Our world of political hype, consumerist mass media, religious indoctrination, cultural blindness, and personal irresponsibility conditions us to think, feel, and believe in all manner of fallacies. One such fallacy is that one has to be "busy" in order to be a useful or valued member of society. This is sheer nonsense.
We have bought into this lie hook, line, and sinker. Our elders and teachers, faith leaders and clergy, and societal figures of authority seem to tell us and mimic for us the supreme value of being busy, doing lots of things and gaining much accolade and approval in the process. We yearn to be busy like them to gain the same accolade and approval. More insidiously, we may have built our sense of self-worth and self-identity around busyness-driven achievements. In our quiet moments, we may inchoately feel the incessant need for other-approval and social reward to boost our own fragile self-esteem. We may not be even aware of this deep-seated and covert need. We simply find ourselves getting all worked up working like hell to get things done. And in the process ending up tired and cranky, needing passive entertainment for relaxation and tasty but unhealthy food to massage our inner selves. We lose ourselves in psycho-movie watching and psycho-eating that lead to more anguish in the end. Busyness ends up as laziness, if we are to see our situation with ruthless honesty.
More than that, our busyness itself is a sign of laziness. Inwardly, we are lazy in not arousing mindfulness and discernment. We fail to be aware of our mental garbage which is smelling bad almost all the time — reactive thought patterns, compulsive emotions, blind drives and intentions, and unnoticed sensations concatenating to create an inner environment of toxicity and dissatisfaction. We say we cannot meditate or cannot find time to meditate. This is very often a rationalization for our unwillingness to make meditation a priority in our lives. We make eating and drinking, sleeping and showering priorities in our everyday lives, and we invariably find time for them. So why not meditation? Deep inside, we may not have truly appreciated the value and worth of meditation. We may subtly resist meditation, perhaps for fear that it would disrupt our neurotic lives too much. Or we may harbour wrong and distorted conceptions of meditation due to our religious conditioning that misconceived and misrepresented what meditation really is. Whatever the case may be, we end up being lazy about our meditation practice that engages us in total involvement with life. Such total involvement is at once free of emotional entanglements driven by ego, allowing us to be, know, think, feel, speak, and act in a spirit of "absolute balance, piercing clarity, and inexhaustible exuberance" (Sadhguru). That in essence is Yoga. Our busyness with our entanglements of the world — endless work and climbing the corporate ladder, money-making, socializing, entertainment, family dramas, community kerfuffles, political hubris, and a plethora of worldly intoxication — keeps us away from what really matters in the end: our spiritual practice and journey towards complete liberation.
Attachment or clinging (Pali: upadana) is a wrong consciousness that exaggerates the value and desirability of a thing or person. Attachment is greed (Pali: lobha) rooted in delusion (Pali: moha). Delusion is the root of wrong consciousness, the fundamental misperceiving and misconceiving of reality. It makes an error in relation to how something truly is and how it exists. Delusion is paired with ignorance (Pali: avijja), not knowing the reality of what is and how something exists. Not knowing how things truly are is the absence of knowledge of reality which is ignorance and forms the basis for the mind's subsequent mis-knowing of how things exist. When things truly exist in a certain way but is perceived (directly known via sense perception) and conceived (indirectly known via mediation of thought) otherwise, we say that we mis-know or are deluded about that very thing. We initially fail to know reality as it is (ignorance) and then come to know it wrongly (delusion). Due to our ignorance and delusion, we see and believe what is impermanent as permanent, what does not yield lasting happiness as the source of our happiness, and what is devoid of self as being a self or belonging to a self. We see and believe what is empty of inherent and autonomous existence as possessing inherent and autonomous existence. This fundamental delusion pervades the totality of our experience, from sensory to mental to spiritual experiences. It is the source and root of all our subsequent wrong views, mental reactivity, and existential suffering. That is why we so frequently arrive at wrong conclusions about our lives, even about our objects of religious belief.
This cliche that "busyness is good" is one such wrong conclusion, as is the belief in transient worldly pleasure and success as the source of lasting happiness. We may also project our sensual desires into some kind of post-mortem paradisal future where we get to enjoy them in an idealised and magnified form for eternity. Apart from this, one common yet persistent wrong presumption is that we will not die in this moment or the next, that somehow death happens to all but it does not happen to me, at least not right now. Or worse, some prosperity pseudo-gospel folks even strongly deny that they can age or will one day die — they merely “fall asleep.” All of these are rooted in our ignorance and delusion, driven by attachment and greed. With attachment and greed come their conjoined opposites of aversion and hatred. Out of attachment to our fragile sense of self-worth and reactive aversion to being socially or religiously disapproved, we may act out in busyness to prove to ourselves and to others that we matter and are valued members of society. And when such social validation is not forthcoming, we may pour out even more of our energy, blood, sweat, and tears to gain that much taunted and much desired validation. This makes us into perfect cogs in the capitalist machinery where human beings are dehumanized into resources to be used and discarded like tissue paper. Is this kind of busyness what we really want for ourselves? Is busyness really a virtue? No, it is not. Not for me anyway. There are very busy people doing all kinds of mischievous and malicious things in the world, like making bombs or planning terrorist attacks or committing atrocities in war zones. The list goes on. Busyness is not a virtue, not by a long shot. Mere busyness is just busyness, there is nothing virtuous about it. Enlightened ones may be immensely active and vibrant but never busy. They act with effortless action. By non-action, all is done.
We need serious and dedicated people who are willing to outpour themselves into authentic contemplative practice that awakens and liberates the mind, so that all anguish and suffering can cease for good and all good qualities like wisdom and compassion can fully blossom. In this endeavour, there is no busyness but only infinite involvement without entanglement. There is full engagement in the deeper dimensions of being, outpouring of energy and time into what truly and finally matters — to be fully and truly actualized as the consciousness that we are, with infinite degrees of freedom and unlimited play of potentialities. Yes, there is inexhaustible work involved but not busyness, much less stress or tension. This spiritual endeavour or sadhana is for people who are serious and dedicated to their ultimate fulfilment that includes all beings. At Awarezen, we are looking for such people, not those who say they are "interested" but are not really serious, only too "busy" with their conditioned and habituated modes of everyday living.
Sadhana will not take too much time. Sadhana will take all of time and space, and requires nothing less than total dissolution of who you think you are — if you are truly serious and dedicated. If you are looking for some stress reduction or anxiety relief or nutriment for your busy consumerist lifestyles (which is no style at all but compulsion-driven existence, as Sadhguru puts it), you may do better to seek some corporate mindfulness programs or psychological therapies catering to those symptoms and needs. But not Awarezen, where deep mindfulness and wisdom take precedence.
Awarezen is looking for people who are serious and dedicated, willing to be fully engaged and involved with sadhana, their spiritual process and practice. This engaged involvement is not dead-pan or humorless but a playful and blissful, even ecstatic journey of exploration, inquiry, discovery, experimentation, persistent practice, and experiential realization. Awarezen does not believe in statements of faith or a set of dogmas. Awarezen cherishes the spirit of free inquiry and experiential knowing. Belief is only relevant when we do not know. Why believe when you can know for yourselves things as they really are?
May all auspicious affinities come to fruition at Awarezen.
