Spiritual Quest - Srikumar Rao
up:: Mindvalley University 2022
author:: Srikumar Rao
tags:: #source/lecture
output:
Today: become wildly successful beyond your dreams; and do it with the serenity of a Zen monk.
The concepts here that will help us grow spiritually also will help us grow in the material world.
It does not work if you try to do it transactionally. It doesn't work even as a secondary goal.
It only works when you're on the spiritual path, and let the material success happen organically as a byproduct.
Most people think success = work harder, manage time better, etc… The truth is that success is about thinking differently.
We fail to consistently think differently because we try to think differently.
Right now there's something in your life that you really want and it's causing turmoil in your life. Would you rather get what you want or outgrow your need for it?
You don't want a 100 million company—you want the feeling you would get if you were running that. Actually, it's the feeling you think you will have.
You feel a deep lacking. You feel a need to have, get or create something in order to feel happy.
You cannot solve an internal lack with external action.
Happiness
What do you need to get in order to be happy?
Our life is a quest for happiness by acquisition. And it's wrong.
The if-then Mental Model
I have to get x so I can do y and then be z.
No matter how often we're to this is wrong, we keep trying to fix it by changing the if part of the model.
We quite literally use this to make ourselves unhappy.
There's nothing you need to do to be happy. In fact it's very hard to be unhappy.
The if-then model is broken.
That times you were suddenly in awe and happy seeing a beautiful scenery, that was because you accepted the universe exactly as it was.
Your life with all the problems you have and think you have, is just as perfect.
Acceptance doesn't mean you roll over and do nothing. You try to make them how you want them to be; if I succeed, fantastic, if not, fantastic. I severed the if-then link.
Goals
Set goals. Tru your level best to achieve them. If you succeed, great, if you fail, great.
The benefit of setting a goal and trying is the learning and growth we have in us as we try our level best to achieve it.
If you succeed the growth is in you, if you failed the growth is not fully embodied yet. Once you stop failing at a goal, you've embodied the learning.
Would I rather be pushed by great pain or pulled by grand vision? (Both work)
Act from a place of being okay, always having been okay and knowing you always will be okay.
Of you did your very best, you will like the outcome.
The more you enjoy the process, the more likely you will get the outcome you want, paradoxically.
Mental Chatter
It's always there like an unwanted relative that walked into your life.
Your mental chatter determines your life.
You don't live in the real world. You build the world you live in with your mental chatter and mental models.
The second arrow is always delivered by mental chatter.
Exercise
Think of current problem and how mental chatter jas been holding you back here.
I cannot overstate how significant mental chatter is in leading your life.
The reason you procrastinate is mental chatter.
Stress
There is only one reason you have stress in your life: because you have a rigid idea of how the universe should be, the universe doesn't listen to your preferences, and in that friction you feel stress.
You have stress because you think you shouldn't have financial issues.
Control (Mental Model)
Every single one of you is a control freak.
You have spent your entire life trying to control some part of your internal or external environment. You're a blinking control freak.
You don't have control.
You never had control.
You never will have control.
Control is an illusion.
This illusion of control is fantastic, it gets you out of bed and making plans and setting and achieving goals.
“I have influence” is like saying “she's a little bit pregnant.” The feeling of control is fantastic because it makes you do things, but do it knowing it's an illusion.
Invest in the process, not in the outcome. Growing, learning, paradoxically achieving.
Resilience
Good thing, bad thing, who knows?
The thing in your life that you're about to label “bad,” could it in a few years turn out to become a good thing?
Is there anything I can proactively do to make this a better thing?
Extreme resiliency is where you bounce back so fast that an external observer doesn't register that you had a bad thing happen.
Suffering starts when you label something as such.
The universe is friendly
When it's a battle between you and the universe, always bet on the universe.
Einstein: the most important question you can ask yourself is, is the universe friendly?
What if the universe was not indifferent? What if the universe knew you existed, and in fact is well-intentioned towards you? What if it didn't give you what you wanted, but exactly what you need?
Regardless or whether or not the universe is friendly, believing that it is friendly will greatly amplify your experience of life.
If you want to believe the universe is friendly, look for reasons that show it is.
You can keep a journal of this if you want. Make a list of ways the universe is showing it knows you exist. Review it from time to time.
Mantra to deal with the world:
Constant gentle pressure.
You need the company of the wise to stay grounded.
I'll say some outlandish things. Don't push it away. Think about it and think about it some more. Use your own life experience to gauge what I say.
Only one way out of the asking “who made it out if what”: God made the universe out of itself.
Dreams
Discarding dreams is a grave mistake. That's a third of your life you throw away; don't be the scientist that throws away so much data. It's a part of you.
The entire universe lives in your mind. You've got it completely backwards. The universe is not real.
If you say, what is real is what is always there—your day life is not real and your dream self is not real.
The thing that is always there is your awareness that you exist. That is the only reality, it's the only thing that's real.
We identify with a particular body-mind complex and then say, this is real. That is the root cause of your suffering because that is what brings in difference. This is me and me gotta win!!1!
When you leave only awareness as real, there is only one. Because there is only one awareness for everyone. It's a single one.
If you look at any single part of me, I am energy, I move at the speed of light and I'm the same age as the universe.
Think about something you're going to do tomorrow. You just crested an alternative universe in your mind.
Thought is so integrated that it is completely compulsory for humans het we're the only species that have it.
Our identity is beyond our ability to perceive het it is always there. Maybe I'm not a ham being with consciousness but a part of consciousness shaped like a human. Just like the waves are not separate, they're the ocean.
I am that cosmic energy, like I've always been.
All suffering is based on the idea that there is a separate me as human being. But in reality death is not something that happens to me, because I stay being energy as I always was.
Enlightenment engineering.
Your intellectual understanding is not your lived experience.
You can enjoy all that is happening if you identify as the screen everything is playing on.
Look at your own mental chatter and realize it is always pointed outwards.
Meditation will not instantly fix tens of hears of mental chatter conditioning.
Pray without seizing. Book: The Way of the Pilgrim.
Keep in your stream of consciousness just: “I am.” You can look at yourself in the third person.
The more attention you pay to mental chatter, the more it loses energy.
The problem is not mental chatter, the problem is that you identify with mental chatter.
It is entirely possible to get to the state where things are happening and it's not you who is doing it. Not just brushing your teeth but also at work.
You are just an instrument of the universe.
In this need to understand you implicitly create this duality between yourself and others.
There comes a time where you have to stop thinking. You can't effort yourself into that.
It takes constant, continuous effort to tone down mental chatter. It only takes days or weeks to start noticing the benefits. But to truly way to get to the quiet mind takes years, decades, lifetimes.
I'm giving you tools to get out of the illusion but as long as you stay in it, might as well enjoy it.
There is no space and time, there is only spacetime.
Maybe Elon Musk doesn't win because he gets up at 3AM and balances on one finger, but just because the universe wanted it so.
There is no striving, it simply unfolds.
Surrender is not something you do willingly, it is something that happens.
Inshallah: if it is the will of Allah