The Art of Living
- by S. N. Goenka
(The following article was originally published in the Sayagyi U Ba Khin Journal.)
Everyone seeks peace and harmony, because these are what we lack in our lives. From time to time we all experience agitation, irritation, disharmony, suffering; and when we suffer from agitation, we do not keep this misery limited to ourselves. We keep distributing it to others as well. The agitation permeates the atmosphere around the miserable person. Everyone else who comes into contact with him becomes irritated, agitated. Certainly this is not the proper way to live.
One ought to live at peace within oneself, and at peace with others. After all, a human being is a social being. One has to live in society to live and deal with others. How to live peacefully
How to remain harmonious within ourselves, and to maintain peace and harmony around us, so that others also can live peacefully and harmoniously
When one is agitated, then, to come out of it, one has to know the basic reason for the agitation, the cause of the suffering. If one investigates the problem, it soon becomes clear that whenever one starts generating any negativity or defilement in the mind, one is bound to become agitated. A negativity in the mind a mental defilement or impurity cannot coexist with peace and harmony.
How does one start generating negativity
Again investigating, it becomes clear. I become very unhappy when I find someone behaving in a way which I don”t like, when I find something happening which I don”t like. Unwanted things happen, and I create tension within myself. Wanted things do not happen, some obstacles come in the way, and again I create tension within myself; I start tying knots within myself. Throughout one”s life, unwanted things keep happening, wanted things may or may not happen, and this process of reaction, of tying knots Gordian knots makes the entire mental and physical structure so tense, so full of negativity. Life becomes miserable.
Now one way to solve the problem is to arrange things such that nothing unwanted happens in my life, and that everything keeps on happening exactly as I desire. I must develop such a power or somebody else must have the power and must come to my aid whenever I request it that everything I want keeps happening. But this is not possible. There is no one in the world whose desires are always fulfilled, in whose life everything happens according to his wishes, without anything unwished-for happening. Things keep occurring that are contrary to our desires and wishes. So, in spite of these things which I don”t like, how not to react blindly
How not to create tension
How to remain peaceful and harmonious
In India as well as in other countries, wise saintly persons of the past studied this problem the problem of human suffering and they found a solution. If something unwanted happens and one starts to react by generating anger, fear, or any negativity, then as soon as possible one should pert one”s attention to something else. For example, get up, take a glass of water, start drinking your anger will not multiply; you”ll be coming out of your anger. Or start counting: one, two, three, four. Or start repeating a word, a phrase, or perhaps some mantra. It becomes easy if you use the name of a deity or a saintly person in whom you have devotion. The mind is perted, and to some extent you”ll be out of the negativity, out of anger.
This solution was helpful; it worked. It still works. Practising this, the mind feels free from agitation. In actuality, however, this solution works only at the conscious level. By perting one”s attention one in fact pushes the negativity deep into the unconscious, and at this level one continues to generate and multiply the same defilement. At the s…
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