The Child Mind

Welcome to Sutra a Day.

As I settle in to write this Monday, I recognize that I’m already thinking negative thoughts about some people, about work, about life. That there are a million things I want to do that I don’t know how to fit into my day, the day of the things I have to do, not want to do. There are other things that I should do that I’m burying my head in the sand about some other things I don’t know how to solve or fix. Fear is a part of my life. Faith is hard to come by.

I have my entire life wanted to be a writer. I watch as people I know actually publish books! Most recently last week. And I question my choices, my focus, my talents. 

This drive to write started young, when I would scribble rhyming poems in spiral  bound notebooks and devour the children’s section of the library, coming home with armfuls of books, sometimes 20 at a time, only to return them all read 2 weeks later. In the depression of high school I stopped reading. I stopped everything really. I never found myself again. I thought that I was returning to myself when I signed up for an MFA in Creative Writing, finally, in my 40s. It’s slow going. Students are publishing. Again, I am not. With what time? I can complete assignments but never seem to find the job to fully carryout my passion projects, to revise and refine, and to figure out where their audience might be. 

How do people do it? I look back now and I wonder why it was I wanted to become a writer. I think it was because when I was young, I was so lonely. Not yet depressed, that came after my parents divorce and with the hormones of adolescence, but still lonely. I found comfort, companionship and solace in books. I found hopes and dreams and possibilities for the future there. Lives to live, relationships to have, worlds to travel. If reading could do that, then writing must as well. 

I think that before I understood fear about money, about career path and stability, my motivation for writing or wanting to be a writer was about connecting with the world. Nowadays, though, it’s become muddied, with the fantasy of working from anywhere and a life dedicated to creativity – with the movie version of a writer’s life, with the illusion of a certain type of freedom, all the while recognizing that level of success is highly unlikely. 

At the same time, I feel a tinge of jealousy towards those out there getting their word out. Perhaps they are better than me, perhaps I have failed. What is my path anyhow? With my first motivation, I should be feeling nothing but love and joy for them. Because they are creating new ways for people in the world to connect and experience new lives and isn’t that what writing is all about? Simply another way to travel.

Selfish or Selfless?

Sutra 4. Vrrtayah pancatayya klistaklistah.  “There are five kinds of mental modifications which are either painful or painless.”

I will forever think in terms of mental modifications now. The expression makes me think of modification to a yoga pose so that they fit your body and what your body can do. Except this time it’s the mind, modifying the thoughts. And since the thoughts are our window to ourselves and the world around us, perhaps the mind is modifying them to fit what we are supposed to work on, overcome, think about, learn or do in the world. Yoga talks a lot about dharma and karma. Dharma is that thing that we are here to contribute or do in this life (although that doesn’t mean we do it) and karma is well, the dreck we’ve accumulated that we need to clean to get to our dharma – or the good fortune that does the same. Is the mind modifying our thoughts to provide dreck to clean or good fortune? Maybe both.

Sri Satchidananda says that we can think of ‘painless’ or ‘painful’ more accurately in terms of ‘selfish’ or ‘selfless.’ In his view, this is important because pleasure is not the same as painless. A pleasure that comes from selfishness, he says, will inevitably result in pain in the long run. Love that come from need will bring pain because it’s based on expectation and expectations can go unmet. Love that comes from a selfless place – that is given without expectation, felt without expectation – that will not result in pain he says. 

Not entirely true of course because if someone you love in such a pure way dies, of course we feel a loss or sense of pain. Or maybe not. Maybe I have more to learn. Maybe it’s simply a matter of gratitude for that person’s life and presence and letting go. Is grief selfish? I don’t have the answer for this question. 

Still, since most of us can’t walk around in a state of perpetual enlightenment, even if we were one of the few that could reach samadhi through meditation, we need to deal with these mental modifications. To do this, Satchidananda says, “we should analyze all our motives and try to cultivate selfless thoughts.” Motives matter. Doing something good for reasons that are selfish will generally bring pain, regardless of any short term pleasure. Sometimes I think we all need to revisit our inner child. As a child our motivations were pretty clear. And while not always pure, of course, I think more often so.

As a kid, I felt alone. And I needed love. And because I needed it, when my parents marriage imploded and they became lost in themselves and their grief, my pain was deep. I lost their love. It wasn’t the pure unadulterated love that comes without need. But my motivations and feelings that everyone should feel love and no one should feel lonely came from a really good place. It occurs to me that this dichotomy, however phrased, is really a bit simplistic. A useful tool, but tough to apply. 

I think perhaps painless or painful are irrelevant. As the Buddhists say, life is pain. Pleasure, too, but also pain.  They are often both a part of the same exact thought or action. Recognizing that this is inescapable only makes motivation more important. For with a selfless motivation, at least we are closer to recognizing that we are all one and letting go of the dislike, the hate, the dread, the fear we feel in our daily lives.