Personal Management Mantra – Productivity in Activity through Spirituality
Talk at Urban Yoga, Melbourne
Personal Management Mantra-Productivity in activity through spirituality
by Chaitanya Charan das
Lecture Podcast:
I welcome all of you. Today evening, we talk on personal management mantra. I am grateful to the organizers of the yoga center for laying this opportunity and of you also to come here and I will be speaking on the topic of productivity in activity through spirituality. I would like to begin with a small experiment. So we will be handing all of you a set of match sticks. Basically we will talk about how spirituality can expand our perception. There are 6 match sticks, If possible make 4 triangles with these matches by re-arranging these matches… Any ideas???
So there is one way, if we think of triangles then we think of flat triangles, but if we think of pyramid (slide 2) then it is possible. So many times solutions elude because we think within particular dimensions. As Einstein has said famously that “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them”.
Now with this simple experiment how does it apply to our daily lives where we have various activities to do. As I said productivity in activity through spirituality that is the mantra I am talking about. So often when we talk about our day, we have say 24 hours and then in that we have so many activities to do, this time this activity this time that activity and some time we try to fill in everything we have to do within a day seems to be like…sometime some people wants to go on a journey and then they are taking a suitcase but they want to put their full house in a suitcase. It seems impossible because it is impossible.
So sometimes trying to do all the activities we have to do just seems impossible and at such times often there are hidden time wasters that we often don’t factor in and that time waster is our own thoughts. Time is taken not just by actions but also by thoughts. Suppose we have a conflict with someone and the conflict may just some harsh is word spoken within 10 seconds -15 seconds but that thought stays in the mind and later on we may be spending 1 hour on a assignment but that 1 hour is taken not by that task but it is taken by the thought and although externally we are doing the activity but that activity does not translate into productivity because there is barriers created by the thoughts. So often the way our thoughts (undesirable thoughts) consume our time is something which does not come in our schedule and it is not talked about in our plans and unfortunately thoughts especially negative thoughts, thoughts about problems and worries they seem to come with a inbuilt mental glue.
That means once a problem starts surfacing in our mind it just don’t go away, it just stays there and stays there and stays glued and as I often say that life determine out problems we determine their size. “Life determines out problems we determine their size”. That means certainly there are troubles there are problems there is stress but the more we dwell on a problem the more the problem seems to be bigger and bigger in out mental world and as it becomes bigger and bigger it makes us more distracted and sometimes more demoralized and this way thoughts take a huge amount of time. So one example, I talked about irritation and anger due to insult, another common time consumer at the level of thoughts is worry. When the mind is worried then it become like a ceiling fan, the ceiling fan keeps on moving round and round but gets no where so like that when the mind is worried, what if this happen, what if that happen, what if that happens, what if that happens, what if that happens and because of that although the mind is hyper active either we are paralyzed in the activity or we are frenzied into inconsiderate activity not well considerate activity which again doesn’t translate into productivity. Based on how people are able to regulate their thoughts broadly people can be classified into 3 levels, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened. ☺
So we are talking about anxiety, so anxiety is a time waster, it puts our thoughts and actions out of sync. So we are doing one activity but if there is stress, our thoughts are caught up somewhere else and because of that we are not productivity. Now worry is not something which we allot time in our schedules, it’s not that every evening 7 o’clock to 7:30 is my worry time. No one allocates time like that in worrying but still if sometimes we have a headache whatever work we try to do because of that nagging pain of the headache we are not able to be efficient. Just like there can be a nagging pain at the back of our head similarly worry becomes like a nagging background noise and it distracts us, it saps our energy. So, the present is all that we have and the present is all that we will ever have we will never have anything more than the present moment and worry makes us absent in the present. Worry makes us absent in the present, it puts our thoughts elsewhere.
The certainly the problems have to be dealt with but the way the only time we will have to deal with any problem is in the present and worry usually is not about the task at hand because when we have task at hand and when we are doing something about it, we have a sense of control, we have a sense of purpose and a feeling that I am doing something constructive but usually worry is about the things which we are not doing anything about right now and worry saps our energy in two ways among many , first if I am doing something , worry makes me worry about something else about which I am not doing right now and in that way I underperform in what I am doing right now and because I underperform this create complexities and then I go to the next activity which I was worried about earlier then worry makes us worry about previous job which I did it bad and in that way sometimes worry takes our thoughts ahead of our actions sometime worry takes our thoughts behind our actions and basically by keeping out thoughts and actions out of syncs worry makes us underproductive not just underproductive it makes us unproductive, worry can even make us counterproductive. So in sports for example now, I come from India. India and Australia have a relationship of cricket, now in cricket you see that often players when they come under stress; they have a rush of blood and they either play a rash shot and a very well set player by one rash shot can lose the wicket then he is out of the match at least for that match. So that happens because you see somebody play a rash shot then some say he lost his head, lost his head basically means the thoughts and actions are not in sync.
Now what causes anxiety? There is some very interesting research on this subject and anxiety is caused not just by outer uncertainty but by inner instability. What I mean by this is, researchers have found that in developing countries people have many more reasons to be worry about. Often in developing countries food, clothing, shelter, electricity, water these necessities themselves are not very certain and that causes anxiety. But curiously enough through statistical surveys and through the reports of psychiatrists, it’s been found that consistently that the anxiety levels among people are more in the developed countries than in the developing countries. And not only that, when the people from developing courtiers immigrate to a developed country, they also tend to become more anxious more stress filled than what they were in their own countries. And even in India, as in metropolitan cities which are increasingly developed increasingly westernized, the anxiety tends to be much more in the cities as compared to villages.
So why is it that when there is greater relatively speaking security about life’s necessities, why is it that in the developed countries there is more anxiety? One major reason which psychologists have found is that in the developed countries there is a greater stress on externals, that means a person’s sense of identity of self identity and self worth is wedded to externals a lot, that means if I am going to purchase a new dress say I decide to purchase a new jeans, if a new jeans is just a dress item then there is not much worry about it but if a jeans is also a statement of who I am, it’s a status symbol then in a status driven society every single action which we do becomes very weighty, so psychologists did survey and they found that in a simple activity say if a person enters a movie theater and then comes and sits on a particular seat in the movie theater, so as compared to Indians and Americans in this simple activity it was found that Americans felt that they had done double the number of decisions as Indians has done. So for example if we go to a theater which ticket should I purchase, what people will think about which ticket I have purchased, if I am going to sit on a seat then which seat I should sit on and if I am two people then should i sit on left or should I sit on right. So every small thing when it is made into a big thing then the mind no longer has energy to deal with big things.
So stress, when I am saying that it is not just a result of outer uncertainty, it is a result of inner instability that means the mental energy gets exhausted over small things and because of that the mind after it runs through its capacity then it gets heated, it gets stressed. So our mental energy is often lost on small things. You know to keep small things small is a big thing. To keep small things small is a big thing and in a status driven culture small things are not kept small, they are made very big. So how does this apply to our discussion on productivity? We have certain work to do certain task to complete and if our mental energy could be focused on the task at hand then the productivity would increase much more. It’s that like we are using a computer and if in the computer there are viruses then no matter how well I work on the computer the output is not going to come because the viruses are going to delete whatever work I do. The output will not come. Between the input and the output in the computer the viruses will cause an impediment which will damage the output. So like that our mind, we have certain desires we have certain aspirations we have certain talents we set our targets and based on these the input comes in and then our performance our productivity is the output now in-between the two, is the mind and if the mind is contaminated with the viruses like thoughts. Now viruses are of multiple characteristics, the term virus is used both for biological entities which cause diseases and they are also used for software programs now although in constitution, in composition these two viruses are of different nature but in consequence both have a similar effect.
This is viruses damage the body similarly the germs the microscopic viruses which are biological entity which damages the biological body similarly the electronic viruses which are there in the software they damage the electronic structure of the machine so similarly there are psychological viruses, we extend the viruses, metaphorical term further, our own thoughts act as viruses. In the body the growth which is a normal natural and desirable function, a small baby is in the conception is just a one tiny microscopic cell and from that baby by the process of growth in all of us how come about with a number of cells in our body, now this has happened by a process of normal natural desirable growth. In the body there is another kind of growth that is the growth of cancer, the defining difference between the cancerous growth and healthy growth is a lack of proportion, a lack of context, when the body grows normally all the parts in a body grow in a proportionate harmonious way where as when there is cancer, the cancerous cells grow without any regard to the host in which they are growing and although the growth is normal natural desirable, growth which is disharmonious with its context, with its host in which it grows, that is dangerous, it can be fatal. So quite often if our thoughts are not disciplined, if we don’t have means to discipline our thoughts then thoughts can grow like cancers and growth for growth sake, when the body there is growth, there is growth for the overall increase in the functionality of the body but growth only for growth sake that is the defining characteristics of cancer, it damages ourselves.
So often the thoughts if they are not disciplined then we have one problem and that problem stays in the mind and it grows grows grows…and it grows till a person just breaks down. In India, I suppose in Australia also, in India, the pressure for education is huge, the competition for education, it’s just not a matter of good carrier but education is a huge matter of prestige, so in one of the colleges where I conduct seminars, there was a girl, she was in medical college that has 8 semesters, 7 semesters she had come first in the class not just among the toppers, the topper and the final exam also, the last exam of her carrier, she studied very well and she had all the preliminaries exams she had done very well, she was well on the track to be in the topper but somehow she got the anxiety, what if I don’t come a topper and that one thought grow and grow and grow and grow… and 7 days before the exam somehow that thought came and it grew and grew and grew and the day before the exam started, in the previous night she committed suicide, she committed suicide for no reason other than the fear how will I live if I don’t come first in my class. Now if we look from… what is the big deal, if you don’t come first you will come second, if you don’t come second you will come third, it’s not the end of the world. Why would anyone make such a worry so worrisome that a person ends one’s life because of that? This is no doubt is an extreme example but this is an example I am giving to illustrate how growth for growth sake can be cancerous and one worry if it is not attended to if it is not dealt with properly, it can grow to disastrous proportions.
And sometimes if we are not introspective we may not even realize, we sometime just find ourselves in a foul mood, now somebody just snap at others sometimes and we may not even realize why we are angry but what usually happens is that there is some irritation, minor irritation which we did not process, I will explain what I mean by processing in a few minutes but when that was not processed, it just stay, it stays at the back of the mind and then when some other irritation comes up then our reaction is not in proportion to the problem whatever some person has made some mistake and yes some degree of correction is required but if there has been an earlier unprocessed thought then that unprocessed thought becomes like… that unprocessed thought makes our consciousness like a pressure cooker. Like a pressure cooker you touch, sudden whistle blows like that suddenly all the steam just comes out and whoever happens to be in the path at that time, that person gets hit. So this is relatively more common example, that example of somebody committing suicide because of a future worry, that is extreme but we letting some irritation carryover say we have some relationship issue at home and then we come to job and then we snap at someone at the job or we have some problem at the job and we go home and then we snap at our family members on what the problem specifically they may have cause is very small, so this is what happens when thoughts are unprocessed and they without our conscious intension, they grow and when the thoughts grow like this, there disproportionate growth as I said it not only decreases our productivity, it can be counterproductive, it damages our prospect, it can even destroy careers.
Now when I talked about processing of thoughts, our thoughts can be broadly classified into four categories: there are positive thoughts, there are negative thoughts, there are essential thoughts and there are waste thoughts. I will start with essential and waste and then I will come to positive and negative. Essential: For example you came by a walk or by a car from your work place or you go you will go from here to your home, so now when you are driving the vehicle, you would see who is coming from left, who is coming from right, what are signals, thoughts about practical activity that we have to do they are essential or functional thoughts we have to think those thoughts. Now along with that there are waste thoughts, thoughts which are really at least immediately relevant to what we are doing, so what happen to which part of the world, what happened there, so often there is gossip which is largely a source of waste thoughts. Information is useful but information without any context or without any purpose can often just take up space in our head and that can waste our energy. Now these two thoughts essential and waste are in terms of the functional utility of those thoughts. The other two categories I am going to talk about are positive and negative, are in terms of their effect on us. So the effect of the thoughts and the utility of the thoughts, two different ways of looking at it. In terms of effect, certain thoughts are positive say for example if someone appreciates us, we feel encouraged, we feel enlivenment or for that matter if we genuinely appreciate someone and that person’s face filled with a bright smile to see that person happy, that’s makes us happy. So appreciation, love, pleasure, protection, confidence these are all positive thoughts and as contrast to that there can be negative thoughts there can be hatred, there can be irritation, depression, low self esteem, stress these are negative thoughts.
Now whichever thought we allow to enter into our mind, it will gradually grow, it will gradually grow, how does it grow. It can grow either by our conscious attention, we pay attention to it and because of that it grows and in some cases, in the case of essential thoughts it is desirable. If we are going on a road and somebody is coming from left, you see it somebody is coming from left that thought enters into our mind and we need to focus so because we consciously focus with the purpose that thought grows, that’s desirable. But other times the thoughts grow not because we consciously focus but because we don’t consciously drive away that thought, we don’t consciously flush away that thought from our mind, so it just stays there and keep growing growing growing… and somebody spoke something and it keep nagging at the back of our mind and then suddenly it just fills us with stress. Different people have different kind of anxiety attacks and psychologists when they try to find out what are the triggers for anxiety attacks, so different people have different triggers but quite often one of most important strategies for anxiety attack victims to counter the anxiety attacks is to identify their triggers, so when I said that some thoughts can grow cancerously, all of us may have different kinds of thoughts which are cancerous for us depending on our nature, depending on our priorities, depending on our relationships something or else can become cancerous.
So now if you see from the productivity function point of view, we would like to focus on essential thoughts, essential functional thoughts, we try to remove waste thoughts and in order to be more effective we will be more energized if we could focus on positive thoughts and we could avoid negative thoughts. Now if we have to do this, if there is dirt in the house we can flush it, we can clean it using a vacuum cleaner, using some machine but how do we deal with… how do we process the thoughts in our mind, this is where spirituality comes into the picture. Essentially spirituality is about the unchanging within the change. Spirituality offers stability; I said that anxiety comes not so much because of outer uncertainty but because of inner instability. So spirituality offers stability. How does this happen? It connects us with our unchanging core. If a boat is there in the ocean, the waves in the boat are inevitable and those waves will keep the boat moving moving moving… and bigger the waves the more the boat will move but if the boat is anchored to something heavy that anchorage will bring stability to the boat. Similarly the events of the world externally and emotions within us internally they often go up and down like a sine wave and when they go up and down like a sine wave, they keep us restless, when they keep us restless, they sap our energy, so what’s spirituality does is it offer us an alternative anchorage for our thoughts just like a boat anchored to a heavy object, not be shaken by the waves, so like that a person who is spiritual who can connect with the spiritual core has as inner anchorage which brings inner stability.
The more things change the more we need to embrace the things that don’t change. Dealing with stress is not just a matter of giving us pep talks, don’t worry cool down, yes these all things will help a little bit but we all need some sense of stability and continuity in our life, if that is not there then the changes will definitely creates stress so the more things change the more we need to embrace the things that don’t change that’s what bring stability and this is where spirituality plays such a important role. Spirituality tells us that amidst all the change that is there outside in the world and even inside us in our emotions beyond that is our core is the essential locus of who we are and that is unchanging. So how do we embrace the things that don’t change? So techniques for linking with unchanging is: there is Yoga, meditation, mantra. We will talk about all three of these briefly.
Yoga is often equated with certain bodily postures and these bodily postures are important at the same time the postures have a purpose. Like going back to cricket, different batsman they have different postures, somebody may stands with the bat upper edge, somebody bat touch to the ground, somebody with both legs close to each other, somebody stands with legs apart but the point of the posture is not just to stand in the posture all the time. The point of the posture is to be able to hit the ball effectively when it comes similarly yoga is not just about postures, postures do help in relaxing the body, in shaping the body, in healing the body but these are external benefits the purpose of yoga is to launch our consciousness to the spiritual level just like the purpose of batting postures is to launch the ball towards the boundary, so like that the purpose of the yogic postures is to launch our consciousness towards the spiritual level. What exactly do we mean by consciousness towards spiritual level? The Bhagawatgita is one of the world’s most ancient yoga texts and it describes that the source of personality is spiritual.
From the biological point of view, this mike is made of the same substances that… from biochemical point of view or chemical point of view as my hand, ultimately it is made up of atoms and molecules, this is also made up of atoms and molecules (hand) and yet this doesn’t have consciousness, I have consciousness. This is hit, it doesn’t feel pain but I feel a sensation, so one of the biggest unsolved questions in the world of science as acknowledge by science magazine is…in its 25th anniversary magazine, it said that we have 10 big unanswered questions, the first was they said is where did the universe come from? And second question is where does consciousness come from? Where does consciousness come from? So, this itself is a big subject but I will just give one example of a scientific experiment to illustrate the non physical, the non-material nature of consciousness, so one of the world’s most last centuries most well known neurosurgeon was Dr Wilder Penfield, Nobel laureate neurosurgeon and he did experiments to try to find out where does consciousness come from? So normally we understand that consciousness is somewhere with the brain but in the brain there is no one particular place from where consciousness comes out. So he did an experiment, researchers know that if there are certain parts of the body which are connected with certain functions, so there is motor nervous system which connected with moving the hands and the legs, the gustatory cortex is connected with the taste like that.
So now with the brain if we put electrodes into it and activate it then… so he had a subject, he told the subject, raise your hand, the subject raised the hand, he said what happened, subject said “I” raised my hand, okay put your hand down and now using electrodes putting in the head he activated the same area of the brain and hand went up. What happened, he said my hand went up. Okay..did you raised the hand? He said No, I didn’t raise the hand, you raised the hand. So now he did this with various parts of the brains with various patients and he found that in each case when the first time, when the subject was asked to raise, the subject said that I am the doer of the action, in the second case the subject said I am the observer of the action, now what this means is…that if I have a computer, it’s my computer and there is a printer attached to it and I give the print command, when I give the print command the printer’s hand will start moving and printing will happen, now if you come near my computer and you press the print command, the same thing will happen. So the hardware..the computer structure here and the printer, they are basically a unit but either I can operate it or you can operate it, the effect will be the same. So now in the second case Dr Penfield said that the brain and the hand are one unit, so I activated the brain, Dr Penfield activated the brain and then the hand rose, in the first case who activated the brain? In the second case it was the subject outside the person, Dr Penfield who activated the brain and the subject was saying that I did not activate you activated but in the first case he said I activated that means just as the brain and the hand are a unit that can be operated by activation but it require separate activator, in the second case it was Dr Penfield, in first case WHO was it? So after 4 decades of neuro scientific research Dr Penfield concluded that the brain is like a computer but the programmer exists outside the brain, the programmer..the user exits outside the brain, the self is..he said is non-neurological, it is extra cerebral. So of course there is lot of scientific research on this and its intricate and I am not going in that but suffice it to say that I gave this experiment to substantiate the point that the spiritual is not just some sentimental concept that we feel stressed and so we imagine that there is something unchanging and try to connect with that. No, there is objective scientific support for the concept of consciousness as non material and the whole purpose of yoga is to raise our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level. So at the material level, things are constantly changing, at the spiritual level there is calmness, there is stability, there is serenity and the more we can connect with the spiritual level, just like here they said that use the sticks in a vertical dimension then the problem that is unsolvable at the horizontal dimension it become solvable at the vertical level.
Similarly when we raise our consciousness to the spiritual level, we get a perspective which first of all gives us guarantee of our own security. Just like if we are caught in a place on fire, all around there is fire and at any moment fire will spring on us, we will be in anxiety but if at that time an aircraft from above comes, rescue helicopter comes sends a rope and lifts us up and now if it’s our home, if it’s our office we will still have concern but there is no immediate threat. So spirituality does not cause the problems the causes of stress, the causes of worry to disappear but it raises us above the problems. So once we have a spiritual stability, we can be concerned but not disturbed. We can be concerned but not disturbed. Concerned means yes we have interest, we are invested in particular situation, we want to deal with that situation. But because we don’t feel personally threaten by that situation, so we don’t become unduly overworked by it. So by connecting with the unchanging, whenever our thoughts… I said that what causes lack of productivity is thoughts and actions going out of sync, so whenever thoughts and actions go out of sync, if we can raise our consciousness to the spiritual level then that stability that comes can help us bring our thoughts and actions back in sync. So going back to the point of positive, negative, essential and waste thoughts, spirituality is an unending source of positive thoughts because at our spiritual core we are indestructible, we are uncontaminated, we are pristine and the more we become aware of this the more positivity fills within us. So yoga is a means to raise our consciousness.
So yoga is a particular posture that is meant to lead to meditation. Meditation, the word is often used for deep thought on any subject, that is fine but meditation as it is used in a spiritual or self actualization context, refers to meditation on spiritual reality and mantra is a sound vibrations, I will conclude my topic with a brief description of mantras. Mantra is essentially a power packed sound vibration, just as we can have alphabets scattered on the ground and those alphabets don’t have much meaning but if alphabets comes together to form a word, they have some meaning. On the other hand further if we take, say we have E=mc2, this is simply an arrangement of alphabets and symbols… and numbers but there is so much power, so much wisdom packed in these 5 symbols, so just as in our experience letters or symbols or sounds when arranged in a specific context can have tremendous meaning, power, significance. So like that in the spiritual context we just described that certain sound vibrations have enormous power and in our context what is the power of mantra? The word mantra in Sanskrit means manas traiyate iti mantra, that sound vibration which frees the mind from its troubles is mantra. So the sound of mantra acts like a elevator for our consciousness. I earlier gave the example of a person caught in a fire and being airlifted above, say a rope sends down and lifts up the person above so the rope that is send down, that is the mantra. So the mantra is a sound which helps our consciousness to rise from wherever it is to higher level. There have been many surveys also done about the potency of mantra, now with the scientific methodology; we cannot directly perceive the spiritual reality because science essentially looks for material things, so we can’t perceive the spiritual reality with science but we can perceive the effects of ascending to spiritual reality at the material level.
That means when people chant mantras, the content of their experience, we cannot find through science. To explain this sometime if a person is sleeping, now by having scientific probes we can know when a person is dreaming, now there is REM, the eyes moves much faster, there are certain ways in which we can know when a person is dreaming but if we want to know what that person is dreaming, there is no scientific probe that can tell us that, we can know a person is dreaming if we want to know what that person is dreaming we need to wake that person and ask what were you dreaming. So from the external when a person is dreaming we can discern the physico-chemical effects of that and by that we can understand that a dream is happening but the content of dream we cannot verify through science because science doesn’t deal with consciousness directly it can points towards it. Similarly with meditation with mantra we cannot verify through science what is the content of that experience, whether the content is real or not but what we can verify is the effect. So it is being found that there are being many different researches done by different scientists, so one of the researches… here I am keeping the talk with non-technical, let’s say I am not going in to specific quotes and statistics but most of you if you want on our website the information is there and when if you google you will find most of the things I am talking about.
So what researchers did is that they divided patients in three groups, all patients have some sickness, so one was they asked them you just take the normal treatment, second they told them to chant some mantra which is considered a sacred sound in some spiritual tradition and in third case they ask them to chant some sound which they just like and every day for 25 minutes, do this and when they compared these three studies, the results they found was when in the first case normal treatment went on as was expected, in the second case they saw dramatic improvement in the health recovery and in the third case there was only a marginal improvement, third case means when the people chanted some thought they just liked to think about and in the second case where the people chanted some specific mantra. So here what exactly is happening, we don’t know by chanting mantra what people experience but the effect of the experience we can see and people in many big companies in various parts of world often they are finding that meditation or sometimes it’s called as power breaks, different terms used in different cultural contexts help people to become more productive. So what exactly does meditation do? It connects us with the unchanging side of ourselves and there are various ways of mediation, mantra meditation is in the yoga tradition that I belong to, recommended as the most efficacious, most easy way because in normal meditation, it’s like we have to direct our thoughts whereas in mantra meditation the mantra becomes a pathway along which to move our thoughts so if we have to make our own road and move through some terrain, it is much more difficult than if there is a road laid down and we have to move along that road so mantra become like a road for moving our consciousness onwards and in that way the chanting of the mantras if we do it between activity and productivity there are the obstacles of the distracted thoughts, those obstacles of the distracted thoughts can be removed by raising our consciousness to the spiritual level through various means like yoga, meditation and mantra meditation specifically and in that way… these are just some means but the important point is management of our thoughts which can translate our activity into productivity.
I will summarize and then we can have some questions, I started by the topic of productivity in activity through spirituality-the personal management mantra and then I talked about how through match stick experiment, if we can think in a higher dimension, the problem that are unsolvable which seem unsolvable become solvable and then an Einstein quote and then spirituality offers us the connection with higher dimension and in that connection I talked about how our time is taken not just by activities but by thoughts, worry for example is a invisible time waster which waste our time by making our thoughts and actions go out of sync and to deal with this to deal with this invisible time wasters which sabotage our activity from becoming productive… transforming into productivity, we need to do some inner housekeeping and this is about how growth for growth sake is cancerous, how problem seem to have a mental glue by which they stay and grow rather than they going away then we discuss about thought processing, we classify our thoughts in functionality point of view into essential and waste and from there based on effect on us as positive and negative. So spirituality helps us to streamline our thoughts so that we focus on essential and positive thoughts and we can flush out of our consciousness waste and negative thoughts and how does spirituality do this? By connecting us with our unchanging side and our unchanging core is not just a matter of some sentimental conceptualization. It is also a matter of having quite a few empirical pointers, I talked about Dr Penfield’s experiment with respect to the coordination between the motor section of brain and the hand and then lastly I talked about yoga, meditation, mantra as means for raising our consciousness above our circumstances so that we can be concerned but not disturbed so that we can efficiently deal with the problem without feeling threatened by that problem, if we feel threatened then anxiety makes our thoughts and actions go out of sync but if we can focus without feeling threatened then we can be productive in dealing with the problem.
Thank you very much for you kind attention.