiness is obviously greater than both sense and emotional pleasures, it is much longer lasting. (eg Einstein, Newton or Nikolo Tesla were not doing work like work, they were enjoying their work).

Happiness born out of contribution is a mixture of Intellectual happiness and spiritual happiness, when you do something for someone without thinking what you will get out of this help, when you donate purely from heart or when you join some social relief work. It is way more satisfying then sex or watching anime or even focusing on your work. It gives you calmness in your soul. It makes you happy because you know you did something good for someone.

Spiritual happiness is obviously the greatest pleasure, it is the pleasure born out of meditation. The joy of completely unfolding awareness, the joy born out of self realization. It cannot be described, it needs to be experienced. It has no cooldown period and it is never ending. It is gives greatest satisfaction, that's why many people in ancient time left their families and normal lives to follow Buddha or any other spiritual leader.
(Like Einstein gave equation E=mc^2, you can't deny it simply because you don't understand it, you know you will reach the same conclusion if you too follow the rules and learn physics for sometime, similarly just because you haven't experienced this joy till now, don't deny it. To achieve spiritual freedom you need to follow certain routines, simply reciting prayers without being aware of why you are doing that wont help.)

Yoga and Vedant tells us that we need to climb this happiness ladder, most people are stuck in sensory pleasure and they never climb above lower rung. When you try to maximize your pleasure at a certain level of ladder instead of climbing it, you end up depressed and frustrated. Instead of moving to emotional pleasure if you simply try to gain more pleasure by earning more money, or more objects, more sex etc, you will simply end up depressed. Similarly if you truly want to enjoy your life, you will have to go ahead of emotional pleasure to intellectual pleasure, if you don't you will simply end up frustrated out of love etc. And even when you are playing at three levels, little bit of contribution towards society can make you and your loved ones extremely satisfied, it will reduce your frustration level by a great degree. And finally above all, you can gain spiritual freedom.
You dont need to worry about leaving PMO and other addictions, once you are playing at a higher level, lower pleasures automatically falls away. It's like if you have access to GTA V, why will you play tic tac toe.

Science of Happiness | Part 1 : Introduction | Pravrajika Divyanandaprana - YouTube

This was all about basic of happiness, in the next post I will write how I was able to handle my thoughts and emotions(which is by the way beginning of mind management, but understanding it wont work if you don't know about happiness). How to be able to set a goal and achieve it. How to develop will power and what exactly is focus according to yoga and vedant. What happens outside in the world might not be 100% in your control, but your thoughts, your actions are 100% in your control, what happens in your brain must be decided by you.

"Compare the lowest with the highest man. The difference is in the degree of concentration. This is the only difference." - Swami Vivekananda

 

Before we dwell into mind management it is of utmost importance to understand what exactly our mind is. According to western psychology we are a combination of our mind and body, but according yoga and vedant we are pure consciousness/awareness. The structure of ourself can be given by (from outermost to innermost):-
body(outermost layer)
vital energy
mind
intellect
atma/awareness/spirit (your true self)

We have to understand that the body and mind are separate from our true self. For eg- I have this pen, now if I say that this is my pen, then I am saying truth, but if I say this pen is me, then the problem arises. The body is nothing but accumulation of earth(basically whatever food you have eaten), and our mind is nothing but accumulation of impressions from society. To prove that you are different from your body and mind, I will give 3 examples:-
1>When you were just born, your body was different, you might not even be able to identify your past photos, then you became a school student and at that time you looked different, over your entire life your body kept changing but you can still know that it was you in the photo, even if I cut your hand away, you will still call yourself "I", there is something unchanging which had not changed over your entire life, what you call "I" or "me". Now was that "I" your mind, absolutely not, because mind changes at even faster rate, neuroplasticity is the biggest proof, when you were a child your interest were different, your thinking pattern were different, and it keeps on changing, at one moment you are happy, at other times you are sad, yet you know that it was the same person in both situations. That "I" is your awareness which is constantly flowing through this body-mind complex.

2>Another way to see this is, we all pass through 3 stages in a day - awake state, dreaming while sleeping and deep sleep. Now when we are awake, we are aware of our body and mind, when we are sleeping and watching a dream, our body is unconscious but our mind is still active, that's why after waking up next day we are able to say that I had this dream and all, but when we are in deep sleep, during the nights when we don't have any dreams, our body and mind both are unconscious, yet we know that yesterday night I had a deep sleep, I didn't had any dream, if our mind and body were both absent, then who was it that experienced that nothingness, that today I am not seeing any dream. That was your awareness.

3>Look at your hand, are you aware of your hand or is it aware of you, obviously you are aware of your hand, even if we cut it away you still are yourself, so you cannot be your body, and talking about your mind, when you were extremely happy and when you were extremely angry, was that two different people, no, it was the same person experiencing different emotions right? well that means you are not your emotions, well perhaps thoughts, no, since thoughts change at even faster rate, then are you the physical brain structure, well due to neuroplasticity your brain keeps on changing structure and yet you know that you are the same person.
Well, in all these cases, you are the awareness flowing through this body-mind complex. It is your body and your mind, it your thoughts and your emotions but it is NOT you.

Once we know that you are not your thoughts and emotions, now we can talk about handling them, since if there is a object in front of me, suppose a glass of water, I can handle or do something to it according to my requirement, but if I start saying that it is me, well I won't be able to handle myself. Subject can handle the objects, since you the subject is different from your body & mind i.e object, you can handle it.

To control your actions, you need to control your mind(obviously becomes your mind controls your body), and since mind is nothing but compound of your thoughts & emotions(imagination and memories are also a part but they only affect you only after becoming a thought, I will explain this in detail later). In yogic psychology mind is nothing but ocean of awareness over which various thoughts appears and disappears, any thought with enough energy becomes feelings or emotion, the stronger the energy provided to a thought, the stronger feeling it becomes.
Since, emotions are nothing but energized thoughts, we simply need to control our thoughts to control our emotions, or simply control the energy that you are giving to a thought, basically what it means is the attention you are paying to a thought, the more you dwell or think about something, the more energy you are investing into that thought (Now everyone tells to control your thoughts but nobody teaches how to do it, dont worry I wont leave the topic).

In ancient times there was a man in southern India, who wanted to gain super powers, he asked many sages for help and finally one sage told him to go & meet a great sage in Himalayas, so he started going towards north, when he reached in front of the great sage and explained him his situation, the sage told him a 5 line mantra and told him to not think about monkey while reciting this chant, and you will surely get super powers. The man was exuberant with joy, he immediately went to a quite place and was just going to start chanting, that a monkey thought appeared, he tried to clear his mind and started chanting and monkey again appeared in his thought. He told himself to not think about monkey and that in turn became a thought about monkey, he tried again and again yet monkeys kept appearing, the more he told himself not to think about monkey, the more monkeys appeared, after few hours his mind was filled with different kinds of monkeys(red, blue, big, small monkeys) and he was still not able to chant the mantra properly. Later he went back to sage and said that you take your powers back, just give me freedom from monkeys.
This was a small story explaining nature of mind. The nature of mind is such that the more you tell it to not think about something, the more it gets focused on it.

Principle 1 - "Human brain only operates using addition and multiplication, it can’t operate using subtraction and division" - Sadhguru.
Explanation - It basically means that if you want to get rid of a bad habit, addiction or negative thoughts, you can't get rid of those thoughts by saying "don't think about that", cause if you say to yourself - don't think about PMO, immediately you will unknowingly think about PMO, cause your brain doesn't understand subtraction, if you force yourself too much, basically give more energy, thoughts about PMO will only multiply, earlier it was thought but with increased energy, it might become emotions. Instead of saying to yourself - don't think about PMO, start thinking about something else - mountain, friends, river or anything else. And PMO will vanish from your head. Here you didn't try to remove the thought by subtraction or division, instead you just added new thoughts, if you use more concentration and focus, you will multiply the thoughts of mountain, thus completely removing the thoughts of PMO.
Snow boarding (ice skating) is very simple, you just need to follow the path between the trees. The trainer always says that 'follow the path', he never tells you to 'avoid trees', because when you think about following path, you automatically find path between trees, but as soon as you think about avoiding trees, your focus shifts to trees, you see one tree, then 2, then 3, then your entire focus is on hundreds of trees, now whatever you see is obstacle, and you won't be able to dodge all obstacles, you will definitely collide with one of them, snow boarding is actually very easy instead of doing all this, just focus on path. Generally speaking focus on goal instead of focusing on obstacles, just like what Sadhguru said your brain only knows addition and multiplication, if you focus on obstacles that is what you will see, if you focus on path, you will be easily able to complete your task, and this is one part of controlling thoughts.

What exactly is a thought, what determines your thoughts. Well, thought is nothing but a compound of a base idea, vital energy and emotion(every thought has some level of energy so most of the time every thought is related to a emotion, depending on energy provided the emotion is powerful or weak). Now the most efficient way to control intensity of a particular thought is by controlling either of three(idea,vital energy or emotion), which might be quite unknown or alien thing if you are not into meditation practices, a far easier approach will be to control inputs of your mind, because your thoughts are nothing but permutation and combination of your memories and your imagination. It is a tragedy that human beings are blessed with one of the most powerful brains which is capable of creating entirely new universe within your imagination, yet people only create worry, tension, stress, they constantly imagine what will happen when they reach late for college, even before they stand in front of teacher, they have already tortured themselves millions of times in their imagination. And even after the incident is over, humans use another powerful tool of their brain i.e memory to relive the entire incident in their head, they constantly think about how the teacher scolded them for coming late and again torture themselves millions of time. Controlling thoughts comes down to controlling what you are doing with your two most powerful tools, your memories and your imagination, in what type of thoughts are you investing your energies in. If you invest your energy in stressful thoughts, it is only natural that you will become stressful.
Your memories is determined by what input you are giving to yourself from your senses, what exactly are you seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. So, to change the content of your thoughts, it is also important to change your sources of input. At the end of the day, remember that you are NOT your body, you are NOT your thoughts, you are NOT your emotions and therefore you can control them.

Take the example of an ink bottle, let the ink in it be your negative or whatever PMO thoughts that you don't want, now according to nature of your mind you can't simply subtract those thoughts, that means you can't simply empty that ink bottle, now suppose you take the ink bottle to a tap and start pouring in clear pure water, initially the ink will still remain in bottle, and the overflowing water will also be of ink colour, it depicts what happens when you try to put positive thoughts in a brain which was filled with negativity, initially any positive thought you put, but your attention automatically goes back to bad thoughts but as you keep on pouring pour water, the ink colour will become lighter, if you keep on pouring clear water eventually entire ink will be gone, and pure water will be left, similarly if you keep on deliberately inserting pure good thoughts for a certain amount of time, after sometime your brain will only think good, and only positive thoughts(pure water) will come out from your brain(overflow from ink bottle). And then thoughts create emotion, emotion leads to action.


Ah! I know this post has already become too long, but seriously there is no single line mantra, you spent 12 years in school learning most of the things that you never use, atleast spend a week to understand yourself, how can anyone expect to achieve success in outer world, when they can't control things going in their head. And I wanted to explain focus but I ended up explaining consciousness and thoughts only, but I can't continue expecting that people will know these basics, because most of the time, nobody teaches them these things. People of even 30 to 40 years age still suffer from their thoughts and emotions, even after living for so long they still dont know how to handle emotions, they get angry, depressed or sometimes stressed. The question is are they controlling their mind, or their mind is controlling them. I will continue in this topic in next post, and hopefully I will be able to reach science of focus in that post.

I am the only source of my emotions, and actions - Sadhguru

 

It is the nature of untrained mind to get attracted towards pleasure, and if you are getting attracted to PMO again and again, it simply means that you haven't experienced a higher level of pleasure which far surpasses PMO, if you have something which makes you far more joyfull and gives you way more enjoyment than PMO, your mind will stop getting attracted to PMO even if you don't try. That's why in starting of this post, I listed types of happiness, only feeble soul who are not able to properly access higher form of happiness, try to maximize happiness through sensory pleasure - it goes by thinking something is better than nothing, but if you have access to higher form, you won't settle for something.

You can't simply keep tackling it with will power, you can fight it for one day, a week, or a month, but eventually when you let your guard down, you will fall back into that abyss. Fighting PMO simply means you have to destroy the feeling also, feelings are related to thoughts as I have given in second post above, control them and you will be already able to see changes, start to indulge in activities that give you higher pleasure, like things that you love, which can take you in flow state easily. When you do something that you love so much that nothing matters, any successful person in history was not working, they were enjoying their work, and that flow feeling is way more better than PMO.
And always remember you are not your body, you are not your emotions, you are not your thoughts, and therefore you can control them.

 

A must watch for anyone struggling with addiction, basically these are the things that will take you out of the addiction.