Feelings and good sense

People often say someone emotionally blackmailed them, he notes. But it happened because we did not keep our feelings in check. King Dasharatha, moved by feeling, granted Kaikeyi three boons, and in the end had to send Rama to the forest. Advertisements work the same way: they touch children and adults alike, and we buy expensive phones and creams we never needed.

Feelings and decisions can live together, he says, but feeling must not take over. When you feel it rising, pause and take three long breaths. Then you can use your emotion intelligently, instead of being used by it.

Sometimes we catch hold of one thought and turn it over for two, three, four hours at night, he says, losing sleep and harming our health. No feeling is bad in itself. If you feel anger, or jealousy, or the sting of failure, that is all right: it will stay a while and then go. Recognise it, and learn to stand a little apart from it. Ask why the anger came, why the jealousy, and whether today’s failure means there will be no success tomorrow.

When feeling carries you away, stop for thirty seconds. Take a long breath and let it reach every part of the body; drink a glass of water, call someone, or go and sit in nature. Then build a positive thought to put in its place.

In his experience, each new generation tolerates a little less. Young men and women alike react at once, will not listen, and will not adjust. The result is tension at home and stress inside. Praise or abuse, success or failure: every word becomes a reason to react.

His way out is to see clearly whose loss an insult is. If someone abuses you or gossips about you, he says, that is their act, not yours. If they lost their temper, the harm is theirs. Learn to stay quiet instead of replying, keep envy out of your mind, and tolerance will grow, and with it your personality.

Over a long teaching life he has found that being simple and natural is harder than being great. We can win fame, he says, but are we at ease? People who stayed ordinary did extraordinary things: Napoleon, Kabir, Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky. In society we try to look grander than we are, and that pretence leaves us unhappy.

Let your graph run level, he says. There will be curves, difficulties and the occasional success; stay the same through all of them. Rama remained steady in every situation. Make simplicity your own formula, and it will bring happiness.

Silence, he says, does not mean keeping your mouth shut while scrolling Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. It means stopping everything and letting the mind settle. As it settles, judgement improves, reflection deepens, creativity grows, and you keep clear of pointless quarrels.

Gandhi kept silence every Monday. He has seen Jain monks keep complete silence several days a month, writing on a slate when something must be said. Try one hour, or at least half an hour, at a fixed time each day, and give the phone a fast for that hour too.