Submit your Article

In his seminal work “To Have or To Be”, Erich Fromm spoke of the ‘having mode’ and the ‘being mode’. James March too speaks of the distinction between being externally motivated, working for specific ‘accomplishments’ or ‘good consequences’ versus following the energy arising from within one’s ‘identity’. According to March, cultivating, recognizing and giving one the freedom to dance with self-belief provides freedom to make mistakes and to appear fearlessly foolish. This trade-off between consequential thinking and identity thinking enables us to practice the ‘spiritual’ audacity of a Don Quixote or a Forrest Gump. Clarissa Pinkola Estes articulates, “Dwelling free means to follow the divine impulse, to live in a way that is not restricted to what others say and insist on, but to follow one's broadest, deepest sense about how to be, to grow, and live.” Moving with one’s self-belief and identity is not a debilitating unproductive space. The energy comes from the union of both passion and disciplined application. Remember Gump with his uncommon destiny of the unpredictable feather floating around him? Everything that Forrest does is with a sense of purpose—albeit, a differently-enabled identity, which is disarmingly self-validating of his shortcomings; yet preciously embedded with a dogged-discipline. There is imagination, persistence, and joy as Forrest ventures out of his adolescent cocoon. An unusual imagination as he makes his choices when to run or pause. A persistence as he strives to fulfill his dharma toward himself, Bubba and Bubba’s family, lieutenant Dan, his mother, his love Jenny and his son Forrest Junior. There is visible confidence manifest in things he does like when he is running away from the bullies in school. It is through this experiencing of inner assurance that he is able to bring succor and joy in the lives of significant others. Clarissa Pinkola Estes further describes this as “a journey to find a truer selfhood; one that cannot be easily corrupted by the outer world, or by time. The impulse fulfills a longing to unearth and reveal one's greatest and deepest shadows and gifts. It provides the balances required for a person to feel one thing especially—contentment”. In the outcomes of many myths, this neglected self so often proves to be the trove of heroic treasures—just right for the conflicts and courageous efforts needed to meet aggressive challenges and to give birth to the kinder, more tender, elegant and more strengthened self. Many a time our mindfulness wanders off, and makes us participate in dramas and in characters that are not related to our values of who we intrinsically purport to be to live heroic lives. We carry pretensions of superficial, quasi-cultural art and glamor-brands instead of elegance. Through this decadent lens we value people, food, things and qualify beauty. We tag talent and pleasure based on how much it cost, and exchange of crass favors and a crafty drift instead of empathetic values. There is a stench in the sweetness of Wilber’s ‘corporate flatland' that ‘professionals and business' often need to mask with artificially concocted benchmarks of ‘quality and goodness’. The timeless archetypes from the old myths that we invoke and connect to in life to negotiate its ups and downs have been almost erased by science, technology, and commerce. In our process to see our world homogenized in terms of currency, lingo, and corporate success stories, and cultural correctness, we sit smugly in our places of work and pleasure while machines slowly bore holes in the ozone layer. We are like Humpty Dumpty, set up to be felled without being put back together again. By shifting our cognitive bandwidth from the internal to the external, from us to me, from elegance to glamor, from health to wealth, from true happiness to indulgence and from kindness to crass indifference and cruelty, we defy our humanness. With a twisted and warped sense of success, we encourage, benchmark, celebrate and idolize the Peaky Blinders and Alfie Solomons of the world spouting unmatched philosophical eloquence devoid of intrinsic moral values. Are we ignoring the uniqueness of our mythos from where we derive our true spiritual strength? Are we ignoring the Don Quixotes and the Forrest Gumps in us? How do we reclaim ourselves from ourselves in order to fulfill our quest from that lie buried within most of us? As Jung questioned us, how do we cultivate the essential attitudes needed to support a quality life of the soul? Our answer may well come from a certain resilience to societal pressures that helps a person to become and to grow and live in the deepest and the most sacred sense.

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.” One is Evil—it is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

“The other is Good - It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

The term ‘Positive Addiction’ to most of us is an oxymoron, isn’t it? It appears to make up a sense of an illogic which is hard to comprehend. This is mainly because the word addiction has such hard-wired and powerful associations to what we have seen, heard, and felt. The only ‘positive’ that we can associate to addicts is their single-minded pursuit for their choice of one’s ‘fix’; and towards which they gravitate by hook or by crook with an astonishing ekagrahta or unparalleled focus.

Let us look at what these words connote—positive deals with all that is good, bright, and wholesome—an expansiveness that reaches from us towards others. It is a movement from the center; to enlarge and envelop an ever-expanding circumference of sentient beings spreading love, caring, comfort, and bodhicitta with its special qualities of friendliness, joy, compassion, and equanimity.

Addiction on the other hand forebodingly conveys a condition of low resolution, dullness, foreboding hues - an ever-contracting selfish state of being parasitically feeding into one’s own entails, moving out toward others once in a while only to satisfy one’s intense cravings to scrounge off others; to devour both others and ultimately in a heroically tragic manner, oneself! The qualities that addiction festers are quite the opposite of bodhicitta and instead of love and caring for others there is more of self-love and selfishness arising from heightened ego state. These are frequently manifested destructively either in aggressive or suppressive forms of behavior. It is but natural then that when we think of an addict or addiction alarm bells are set off and we want to step aside from an addict’s trajectory.

However, in recent years there has been a special space carved out in psychology—under the realm of positive psychology—that attempts at enshrining the positive aspects of addiction. We certainly come across lots of planted stories by big businesses that extol the virtues of workaholics and how it leads to ‘longer, healthier, and happier’ lives but those are not the factitious Machiavellian kind of research that we wish to dwell on here.

The expression ‘positive addiction’ was made popular by the psychologist William Glasser. Essentially what we need to understand is that while addiction to drugs, alcohol, food, smoking, etc. are actually instances of powerful motivation, they erode our moral strength and values, and suffocate flow and creativity. This holds us back from doing our best.

With gross addiction, which after initially catapulting us to vigorous oomphs and aahaa’s of rajasic energy phases, we find ourselves into toxic tamasic dumps, often unable to pull ourselves out of there, even to perform simple day to day chores.

Unlike gross addiction, Glasser believed there were ‘other forms’ of wholesome and enriching addictive activities that give us strength, such as jogging, meditating, writing a diary, exercising, and relaxing. These, he categorized as positive addictions. We often hear people we know complaining how uneasy they are because they did not have their morning walk or skipped their yoga class.  These people, who hanker for their daily game of tennis, or feel very uneasy unless they have their daily ‘legitimate’ walk or jog, will understand what is meant by positive addiction.

Let’s look at some of the main differentiators between positive addiction and addiction. While positive addiction is a self-actualizing phenomenon (remember Maslow?) and invokes a higher spiritual pursuit and intent, addiction is more of an animal need in us. With addiction, the user is obsessively holding on to the thought of the next fix the whole day.

With positive addiction you only think of it once or twice in a day; and after you have performed the activity (such as meditating or jogging), you forget about it until the next day. You get uneasy if you miss your activity whereas with addiction there is continuous obsessive hankering about the ‘fix’; one neither has space nor time for other interests or pursuits. The withdrawal symptoms too are acute, severe and could be fatal sometimes.

However, the most important divergence between them is that positive addiction enhances physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual quality of our life while addiction debilitates and affects our whole being negatively. Positive addiction leads to a healthier and longer life span.

This clearly explains that positive addiction stems from and strengthens our innate self-esteem; while addiction arises from giving up on our dharma or duties or responsibilities. While looking for immediate satisfaction and pleasure to offset real-time failure or disappointment in life, the addict is unable to delay gratification and slips into an abysmal quagmire of harmful addiction. Along with self-esteem two other factors that are deficient in an addict are resilience and hope.

The real tragedy of addiction is the hole that is dug into by the addict, bereft of possibilities—this snatches away the ability from the person to make choices. For the addict, the world exists in black and white. A life in which there is only addiction is a life with no other life! It results in loneliness and isolation from others. 

If you are in a good mood to celebrate, you reach out for your addiction, if you are sad, you reach out for it. If it’s a manner of having fun, or relaxing, or an intellectual-stimuli, or venting out of anger or depression—whatever it is, it prefers to be ‘self-medicated’ with the ‘substance’ of one’s external dependence.

On the other hand, positive addiction allows one a lot of space for possibility thinking and many choices of what we want to do with our lives. On Monday I can choose to read a book, on Tuesday I can paint, on Wednesday I can be playing golf, Thursday I spend a quiet evening, and on Friday I can even go to the pub and chill out with friends…and so on. Life is then vibrant with rich pastels of baroque colors and the in-between shades and hues. One can manifest oneself with an abundant repertoire of thoughts, emotion, and actions. A person with possibility thinking and with a choice of creative abundance dances fearlessly between the innocence of the Fool (zero) and richness of the Magi (infinity).

Today the tendency of gross materialism and a sensate lifestyle takes us far away from our natural curiosity to conjure and manifest unique expressions of possibilities. Isn’t it important, therefore, for each one of us to introspect how much of a choice-making ability we cultivate and how much space for practicing the art of possibility we allow and create in our lives? As the old Cherokee asks, which wolf would we choose?

The author heads Upaaya—a Contemplation and Research Collaborative at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore

The other day a friend asked me ‘so what is Buddhism?’ For me it is like opening a can of worms or the opening of the Pandora’s Box. Prince Siddhartha, who went on to become the Buddha, on attaining enlightenment, explained the first noble truth as the truth of suffering. He meant that whatever we like or are attached to, will make us unhappy and bring suffering, with hundred percent certainty. That is why it feels like a can of worms or a Pandora’s Box when you set out to explain what is Buddhism.

Although our attachment brings suffering, it is not the original cause of suffering. It is important for us to understand this. The original cause of suffering is the ‘I-ness’ or the ego that we are deeply attached to. These are in our thoughts and ideas and in the people, places and things that we are connected to. So if this ‘I’ is absent, where is the question of attachment?

Attachment essentially causes suffering in bewildering ways. Take the case of an impoverished yogi who is presented with a new loincloth. He begins to worry that the mice running around his hut could bite holes into it and therefore keeps a cat; to feed the cat with milk, he has to keep a cow; to protect the cow from wild beasts while grazing in the forest, he himself has to keep watch over the cow; and so eventually his attachment to his brand new loincloth robs him of the time for yogic practices. So attachment arising from our ‘I-ness' can be a huge distraction.

If desire, attachment, greed form one side of the coin, the other side is anger, aversion, fear. Whatever we desire deeply or pine for greedily has a shelf life after we have got it. There is the law of diminishing returns. There is also entropy and deterioration. So when ‘the time comes’ for us to lose it or part from it we get into negative moods and behaviors. Losing becomes very painful and we suffer.

So getting separated from what we like, becomes a cause of suffering. In his second noble truth, the Buddha says there is cause of suffering. Once there was a lady who was very distraught when her son passed away. She came to the Buddha with hopes that he would make him alive again. In Greek mythology, we have Orpheus, who tried to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead with his enchanting music. We basically want to enchant, bribe, cajole, and beg that the status quo of our attachments prevail beyond all else, realizing little that our ability to ‘play enchanting music’ diminishes over time. The reaper threshes all asunder, irrespective of our worldly resources, pretensions, and the masks we adorn.

Gautama Buddha advised that we could actually get out of this loop of suffering. This was his third noble truth. In the fourth noble truth he elucidated a path that one could travel on, to free ourselves from pain, anguish and suffering, caused by attachment to the idea of self and the objects of desires that we incessantly and relentless craves and pine for.

According to him, there was a misunderstanding on how we see ourselves and perceived our ‘I-ness’. It was not about negating or disowning the ‘I’ but to know how the ‘I’ actually exists.

However, the manner in which we usually live our lives with loads of attachments only feeds our current sense of ego. it is not really possible to explore who we actually are or how we really exist. It is as though we are moving in the wrong direction and we first need to stop, before we can begin our journey on the right pat again.

Our customary proclivities, passions, dreams and desires are like gusts of breeze that keeps the flame of our consciousness fluttering in all directions. When we try to look within to know who we are with the help of superficial ‘spiritual’ practices that we pick up in the bazaar, they only allow us to see flickering glimpses of distorted images of our self. If we are really serious to find our true self, the first stage is to attain calm abiding or samatha. It requires us to distance ourselves from all materialism, expressly those of the religious and ‘spiritual’ kind.

The steady flame of consciousness resulting from distancing ourselves from distracting thoughts, and getting immersed in the practice of meditations such as samatha or vipassana allows a special clarity to dawn on our consciousness. This clarity provides special insights into how we really exist. We then get answers to who we are, how we exist and how the cosmos exists.

We also know then how to connect meaningfully with one another, respect the spaces we dwell in, and fortify our own bodies and minds. We become capable then to want to sustain all things both within and without. When we realize the essence of living, our ‘I-ness’, attachments and desires do not affect us. 

The author is a master trainer of NLP and faculty at Srishti Institute of Design, Bangalore