Audio Transcript
Imagine you’re dying of thirst and your lips are cracked; they’re parched. Your body needs water, and there is in front of you a glass of water, but you don’t drink it. Instead, you pick up a book about water. You read about its molecular structure, H2O—so, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. You study the hydration process. Then you join a forum discussing the best techniques for drinking water. You also bookmark all the articles about people who drank water and they felt amazing. You also take some notes, you highlight passages, you save some videos, and you say, “Yes, this all makes sense; I really understand water now.”
But in the end, you remain thirsty. Reading a lot of books without integrating the wisdom into your daily life and without practice is something similar to the simile of learning all about water but still being thirsty.
So, there was this person who had come to me a while back, and he had read hundreds of books: Advaita, Zen, Nisargadatta. You could ask him the finer points between Advaita, Neo-Advaita, Uttara Paksha – you know, they’re all different parts of Advaita, Upanishads – and still, he was so restless. I could see the restlessness when he was sitting with me and talking. His body was agitated. I could see the movements in his hands, his eyes, and so I asked him, “You know, how long can you sit quietly with yourself before you need to engage your mind in, say, TV or scrolling or doing something?” And he said, “Not much; maybe three to four minutes.”
So, three to four minutes after reading a whole bookshelf of books. And this is not an isolated case, with the amount of spiritual books, podcasts, videos, and teachers available. It’s like a buffet of spiritual consumption, but you’re still suffering. And there is something delicious about reading and consuming this spiritual buffet. You do feel you’re productive; you feel you’re learning, you’re growing, there is evolution. The words flow into your mind like peace and calm and like honey. They paint a picture of, you know, all these beings who are enlightened, sitting in perfect stillness. And for those few minutes while you’re reading or consuming the spiritual media, you feel spiritual, you feel good. But once you close the book or stop that consumption of the media, mostly nothing has changed. You’re still angry at your partner, you’re still anxious about money; maybe you’re still restless, waking up at two or three am in the night, your thoughts racing all over.
So the books and the media and the podcasts give you concepts and insights, surely, but they don’t transform because, as I said, reading about water doesn’t quench your thirst; only drinking it does. So the question is: why do we do it? Why do we choose to read about meditation and acceptance and being with the “what is” instead of actually putting it into practice? And the answer is pretty simple: because it’s easier. Reading is safe. The book gives you the illusion of progress without requiring any of the discomfort that a real transformation demands.
To bring home my point, I’ll ask you to do a small exercise in your mind. Imagine it’s Sunday morning and you have an hour of free time. You have two options.
- Option one: Sit in silence and meditation and face the anxiety in your belly, in your heart, the thoughts about failure, the grief, or anything that you have been avoiding.
- Option two: Read an inspiring book, maybe about J. Krishnamurti or some sage, or some spiritual book while drinking a hot cup of coffee or tea in a cozy chair.
Which one would you choose? Would you want to go through that discomfort of being with yourself, or would you just want to relax and listen to a podcast or maybe read a book while sipping tea and coffee? Many of us would choose the book because it’s comforting; it’s easy compared to the rawness of facing whatever is coming up inside of us.
This is not only an issue with spiritual seekers; it has a strong psychological foundation. I’ll talk about a study now, and you can read about this study – you can Google it and read all about it. There was this psychologist or a professor and they did research on this. They did a lot of experiments on stillness and silence and making people sit all by themselves. And they found that most of the people found that exercise to be very discomforting – just being with their thoughts or being all alone and nothing to do. So they had no engagements, no phones, no TVs, and 70 to 80 percent of the people said, “We don’t like it.”
But then this guy went a step ahead, which is really very surprising and telling. He chose 55 participants, and they would be seated alone in a quiet, empty room with nothing to do. Now, they had access to a button that would deliver an electric shock to their ankle. Now, before the experiment started, everyone was given a shock. So they pressed a button, they caught the shock, it was fairly uncomfortable, and they were also asked: if you had five dollars, would you give away that money instead of getting the shock? And they said yes, we don’t want to get shocked; we’ll happily give away the five dollars instead of getting shocked. So what they wanted to establish as a baseline was that the shock was very uncomfortable for them – uncomfortable enough for them to part with money.
Now, once they were put in that solitude and alone, in those 15 minutes of solitude, 67 percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to shock themselves instead of simply sitting quietly. So on an average, more than 50 percent of the participants gave themselves electric shocks. So most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing – even if that something is negative.
So the professor – and I’m quoting him, the researcher – he says after the experiment and after all the analysis, he says that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid. And we are talking about this discomfort now. This discomfort is actual. It is so actual that it has been quantified by science in experiments.
So, of course, the mind will try to avoid it at all costs, and consumption of spiritual media and books is one of them. So we don’t give ourselves electric shocks; instead, we reach out for something which is comforting. And sometimes that comforting thing might not be spiritual. It might be an escape like Netflix, or drugs, medication, sex, love, driving, going to a retreat, going to an ashram. So all these are actions we take which comfort us. On some level, we are stalling, even after knowing what needs to be done.
Another thing that the mind does: it creates an illusion of being prepared, and it convinces you that you’re not ready yet. And so the mind says you need to learn more. You need to understand the theory intellectually. What is Advaita? What is Zen? Why did Buddha say this? Why did the other teacher say that? Why did Nisargadatta say this to this seeker? Why did J. Krishnamurti contradict other teachers? And the mind says, “You know, just one more book, one more teacher, one more podcast, and then I will be in a place to start the real work.”
But for some, that day never comes because the mind will always find another reason you’re not yet ready. And what it’s doing is it’s protecting you from the discomfort of true transformation. It’s keeping you in a safe place when you actually need to sail into the storm.
So what actually changes you is the capacity to be with this discomfort – the capacity to be with this boredom. Sometimes meditating can be really boring because, for the mind, nothing is happening. There is no drama; there is no stimulation. But say for those 55 people that we talked about in the experiment: if they could slowly learn to sit quietly without engaging their mind in silence and stillness, with time, they would develop the capacity where they could slowly process and go deeper into their own anxieties, their own fears, and the thoughts which they have been avoiding.
So we’re talking about how real change can happen. And for this change to happen, you will have to one day give up the book and the podcast and even the teacher and the teachings and sit quietly and just be, and develop the capacity to accept whatever arises. Of course it’s terrifying, because whatever arises is never in agreement with your demands and your needs. The universe has its own patterns, has its own way of manifesting situations, and they might not be according to what you want or what your ego wants. And so on some level, it is terrifying to just accept – not only the external situation, but also our internal shortcomings, our conditionings, our darkness, our fears.
So books and teachings are good till you use them to learn. So you learn about water, but you also drink it. So books will give you the basic insights, but then ultimately you will have to sit down on the cushion – and then also, once you get up from the cushion, into your everyday messy life, full of chaos and problems and suffering, that is where you will have to apply the practice. Otherwise, tomorrow will be the same day again: the same mind, the same patterns, the same conditionings, the same reactions.