Two weeks ago in this space we talked about the origin of suffering. The tragic story of the Valdeblánquez and Cárdenas families in Santa Marta served us as an example of the terror and death that ensue when attachment and identification with destructive ideas such as hatred and vengeance are taken to the extreme. In today's episode I am going to expand a little on suffering, drawing on examples from another topic I am passionate about, which is world history. But stay with me, because after the first part comes the most important thing: The great revelation the Buddha left us: How to put a definitive end to suffering.
As I mentioned in the first part, although the story of these two families who killed each other by the dozens may seem like madness that only people with sick minds could reach, the reality is that many of humanity's worst tragedies have begun with ideas that seemingly made sense, or with an altruistic purpose, which along the way became twisted, complicated, and in the end, turned into a nightmare.
Another valid example, although certainly overused, could be the story of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Those evil military men that popular culture shows as monsters full of hatred against the Jews and thirsty for blood seem inhuman to us, beings morally very inferior to us. However, the truth is that even they at some point were victims of circumstances and simply tried to do what was right for their people.
I hope you do not feel offended by this statement, and if you did, please keep listening so I can better explain my point.
The world at the beginning of the 20th century was very different from the one we have today. All over the world there were still many kingdoms, empires, and colonies. The United Kingdom and France had allied to continue expanding their colonies around the world, at the expense of the decline of the Spanish empire. In that context, Germany, which had spent the previous century trying to consolidate itself as a nation after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire by the Napoleonic wars, felt that it had the same right as the United Kingdom and France to expand its territory and colonize regions of the world that were not already under the yoke of other empires.
Germany's problem was that the other empires had an enormous advantage in their positioning as colonial powers, and it was taken for granted that Germany was an emerging empire that did not have the same right. That is why, when Emperor Wilhelm II assumed the throne and decided to step on the accelerator of Germany's imperialist aspirations, the other empires went on alert and began to see Germany as a common enemy.
It is known that there were a number of causes for the outbreak of the First World War, but a very important factor was that Germany was growing industrially at a much faster rate than the other European powers, and it was not part of the “inner circle”, as we say in Colombia. At that time Germany had only the Austro-Hungarian empire as its ally and wanted to defend its right to be a power equal to the United Kingdom and France.
Let us remember that these two nations were not precisely known for their respect for life and international law. Napoleon had invaded almost all the territory of what would become Germany, and the United Kingdom had started a war against the Qing dynasty of China defending the right of British merchants to flood the Chinese city of Canton with opium. This is as if the Colombian government declared war on the USA for preventing the entry of cocaine into its territory.
The truth is that Germany had every argument that would justify its position in the First World War. The allies win the war, and then Germany not only has to swallow its imperialist intentions, but the victors also impose on it the Treaty of Versailles, which even today most historians consider a humiliation for Germany and an unnecessary provocation of resentment in the German people. Among the clauses of the treaty is that Germany should declare itself guilty of all the damages and losses that occurred during the war. The Germans also had to cede a great amount of territory that already belonged to them and economically compensate the victorious countries with such an exorbitant amount that it caused an economic depression in Germany that brought them hunger, death, and despair.
Imagine that, with those antecedents, a brave, energetic, and charismatic leader appears who promises to put a stop to suffering, recover the honor of the people, and ensure a future of prosperity. Good and intelligent people like you or me went to the polls with their hearts in their hands, with the hope of a better future for their children, and they chose Adolf Hitler because he seemed to be the person with the necessary character to achieve it.
What happened next? Well, when you sign a blank check to someone who does not have the moral or intellectual capacity, the only thing you cannot expect is that they return it; a messiah-leader chosen to bring salvation is going to spend every last cent of that check and take it to the last consequences. Hitler is the most famous case, but not the last, and not even the one that has caused the most death.
It is easy to look in the rearview mirror at Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Nixon, or Hussein and think they were evil people, with rotten hearts, and not good people like us. The reality is different: those leaders were driven, supported, and kept in power by people like you and me. Those people at some point wanted to do good for their people, for their country, and when they mounted the tiger of power, they could no longer control it.
One wonders how there were good people who supported those leaders to the end. Well, as I said in the previous episode, we tend to become attached to the decisions we have made. It is very difficult to recognize that we have failed and take a different path, especially when we have already invested a lot of time, effort, or money in something.
How many times does it not happen to us that we force ourselves to eat something we did not like, to finish a book or a movie, or to wear a piece of clothing we detest, only because we already paid for it. Well, history is full of leaders who have sent thousands to die in useless wars only because they are not capable of recognizing that they were wrong and turning back.
That is what the Buddha discovered sitting under the fig tree; that the cause of suffering is attachment and aversion: attachment to pleasant sensations and aversion to unpleasant sensations. We saw that attachment and aversion, or “sank-aras”, arise in the mind automatically as a response to the unconscious judgment we make every time we perceive internal or external sensations.
All suffering can be traced back to a sank-ara, even a physical illness, because no illness produces suffering. There are physical illnesses that produce pain, weakness, disability, etc. But many patients who suffer from them choose to focus on life, accept their illness, tolerate the pain, overcome the limitations, and live their life with the greatest happiness they can.
The case of mental illnesses is different, and I think they deserve a more detailed analysis in another episode, but for now, I will only say that the path of spirituality requires a single tool in good condition, and that is our cognitive capacity. A person with deep depression, chronic anxiety, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder cannot simply “think differently”, meditate half an hour a day, and practice Buddhism to get cured. There are illnesses that limit the brain's very capacity to relax, to feel pleasure, and even to understand reality.
Spirituality can indeed help people with these conditions improve remarkably and live a fuller life, but in many cases, when what exists is a chemical imbalance in the brain, the help of medications and other therapies is required in order to then, and only then, begin the path of initiation.
With which we arrive at the most important part of this episode. How can we break the cycle of dukkha, the suffering caused by attachment and aversion? As always, there are many techniques and paths to achieve it, but whichever one you choose, the essential thing is that that path helps you remain anchored in the present.
Many religions and sects offer the end of suffering based on handing over your problems or your burden to a divinity or a leader. Spirituality offers you the end of suffering by attacking its very root. Initiation tells you that there is no way to control what happens around you: You cannot change the past, you cannot change the circumstances around you, you cannot change the people around you. But you can change the way your mind processes that past, those circumstances, and those relationships.
Think of the path of initiation as martial arts training. A Karate or Kung Fu master is going to teach you to focus, to control your mind, to observe your opponent and your surroundings with complete attention. He will teach you to read your adversary's movements before they happen and respond with the most effective movement for your size and level of strength.
No martial art is going to tell you that you must have faith in the god of Kung Fu and that he will give you the strength to defeat your opponent. Nor will it tell you that you must hand over your fight to your sensei and that he will fight for you. Nor will it offer you a sacred scroll that, if you accept it with your heart, will turn you into a black belt.
Spirituality is less like a religion and more like martial arts or high-performance sport. You have to start with simple, repetitive, sometimes uncomfortable exercises that seem like they are not going to take you anywhere. What Initiation asks of you is discipline to stay on the path and belief in your own power to become what you want to achieve. It demands that you take responsibility for your own process and commit to getting up every time you stumble along your way.
With the above I want to show you how the work will be once you have begun the path: small constant steps, techniques that at first you are not going to understand or see working immediately, and discipline to keep going despite the difficulties that arise, because they surely will arise. There is no great secret that will be revealed to you when you reach a higher level. This is all there is: a training of the mind to change the way it works, so that it stops being an obstacle and becomes a tool in your favor.
But there is something you have to know. Initiation is not given to every applicant. No matter how much you want to get out of suffering, to receive the initiation you must first defeat the guardian of the threshold. What is the guardian of the threshold? It is a test you must pass in order to begin the path. It is an obstacle that is presented to all aspirants to determine how determined they are to leave behind the life of suffering.
What is that terrible obstacle? It is called guilt: human beings have the compulsion to look for those to blame for everything bad that happens to us, and the guilty party is almost never oneself. But furthermore, when we believe we are the guilty ones, then guilt paralyzes us and puts us in a dungeon of self-flagellation from which it is even harder to get out than from the dungeon of blaming others.
It seems simple, but it is not at all. Those guilts are the three heads of Cerberus, the dog-shaped monster that guards the gates of the underworld: guilt toward oneself, guilt toward others, and guilt toward circumstances.
The only way to defeat this guardian of the threshold is Self-Responsibility. That is, the capacity to accept that you, and only you, are the only one responsible for achieving happiness. It does not matter that your boss is racist or misogynistic, or that your partner is unfaithful and abusive, or that your mom denied you affection and guidance your whole childhood, or that you were raped as a child, or that you find yourself without money or work. Nor does it matter that you have been unfaithful or abandoned your loved ones, or that you have an addiction you have not been able to overcome.
None of that matters, because whoever caused the harm you suffer from, whether it was you, another person, or the circumstances of life, does not change in the least either what you are feeling or what you have to do to resolve that situation. As I said before, guilt, whatever it is, paralyzes you and distances you from the solution. The only possible path to get out of suffering is to assume 100% of the responsibility for your healing and the construction of your future. If you are not willing to accept that responsibility, then you are not yet ready to begin the path.
Not being ready to begin the path does not mean you have to resign yourself to doing nothing. Self-responsibility is a personal decision, not a conviction. Let me explain: You do not have to believe that assuming responsibility for all your healing is the only path; you have to decide it. That is, even if other paths exist, even if it is possible that your partner changes, that your luck improves, or that Jesus Christ saves you, you have decided to make the changes you have to make within yourself and not depend on anyone or anything to achieve it.
But even knowing that it is a decision, for many people it is very difficult to stop blaming others for what happens to them, or to continuously punish themselves for a bad decision in the past. So help is required. If this is your case, then seek help: You can talk to me if you wish, you can talk to someone you know who has walked a spiritual path and in whose life you see the harmony you would like to achieve. I personally found in yagé the most powerful tool for transforming my vision of reality, and it is quite possible that it can also serve you to defeat the guardian of the threshold. If you have not listened to the narration of my first experience with yagé, I invite you to listen to episode T2E4: Death and Rebirth in Yagé.
Finally, if you cannot connect with any of those tools, keep searching, ask your inner wisdom to show you the best path for you, and allow yourself to discover the book with which millions of people around the world have found the key to definitively believing in the path of self-responsibility. This book is called The Power of Now.
The Power of Now is a book written in 1997 by the German-Canadian Eckart Tolle. You may have already heard of that book because it is a world bestseller, and even today it is referenced by many celebrities who have found in its lines a guide to discovering the healing power of living anchored in the present and understanding that each of us is the only one responsible for the construction of our own destiny.
The book will show you many perspectives, including some scientific, religious, and pragmatic ones, to understand why our mind is so prone to looking for those to blame rather than looking for solutions. It also narrates, with practical examples from daily life, the ways in which the modern world and our own mind distract us from the present and lead us to live in the past and in the future, there where we have no possibility of action.
Once you have understood this simple but powerful concept, your life is going to change radically. It is not that you are going to change your way of acting by magic, but you are going to learn to immediately recognize the moments when you are evading the present and losing yourself in the past, or fantasizing about the future. You will also detect on the fly the situations in which you place yourself in the victim position and delegate to others the responsibility for your future.
Mara, my teacher, says that depression is an excess of past and anxiety is an excess of future, and one of the first things she taught me is a little trick that I practice frequently and today I am going to gift it to you: Every time you catch yourself entranced in memories that torment you, or planning uncertain futures, scheming about possibilities that throw you off balance, then with the index and middle fingers of your hand, give yourself three dry taps on the crown of your head. While doing it, you order your mind to return to the here and now.
If you have walked the path we have been talking about, you recognize that you live in a Matrix that hides reality and keeps you enslaved, you have grown tired of the constant suffering in your life, and you want to achieve a state of inner peace. If, in addition to that, you have decided that you are the only person responsible for achieving that peace and happiness, and you understand that there is nothing for you in the past or in the future, then you have received your first initiation into the greater mysteries. Now you are a person of knowledge and you can begin the journey of the Buddha, of Jesus Christ, and of all the other enlightened ones.
Let me repeat something: there is no secret. True spirituality hides nothing. There are no mystical powers awaiting you at 7 years of journey, nor a mysterious scroll with supreme truths that you are going to receive like a graduation. Yes, there are many mysteries you will unveil, many mystical experiences you can live, and wisdom you will obtain, but no initiate can offer them to you or reveal them to you, other than as a personal anecdote without any importance in your walk.
The only universal revelation awaiting you on the other side is the only one that truly matters: You are immortal in the eternal present. There is nothing other than the here and now, there is no one other than your own consciousness. If not here, where? If not now, when? If not me, who?
What should you do now to begin your training? I do not know; there are many paths and all lead to the same destination. You can choose Buddhism, leave your possessions behind, and enter a cloister to seek enlightenment through meditation. It may be that your path is yoga, and with the asanas, mudras, and mantras you connect with your inner essence. You can try the path of yagé as I did for 10 years, or even become a high-performance athlete, a practitioner of martial arts, birdwatching, or the visual arts.
Any path that leads you to live in the present and centers you in your own being is a good path. The important thing is that you find a path in which your heart vibrates and that makes it easier for you to maintain constancy for the necessary time.
In a moment I am going to tell you what my favorite tool is, keeping in mind that yagé is only one tool that requires an entire logistics and specific conditions to be beneficial. About yagé I am going to talk in more detail in a future episode where I will narrate many more perspectives of my personal experience. But first, I want to recommend that you read spiritual authors with whom you connect and enjoy. My personal recommendations in this section are Osho, Khalil Gibran, Sadhguru, the Power of Now by Eckart Tolle, which I already mentioned before, and The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz.
Be very careful with books of Gnosis, Esotericism, Metaphysics, and Pseudoscience like The Secret, shamanism books like those of Carlos Castaneda, and “revealed” books like the Urantia Book, A Course in Miracles, and Conversations with God. I am not saying they are bad, but that you be careful. In fact, I have read them all and from all of them I have learned and been quite entertained, but I have also been very confused, because these books mix spirituality with religion, magical beliefs without experimental support, and in some cases, dangerous dogmas of which it can later cost quite a lot of time and effort to get rid of.
Reading is fundamental because it is the way to enrich your knowledge while you train your mind with the discipline you have chosen, and you wake your mind more and more to reality. In later episodes I plan to talk in detail about some of those authors and their works and share my personal experience with them: what I learned, what I loved, and what tangled me up. Not as a judgment on those works, but as a personal opinion based on my own experience.
Well, finally I am going to share with you the most powerful tool, along with yagé, that I have found on my path, but that unlike the former, I can use at any time and in any place. It is called Vipassana meditation.
This is a meditation technique created by the Indian teacher S.N. Goenka, or Goenkaji, and it is said to be based on the technique that Gautama Buddha himself used to liberate himself. It is totally focused on the dissolution of the sank-aras, that is, the reactions of attachment and aversion, through the simple method of observing one's own breathing.
This technique has spread throughout the world through meditation centers that offer a 10-day spiritual retreat in which you learn the technique intensively. They are 10 days of boarding in the cloister, during which you have no communication of any kind with the outside world and you receive food in small but sufficient portions, to keep the body in a state of mild discomfort. You cannot talk to other students and you must meditate between 2 and 8 hours daily, following the technique they teach you from the first session.
The technique itself is something very simple. You must sit in a comfortable position and, for a prolonged period of time, devote yourself exclusively to observing your breathing, nothing else. In addition, you do it focusing on a very specific area of your body, normally your nostrils. Your mind is going to get bored and will try to distract itself with thoughts and uncomfortable sensations, but the trick is to persist and overcome those difficulties until the mind forces itself to obey and limits itself to observing the entry and exit of air in your nostrils.
As the days go by, you receive a daily lecture where teacher Goenkaji teaches life lessons based on the Dhamma, or the code of right conduct of Buddhism. In addition, he comments on the typical difficulties that students face and keeps increasing both the duration and the intensity of the meditation for the next day: The attention during meditation is then focused on a smaller area of the nostrils, for example, on the left nostril, then it moves to a smaller area, perhaps a window of the nose, then another smaller one, and so on.
As the meditation progresses, the mind is bombarded with pleasant and unpleasant sensations: a small mystical experience, how pleasant!, a backache, hunger, or boredom, how unpleasant! In all those cases, the teacher tells you: it does not matter, ignore that pleasant or unpleasant sensation and keep observing your breathing.
I have not yet managed to do the 10-day retreat, although I hope to be able to do it someday. But I received as a gift from Existence the 10 lectures of the retreat, and I have listened to them many times, practicing little by little, as I can, as I understand it. Even so, the results for me have been wonderful. Meditation helped me during my episodes of anxiety and sadness, it became my tool to relieve stress and to prepare for an important moment like an interview or an exam.
Today I want to give you that same gift that I received one day, and on the page where this episode is located on my website EspiritualidadYCiencia.com, I have left the links to all the lectures. If it is your will, you can download them, listen to them, and give yourself the opportunity to discover the most powerful and accessible medicine you can find: Your own breathing, here and now: