Waiting for Success

This is what happens when we chase success the way our modern society defines it. Such success is always relative. The “other” is necessary for me to feel successful. If I want to go ahead, there must be those who I leave behind. And the other too is trying to do the same.

Of course I pay a heavy price for such success. I gain money, fame, power and the contraptions that symbolise success but lose a lot more in the bargain—I  lose my health, my relationships, my peace of mind, my awareness and appreciation of nature, my ability to relax and allow life to unfold, my wonder and awe… all my real wealth. In fact, I would say I lose my very life because when I seek something, I end up always waiting to live, instead of living now. It’s a very big price for something so ephemeral.

A Different Kind of Neurosis

But wait a minute! My ego doesn’t think so. It is very pleased with all the possessions and acquisitions, and the sense of pride and identity it derives from them. It doesn’t matter that inside I feel like a failure because I have gained this success and yet lost the ability to enjoy it—like my friend Abhishek! If this is not neurosis, what is?

To different degrees and in different ways, we are all afflicted by the same neurosis. My friend is a mirror of my own desire; mine is not about achieving more but about making a greater positive impact on the world. Outwardly it seems like a noble intention but make no mistake—it’s just another form of neurosis, different in degree perhaps, but similar in its emphasis on “doing” and living in the future.

I can see that my conviction that some day I will finally arrive, feel truly successful and happy is an illusion, albeit a compelling one. Isn’t it absurd that even though I have no guarantee that tomorrow will come, I sacrifice my today in the hope that I will be happier when it comes?

Real Success Isn’t Pursued

I also understand that unless I change how I define success and what it means to me, my pursuit will never end. I will keep chasing and wanting and doing more—never realising that true success cannot come in the future because the future doesn’t exist, except in my imagination.

So what is true success? A wiser dimension of me whispers that it is the ability to be fully alive now. And it means to be aware of being alive. This is the awareness I need to keep coming back to, each time my neurosis threatens to take my life away from me. This is the anchor I need each time my attention moves away from living now to ‘waiting to live’.

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In our great epic, the Mahabharata: Bhishma Pitamaha, the divine son of the sacred River Ganga, is asked about the source of sin and evil in the world. Bhishma replies to his questioner, Yudhishtira, a young King seeking wisdom. “From greed, sin and all adharma flows, a stream of misery. Greed is the poisoned spring of all cunning and hypocrisy in the world. It is greed which makes people sin… Greed is the source of evil.”

Like lust, greed is also a severe internal affliction, a diseased condition of the mind that leaves us permanently dissatisfied, permanently insecure and permanently in a state of lack, want and need. As the wise old saying goes, “He who loves money excessively, never has money enough.” The more you acquire, the more you covet, and the more you dwell in want and insecurity. An offshoot of this insecurity is the fearful need to hoard, store and cling to the wealth you have amassed.

Hoarding and spending

Greed manifests itself in two broad tendencies — the impulse to hoard and the impulse to spend extravagantly. In the first case, the ‘victim’ is obsessed with amassing more and more wealth and putting it away safely for a future need. Such a man cannot trust Providence for the morrow: he is determined that he will be his own provider, and will not look to God to take care of his needs; he trusts his avarice and miserliness more than he trusts God’s generosity and compassion!

The ‘big spenders’, as they are called, are on an acquisition spree; they cannot stop buying things that they don’t really need. Bigger, better, newer, faster… whatever the excuse, they keep spending on luxuries and whims, indulging their urge to splurge and acquire more and more…

Root cause of unhappiness

I would say that this tendency to accumulate material wealth, the craving for more and more, is the root cause of human unhappiness. Greed, listed as one of the seven deadly sins in the Christian teachings, binds people with fetters that shackle their capacity for self-fulfillment and inner harmony. The more we are attached to a house, a car, a piece of jewellery or an object, the more we lay ourselves open and vulnerable to unhappiness. The desire to possess leads gradually on to the impulse to accumulate and hoard. Invariably, we begin “keeping up with the Joneses” as they put it in England – i.e. constantly comparing ourselves with our neighbours, and trying to be one up on them.

Our senses are instruments of cognition that Nature has blessed us with; they tell us to eat when we are hungry and seek warmth when we are cold. The fulfillment of such needs is essential for human survival. It is only when our needs and wants become unreasonable and obsessive that they cease to be natural and enter the danger zone of covetousness.

Goal of life

Artha or wealth, is one of the purusharthas or legitimate goals of life. But we must understand that amassing wealth is not the sole aim of our life on earth — it is only the means to a higher end. Our money, our assets, our car, our house and all our worldly goods (acquired by fair, honest means) can help us and our loved ones lead a life free from want and deprivation. At a higher level, they can help us help others who are not as fortunate as we are. In other words, wealth is an aid to living life well; it cannot be the ‘be all and end all’ of our life!

Unfortunately, our society today recognises and equates accomplishment and success with money. In business, sports or entertainment, a ‘star’ or a ‘leader’ is valued by the millions he has amassed, the size of his bungalow and the car he drives. I do not grudge these celebrities the money they make but I am pained by the fact that we lesser mortals compare ourselves to them, and feel frustrated, inadequate and insecure!

Happiness and success cannot be measured in terms of money, power, position, wealth or social status. For a man may have all of these and still be miserable. The world thinks that a millionaire is a ‘successful’ man. Success is measured by the yardstick of inner happiness – your ability to be happy and make others happy; the ability to love and be loved by others; the ability to live in harmony with those around you, with your own self and God’s cosmic laws.

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Pavlov, BF Skinner and the other behaviorists, go on circling around the physical, the muladhar. They think man is only the body. They get too much involved in the first temple, they get too much involved with the physical, they forget everything else.

These people are trying to explain man only through the physical, the material. This attitude becomes a hindrance because they are not open.

How man becomes a thing

When from the very beginning you deny that there is nothing other than the body, then you deny the exploration itself. This becomes a prejudice. A communist, a Marxist, a behaviorist, an atheist—people who believe that man is only the body—their very belief closes doors to higher realities. They become blind.

And the physical is there, the physical is the most apparent; it needs no proof. Because it need not be proved, it becomes the only reality. That is nonsense. Then man loses all dignity. If there is nothing to grow in or to grow towards, there cannot be any dignity in life. Then man becomes a thing.

Then you are not an opening, then nothing more is going to happen to you—you are a body: you will eat, and you will defecate, and you will eat and you will make love and produce children, and this will go on and on, and one day you die. A mechanical repetition of the mundane, the trivia—how can there be any significance, any meaning, any poetry? How can there be any dance?

The body is not all

There is nothing wrong about the body, remember. I am not against the body, it is a beautiful temple. The ugliness enters when you think this is all.

Man can be conceived of as a ladder with seven rungs, and you get identified with the first rung. Then you are not going anywhere. And the ladder is there, and the ladder bridges this world and the other; the ladder bridges matter with God. The first rung is perfectly good if it is used in relationship to the whole ladder. If it functions as a first step it is immensely beautiful: one should be thankful to the body.

But if you start worshipping the first rung and you forget the remaining six, you forget that the whole ladder exists and you become closed, confined to the first rung, then it is no longer a rung at all… because a rung is a rung only when it leads to another rung, a rung is a rung only when it is part of a ladder. If it is no longer a rung, then you are stuck with it.

Materialism is boring

Hence, people who are materialistic are always stuck, they always feel something is missing, they don’t feel they are going anywhere. They move in rounds, in circles, and they come again and again to the same point. They become tired and bored. They start contemplating how to commit suicide. And their whole effort in life is to find some sensations, so something new can happen. But what ‘new’ can happen? All the things that we go on being occupied with are nothing but toys to play with.

Think of these words of Frank Sheed: “The soul of man is crying for purpose or meaning. And the scientist says, “Here is a telephone.” Or, “Look! Television!”—exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces at it. The leaping stream of invention has served extraordinarily well to keep man occupied, to keep him from remembering that which is troubling him.

Materialism makes you stuck

All that the modern world has provided you with is nothing but sugar sticks, toys to play with—and you were crying for the mother, you were crying for love, and you were crying for consciousness, and you were crying for some significance in life. And they say, “Look! the telephone. Look! The television.

Look! We have brought so many beautiful things for you.” And you play around a little bit; again you get fed up, again you are bored, and again they go on searching for new toys for you to play with.This state of affairs is ridiculous. It is so absurd that it seems almost inconceivable how we go on living in it. We have got caught at the first rung.

You are not your body

Remember that you are in the body, but you are not the body; let that be a continuous awareness in you. You live in the body, and the body is a beautiful abode. Remember, I am not for a single moment hinting that you become anti-body, that you start denying the body as the so-called spiritualists have done down the ages.

The materialists go on thinking that the body is all that is, and there are people who move to the opposite extreme, and they start saying that the body is illusory, the body is not! “Destroy the body so the illusion is destroyed, and you can become really real.”

This other extreme is a reaction. The materialist creates his own reaction, just as the spiritualist, but they are partners in the same business; they are not very different people.

The body is beautiful, the body is real, the body has to be lived, the body has to be loved. The body is a great gift of existence. Not for a single moment be against it, and not for a single moment think that you are only it. You are far bigger. Use the body as a jumping board.

Excerpted from The Heart Sutra # 1 Courtesy: Osho International Foundation; www.osho.com

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