Determined Education

Persistence is key. You must not ever give up, no matter what obstacle. No matter what the difficulty. You must never give up, you must never stop.

Once it was a batch get together. After dinner 6 friends sat to play rummy. Out of 6 only he was unsuccessful. All the others had become rich and successful with having lots of money, house properties and bank balance. He was still struggling to cope up with life. He had failed wherever he worked, invested or started his own business. He tried many businesses but all led to none but failure.

Cards he was disgusted. Even in the game neither God nor luck was supporting. What a poor set of cards! He thought about resigning but then he thought that why not practice in this game of rummy which is intense and sincere. So he decided to play games till the end. He was hardworking, intelligent, amongst the topper of the class. He formed a pure sequence very easily. He has a good understanding of his job, he was very honest, soft spoken and always thought of customers, giving value for their money. He framed the impure sequence also. Game was in full swing. Everybody was confident of their win. One round, 2 round, 3 round. Nobody was able to complete the sequence and set.

In the meantime one person became very anxious and he resigned from the game. Second friend also resigned as he lost the patient. Third person lost his confidence and resigned. Again 2, 3 rounds. Fourth person became bored and he closed the cards. Only two people were remaining at the table. Both were confident to win. Both were in need of a single card. He was thinking of resigning but when he drew the card, he smiled. He had got a joker. His sequence got completed. He won the game. When everybody showed their cards, everybody had a better chance to win if they continued.

He learnt a lesson. we don’t know when we can get a joker from an unknown source and our sequence or set will be completed. So never give up till the end, whatever you have decided or taken responsibility. Complete it, whatever may be the circumstances. He was very happy. He decided that he will continue to work even though he has not tasted success. Even if he doesn’t succeed then also there will be no regret, as the second person who lost the game. He knew that this was not in his hand to get the joker.

The person who was unsuccessful in life has learned openness, the vulnerability from his failures. Because he learnt that he was intense and sincere. When he was playing rummy he used that as an opportunity to see whether he can be intense and sincere in the game or not. He got a success key.

Patanjali says: Success is nearest to those whose efforts are intense and sincere. The chances of success vary according to the degree of effort. Your totality is needed. And remember, sincerity is a quality that happens whenever you are in something totally. But people are almost always wrong about their idea of sincerity, they think to be serious is sincere. To be serious is not to be sincere; sincerity is a quality which happens whenever you are in something totally. A child playing with his toys is sincere – totally in it, absorbed, nothing left behind, no holding back; he is not there really, only the play goes on.

You cannot cultivate sincerity. You can cultivate seriousness, but sincerity – no. Sincerity is a shadow of being total in something.

Sincerity is always intense. Why does Patanjali say …intense and sincere? – For a certain reason: sincerity is always intense, but intensity is not necessarily always sincere. You can be intense in something but not sincere, may not be sincere. Hence he adds the qualification …intense and sincere, because you can be intense even in your seriousness. You can be intense even with your partial being, you can be intense in a certain mood; you can be intense in your anger, you can be intense in your lust. You can be intense in millions of things and may not be sincere because sincerity belongs to when you are totally in it.

A sincere person is an Individual. An individual means one who can function as a totality, as an organic unity. How are you going to become an organic unity? It can only be through conscious discipline.

That’s what Buddha is saying again and again: perseverance, effort, a conscious, deliberate effort to grow – and a total effort, not lukewarm. You have to boil at a hundred degrees. Yes, sometimes it is painful, but it all depends on you, on how you interpret it. If you really want to grow it is not painful, it is tremendously pleasant. Each step deeper into discipline brings more and more joy, because it gives you more and more soul, being.

Discipline means readiness to learn; hence the word disciple: they come from the same root. Who is a disciple? – One who bows down, surrenders, and is ready to learn. And what is discipline? – the readiness, the openness, the vulnerability, to learn.

An individual is always disciplined and he knows an intricate relationship between an act and the end result. We always want to have a perfect result for whatever we do, without losing ourselves in the act. Is such an act possible? To understand the fine difference, it is important to examine ‘perfection’ and ‘totality’. Although for many people, perfection is the ultimate goal, it is nothing less than illusion or myth; something which is nonexistent. We are attracted by the very idea of perfection, not realising that it is like a disease which is dangerous and destructive. If not for our obsession with perfection, our action could open the door to a beautiful spiritual journey.

Whatever you do, just pour your heart in it, do it with totality. The Bhagavad Gita says that karma is enjoyable if the heart is involved in it. Then there is no karma and kerta; both melt and become one. That is totality. Perfection is myth, while totality is reality.

The very idea of perfectionism drives people crazy. The perfectionist is bound to be a neurotic, he cannot enjoy life till he is perfect. And perfection as such never happens, it is not in the nature of things. Totality is possible, perfection is not possible.

There is a tremendous difference between perfection and totality. Perfection is a goal somewhere in the future, totality is an experience herenow. Totality is not a goal, it is a style of life. If you can get into any act with your whole heart, you are total. Totality brings wholeness and totality brings health and totality brings sanity.

The perfectionist completely forgets about totality. He has some idea how he should be, and obviously time will be needed to reach that idea. It can’t happen now – tomorrow, day after tomorrow, this life, maybe next life … so life has to be postponed.

But if you have an idea what you want to be in the future, today you will live very partially because your main concern becomes the future. Your eyes become focused on the future, you lose contact with the real and the present – and tomorrow will be born out of the real with which you are not in contact. The tomorrow will come out of today, and today was unlived.

Perfection is a goal somewhere in the future while totality is an experience this very moment, in which your act is transformed into meditation and a beautiful prayer descends in your heart. In fact, there is no future reference or goal for totality; only a routine lifestyle albeit soaked in spiritual fragrance.

All the five friends were focused on the future, on the goal to win. While the unsuccessful person was focused on playing he was in this moment. So he did not give up. He played with awareness. For him, the game was more important than the winning. You can get a joker only if your focus is on the game and not on winning.

If you do any work or any act with your whole heart, then you are total, then you are walking on the same path which Kabir and Ravidas chose.

The whole idea is to ‘be total’ in everything that you are doing. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether you are making clothes like Kabir or shoes like Ravidas, or cooking food or working on a new design for most advanced spacecraft, or cleaning the floor. The job is immaterial. The focus is that doing is with totality, which is the only way to transform the act into meditation and to transform the doing into a beautiful prayer.

The founder of Tantra vision, Saraha, born two centuries after Gautama Buddha in Vidarbha district, Maharashtra, later became a disciple of Shri Kirti, a Buddhist saint and disciple of Buddha’s son Rahul Bhadra. Saraha, along with his father and four brothers, spent some time in the court of King Mahapala and he was particularly popular among his brothers for his knowledge of the Vedas.

After some time, the Brahmin Saraha became a sanyasi and chose Sri Kirti as his master. Immediately after his initiation, the first thing Shri Kirti asked Saraha was to drop all the Vedas, and all the learnings. After many years, Saraha became a meditator. One day, while in meditation, Saraha had a vision that there was a woman in the market place who would become his real teacher. Saraha told his guru about the vision and with his blessings, left to seek the truth about his visions.

Sarah found the woman he saw in his vision in the marketplace. She was a young woman of a lower-caste arrowsmith family. She was making an arrow. For Saraha, this was a major shift – a learned Brahmin saint seeking out an arrowsmith woman as guru.

Saraha watched her carefully. The young woman was lively and luminous with life, cutting an arrow shaft, deeply absorbed in the process. Saraha immediately felt something extraordinary, something he had never heard or learnt in the scriptures or from any guru. Her very action of making the arrow illuminated the heart of Saraha.

He continued watching her working on the arrow. She, on the other hand, was working intensely without realising his presence or getting perturbed by his stare. For her, no one existed at that moment. After the arrow was ready, she closed one eye and opened the other as if pointing towards a target to check the fineness of the arrow. And that very moment something happened. Saraha understood the real meaning which he couldn’t discover in life despite reciting from various books. She was much absorbed in the act; there was no duality. She was one with her work. She gave Saraha the real message of Buddha – to be total in the action is to be free of action. Be total and you will be free. For the first time, he understood what meditation is.

The ordinary arrowsmith woman became the real teacher of a Brahmin guru without saying a word or mantra correcting scripture. Saraha got enlightened with just her presence involving routine work of making an arrow, albeit completely absorbed and melted with the act in the process.

A man who is total in his work is not a workaholic. He can be total – in anything, he will be total. He will be total while he is sleeping, he will be total while he is going for a walk. He will be just a walker, nothing else – no other thoughts, no other dreams, no other imaginations. Sleeping, he will simply sleep; eating, he will simply eat.

You don’t do that. You are eating and your mind is doing hundreds of trips ….

So be total in everything that you do or do not do. Be total — then your whole life becomes a meditation.