Understanding the Marshmallow test from the three modes’ perspective

Talk to University of Florida students, Gainesville

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, I welcome you all today in this programme and as you saw in this video on the marshmallow test, this was conducted in the 1970s for the first time and it has been repeated in different contexts and different occasions.
So, the test itself as you saw was fairly simple but the researchers followed this test. This was done on Stanford, in Stanford on preschoolers and researchers followed these children 5 years, 10 years, 15 years after the event and they found that these children they were divided into two groups. One was called as the grabbers and the other the resistors.
The grabbers were those who could not wait the 15-20 minutes and they just took the one marshmallow that they had and they ate it. The resistors were those who waited for 20 minutes and then got the marshmallows. They found that by the time they came to the teens and through the teens, the resistors were far better on an academic as well as interpersonal scale of behaviour and success than the grabbers.
That means the resistors could take up long-term challenges when faced with problems whereas the grabbers would collapse under pressure. The resistors would manage that stress and would move onwards, would deal with the stress properly. When it came to relationships, the resistors were able to tolerate other people and continue moving onwards.
The grabbers on the other hand would just either become vindictive or would become pessimistic. Either they attack the other person or withdraw completely from the relationship and in the SAT scores, on an average, the resistors had a far better performance than the grabbers. So Daniel Goldman among many other researchers have quoted the study and he says that this study has been replicated other times.
He says there is no better indicator of growth and no greater predictor, predictor of growth and success in life than the ability to delay impulse, the ability to delay impulse. That’s what the grabbers essentially did. They were able to delay their impulse to eat that marshmallow.
Now, it seems to be a very simple thing whether you eat a marshmallow or you don’t eat it. How is it that this reflects on long-term progress and success in one’s life? The emotions that we go through, the Bhagavad Gita analyses through a typology, through a frame of analysis called the modes. In Sanskrit, this is called as gunas, three modes of material nature, three gunas.
So now what the modes are, among other things, they are subtle forces that shape the interaction between us and the things around us. Or put in more technical language, the modes, they shape the interaction between consciousness and matter. So let me give an example.
Say the Bhagavad Gita talks about three modes, sattva guna, prajoguna, and tamoguna. The 14th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita is called as the three divisions in terms of modes. So in 14.5 in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna introduced the concepts of the modes and he says that sattvam rajas tamaiti guna prakrti sambhavan nibadnanti mahabaho dehe dehinam avyayam.
This is sattva, raja, and tama. Now sattva in roughly translated in English as goodness, raja as passion, and tama as ignorance. So to understand these modes, Krishna talks in the next three verses, their basic characteristics.
So Krishna says that the mode of goodness is characterised by light, by illumination. Rajas is characterised by hyperactivity. And ignorance is characterised by lethargy.
So I’ll give two examples. Suppose a group of people are watching a movie and suddenly in the movie theatre, a fire breaks out. So people who are in the mode of ignorance, that means tamoguna is shaping their perception and action, they will just become petrified.
Maybe I’ll get burned. Their mind goes into hyperactivity. Maybe I’ll get burned.
Maybe I’ll get scorched. I’ll die. Everything will burn in fire.
But that mental perception makes them paralysed, petrified. Sometimes people freeze when they are overwhelmed by emotions. So this is the reaction when the mode of ignorance is influencing us, that we become petrified, we become inactive.
When there is mode of passion, today’s society is largely in rajoguna. So when there is a fire, the knee jerk reaction, the passionate reaction is, everybody will rush towards the door, exit to escape. And sometimes in that process, there might be a stampede, some small children may fall and people will just in their panic, they will not even look at each other, stamp on them and move onwards.
And quite often when some some adversity or some problem, some accident happens, the response in passion makes the problem worse. Sometimes if there is a crowded place and some pillar falls, the panic that comes among people and the rush that happens, that stampede causes more harm than the actual accident also. So in passion, there is hyperactivity and often it is thoughtless hyperactivity.
And in goodness, when a person is sattvaguna, when he sees a fire and he will look around, where is the fire extinguisher? Immediately go to the fire extinguisher, go to the fire and extinguish the fire. So there is thoughtless inactivity. We can never be thoughtless.
We are always thinking something. But thoughtless means there is no proper thinking. So in ignorance, in tamoguna, there is thoughtless inactivity.
In rajoguna, in mode of passion, there is thoughtless activity. And in sattvaguna, there is thoughtful activity. So thoughtless inactivity, thoughtless activity and thoughtful activity.
This is how the responses are different. Now, these three, goodness, passion and ignorance, these three are fundamental to the whole of existence according to Bhagavad Gita. Just like if you saw the video on the computer right now, so you know that computer basically uses three colours, RGB.
But using those three colours or depending on in nature, we may have reduced all the colours to RYB or RGB, whichever framework we use. But there are three basic colours. And the combination of those three colours creates all the images and the action that we see in the video.
Similarly, everything that we do, all our perceptions and all our actions in response to those perceptions, and all our emotions that are involved because of the perception and the action, they are all associated with the three modes, sattvaguna, rajoguna and tamoguna. Now, a progressive human being, if that person is in the mode of goodness, that person can think properly and act wisely. So in one sense, as students, there may be some cricket match or some sports event, and that may give you some immediate indulgence.
But today you can go and watch the match and there may be some pleasure. But one week down the line, there is an exam. If you resist that and study properly, you will get a better result, a more enduring result in the long run.
So now from the marshmallow test, what they found is that the resistors were able to succeed in the long run in life, whereas the grabbers were not able to. So if we correlate this experiment in terms of the Bhagavanta s way of looking at things, then the resistors were in the mode of goodness, in sattvaguna. They had a certain level of control over their emotions.
Although the urge to eat the marshmallow was there in everyone, but the resistors were able to push aside the urge or delay the urge. Whereas the grabbers, they were controlled by their emotions. They were almost dominated by their emotions and because of which they could not, not only not resist eating that marshmallow, but in life situations, when emotional control was required, they were not able to have it.
So for example, relationships to be sustained require a certain level of control of emotions. The other person may not behave the way we expect that person to behave. Then if we react in an over emotional way, then the relationship can get ruptured.
But if you are patient, so then the relationship can be, that particular phase can be tolerated and we can go beyond that. Similarly, if you want to do any long term project, the nature of the mind is sometimes you feel like doing it, sometimes you don’t feel like doing it. So if you’re able to manage our emotions effectively, then we can achieve long term success in life.
So we today live in a culture in which often the exact opposite is done. That means that rather than helping us to control our emotions, to manage our emotions, instead our emotions are often triggered and exploited. The father of modern psychology is considered to be Sigmund Freud.
And he had an insight about human psyche. He said, what the Bhagavad Gita calls as the mode of goodness, he roughly, in his framework, if you look at it, he said, we have a rational intelligence and we have irrational emotions. And he gave the example that our rational intelligence is like a small canoe, a small canoe and our irrational emotions are like a vast ocean with turbulent waves.
Now, the canoe can at any moment be overturned by the turbulent waves. So like that, we can, using our rational intelligence, make proper choices and act well. But if somehow our irrational emotions get triggered, then those irrational emotions can, just like the canoe can be overthrown, the irrational emotions will completely push aside our intelligence and make us act against our good sense, against our conscience and often act self-destructive.
So, this, his way of looking at it, the rational intelligence from the Bhagavad Gita’s point of view is the mode of goodness, sattva guna. And the irrational emotions, they correlate with rajoguna and tamoguna. So now, when I talk about goodness, passion and ignorance, the Bhagavad Gita in 14.10, I just quoted 14.5-8, in 14.10 it says that, it is not that these three, when I give the example of a movie theatre, I talk about three different kinds of responses.
So it is some people in goodness, some people in passion, some people in ignorance. But actually, all of us go through different emotions at different times. So Krishna says that our heart is like a war ground.
So Krishna says, sometimes the mode of passion and ignorance is suppressed and goodness comes forth. That means we can think clearly. We think clearly and then act properly, effectively.
But sometimes the mode of passion comes up and that time we are just hyperactive. Do this, do this, do this, do this. And often when we do work like that, we are very busy.
Just like if you have a fan, the fan moves round and round, but it does not go anywhere. So like that, our thoughts and our actions, we keep doing the same thing. But if I did that, the nature of the mode of passion is that it puts our thoughts and our actions out of sync.
Out of sync means I am doing one thing, but while I am doing one thing, I am thinking of something in the past or something in the future. So I am sitting in this class and here in the Bhagavad Gita class, but then I am thinking, what am I supposed to do next? Will I get time to do it? When will I go from here? Or I did that in the afternoon, but maybe I could have spoken like this. Or maybe instead of this, I could have done like that.
I could have done like that. Now when our thoughts and actions are out of sync, then we become, our productivity goes down. Because we are not attentive.
And the same thing all of us may have experienced, that if we are studying, sometimes we are just looking at the page for 15 minutes and then we realise I never looked at this picture. So what has happened is the eyes are there on the page, but the thoughts are out of sync. So this is what the mode of passion does.
We are at one level active, but we are active but not productive. So often people feel that I don’t have time for spiritual life. I have so many things to do.
But like many of you said, by coming to this programme, by participating in Kirtans, you feel peaceful. So what spirituality does, among other things, a connection with God, it brings our thoughts and our actions in sync. This out of sync, it actually causes us overwork and exhaustion.
Because we are repeatedly going over things which we have already done or which we had to do. And we are not able to focus on what we are doing right now. And in the mode of ignorance, there is, there is a lot of worrying about what will happen in the future, a lot of lamenting about what happened in the past.
But there is no focus on doing anything right now. Put another way, there is that some people make things happen. These are the people in goodness.
Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened. So, although in passion, in Rajyogana, we run around doing this, doing this, doing this, but I did this, but why did that happen? I spoke like that, why did that person react like that? Everything seems to be just going wrong, no matter what we do. And in ignorance, we don’t even know what is happening.
We are like in a stupor. So, in today’s culture, our culture is largely passionate, Rajyogana. So, I talked about Sigmund Freud saying that the irrational emotions can any moment overthrow our rational intelligence.
So, this point is basically like what the Bhagavad Gita says, Rajyogana and Tamogana can any time overcome Satyogana. And then we act irrationally and sometimes, after I actually do that, why did I do that? What made me do that? I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t want to do it.
What happened? That simply the lower emotions have overpowered the higher emotions. Unfortunately, Sigmund Freud’s idea, he gives insights so that people could use their rational intelligence to control their irrational emotions. But his insights were misappropriated by many people.
One of them was the advertising agency. So, if you look at prior to the 1920s, the advertisements mostly focused on how good the product is. So, if a car is to be advertised, so if Henry Ford made the first car, he said that this is man’s alternative to walking.
So, okay, this is going to provide you some convenience, make it easier for you to move around. So, the virtues of the product were told, the good quality of the product were told to attract people to purchase it. But advertisers, they felt that, okay, by appealing to people’s rational intelligence, we might be able to persuade them to purchase a product.
But if we could appeal to their irrational emotions, those irrational emotions are much stronger than their rational intelligence. If you could appeal to that, then we will make people do things much more forcefully. So, most advertisements from the 1930s onwards, they focus not on how good the product is, but how good the product will make you feel.
So, advertising becomes pop psychology, where people try to get some feel good therapy. There’s a, many of you may have seen this advertisement of shampoo for men. This is Bollywood star, who is, there’s one young man who’s walking along and he sees a Bollywood star coming.
And this Bollywood star is surrounded by girls. They’re squealing, calling out his name and rushing and hugging and kissing him. And nobody’s looking at this boy.
So, then this Bollywood star comes and says, I will tell you the secret. And then, he says, my secret is, what is it? Fair and handsome, I think. Fair and handsome, the shampoo.
So, he says, so, you take this. And then after that, he puts the fair and handsome and then he walks along and then all the girls come rushing to him, hugging him, kissing him. And now, such an advertisement is an insult to both male and female intelligence.
Actually, to depict that a woman will fall for a man just because he’s applied some shampoo. It’s an insult to female intelligence. And that men will believe such a fairy tale.
That’s an insult to male intelligence. But what happens is, it feels good. So, because it makes people feel good, people just don’t evaluate this with any intelligence.
This is what I want. Maybe I’ll get it. So, advertisements start focussing on attracting us, dragging us, manipulating us by triggering our lower emotions.
Now, the ad for a shampoo may seem to be relatively harmless. But advertising has often gone to much more insidious levels. For example, soon after Freud came up with the idea, in 1929, roughly, the cigarette marketers, they found that our market has reached its plateau.
All the people in America and Europe who have the money to smoke, they already started smoking. So, what do we do now? And one of them got an idea. Actually, 50% of our market is not tapped because women don’t smoke.
So then, during the 4th July Independence Day parade, in several cities in America, when there was this procession going on, the cigarette companies, they paid several of the prominent female icons of those times. Now, at the most photogenic moments in the parade, they have paid them to all flip out a cigarette. And right in public, photographs are being clacked, videos are being shot.
Now, take out the cigarette and start smoking it. And they smoked it and they called those cigarettes as torches of freedom. So, you are lighting the cigarette.
What are you doing? You are lighting the torch of freedom. Now, that was the time when the suffragette movement was gaining momentum and the idea that women have been exploited for many centuries and now we are going to be free. That idea was very popular.
So, that just grabbed the imagination and literally within a few years, thousands and millions of women started smoking. And at that time, the smoking industry had more or less suppressed the research about the harmful effects of smoking. And in general, and all the more so for women and all the more so for women who are pregnant.
And what was supposed to be the torch to freedom actually lit the path to self-injury for millions of people. Now, here again, what happened? The idea of freedom was so emotionally captivating that it triggered the irrational emotions. And after that, no one asked the question, what has lighting a cigarette got to do with freedom? Okay, freedom is a worthy cause, but how is lighting a cigarette going to get freedom? So, again, what happens? If the irrational emotions are triggered, the rational intelligence is completely put aside.
And unfortunately, if we are the recipients of these advertisements, so the rational intelligence should be used to control the irrational emotions. But today, the advertisers use their rational intelligence to trigger our irrational emotions. Many of the advertisements are done with a lot of intelligence, but it is intelligence which is used to bring out the lower side within us, to bring out the worst within us.
So, when we talk about managing our emotions, we often are bombarded with propaganda, which makes us crave for things which are not really all that important for us. We see something, okay, I want that, I see something, I want that, I want that, I want that. So, the life story of most people who get caught by these irrational emotions, they can be described in three words, W, W, S. So, what is W? First W is work.
We are all busy, we have to go to work. So, you work for 6 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, and then we come back home, we are exhausted. So, what do we do? We turn on television.
Second W is watch. And on the television, there might be various entertainment programmes, but the highest level of intelligence that is put in the television is in making advertisements. Maximum money, maximum intelligence is put in making advertisements.
So, we come home to watch, and then when we watch, we see advertisements. And essentially, what are advertisements telling us? No, your shoes are not good, your hairstyle is not good, your dress is not good, your smartphone is not smart. So, basically, when we watch advertisements, the whole advertising industry focusses on making us feel bad about what we have.
And because of that, there is a third S, that is shop. So, we shop. There is, just like there is alcoholism, there is a form of addiction which is called shopaholism.
Shopaholism means people are just addicted to shopping. They shop till you drop. That is the idea.
Shop, shop, shop. They feel that if I am shopping, then I am living, otherwise I am not living. Now, this is a vicious cycle.
We work to relax, we watch. When we watch, we get all those things, buy this, get this, and then we go and shop. Now, we cannot shop for free.
So, what happens? To pay for it, we have to work more. When we work more, we get more tired, so we come and watch more TV. And when we watch more TV, we get more desire, then we go and shop more.
And then we work more. It just becomes a cycle that traps us. So, if we don’t learn to manage our emotions, we will get completely trapped in this.
In 16.16, Krishna says, the consciousness is pulled in various directions. And then, the person gets trapped in a network of illusion, because of the desire to enjoy. I want this, I want this.
The person suffers hellishly. We just bring hellish suffering in our mental life, eventually in our physical life also. So, managing our emotions means that we don’t let ourselves be manipulated by such external influences.
So, we all need to feel good. That’s a natural human feeling. If we feel bad about ourselves, about our relationships, about the world, then that will make us discouraged, disempowered, and will not be able to function.
So, a certain level of good feeling is vital. But where we get that good feeling from is defining for our eventual destiny. If we try to get that good feeling by watching movies, watching advertisements, and purchasing things, then we will become more and more manipulated and manipulable.
Manipulated in the present and will be vulnerable to that manipulation in the future by external influences. So, this WWS, this worldwide stupidity. So, really people just end up spending so much time, money, energy on things that often they just don’t need and they don’t use also.
Just we keep getting things and we are driven by emotions over there. So, as I said, we all need good feelings. But we can get those good feelings in a healthy way by connecting with God, by connecting with Krishna.
When we chant Hare Krishna, when we study Bhagavad Gita, when we worship Krishna, then that brings out, first of all, it strengthens our rational intelligence. It brings out the mode of goodness within us. But more than that, what Sigmund Freud didn’t talk about, he did not know, he talked about a psyche, but the psyche is basically like the mind.
Beyond the mind is the soul. Just like there is a computer, the computer is hardware, there is software, and there is a user. So, the hardware is like our body, the software is like the mind, and the soul is like the user.
So, the advertising agency and other such forces, they affect us at the level of the mind. And when they affect us at the level of the mind, we get caught by the desire that is objected. We talk about freedom.
Freedom is a very cherished idea in today’s world. And that’s natural, we all want to be free. But often, when we are caught by desires, for example, if somebody gets addicted, a person is addicted to alcohol, to smoking, or to various things.
When a person gets addicted, nowadays there is pornography addiction. So, that’s very widespread. So, what essentially happens is, the person may physically seem to be entirely free.
But, आशा पाश शतयीर बद्धा काम क्रोध परायणा इहन्ते काम भोगार्थम अन्याये नार्थ संचयान। So, Krishna says, आशा पाश शतयीर बद्धा. By आशा, by the desire, desire becomes like a noose, पाश. शतयीर बद्धा.
By hundreds of such desires, one is bound. So, when, say, a person is addicted to alcohol. So, this is the home where you are residing.
This is the place where, say, colleges, their office is there. So, now, if a person is not indulging in alcohol, not bothered about alcohol, he just goes straight from the home to work and not even notice that there is a bar on the way. But, someone who is indulgent and who is habituated to it, as the person comes closer and closer to the alcohol bar, there is a stronger and stronger rope that pulls the person.
It pulls the person and drags the person inward. So, this rope is invisible between the bottle of alcohol and the person’s mind. And as one indulges more and more, that rope becomes thicker and tighter.
That means, rather than just on seeing the bar, one thinks, I’ll go and drink it. As soon as one wakes up in the morning, the first thing is, oh, I have to drink today. So, it’s like right on the moment of sleeping, one is dragged.
So, if we don’t protect ourselves emotionally, now we can get manipulated and trapped. So, protecting ourselves emotionally doesn’t mean suppressing our emotions. It means fulfilling our need for good feelings in a healthy way.
So, when we chant the Hare Krishna Mahamantra, Krishna, God, is the source of all auspicious feelings, all good feelings. Ananta guna sampanna, that is the Lord. So, when we remember Him, when we chant His holy names, when we worship Him, that gives us a good feeling, which not only fulfils our need for good feeling, but it brings out the higher side within us.
The chanting of the holy names, you’ll find that not only it will bring you calm, but you’ll also be able to think more clearly and act more intelligently. Because it will bring you to the level of mood of goodness. So, to conclude, when I talk about managing the emotions, I’ll summarise what I spoke.
I started by talking about this marshmallow experiment. So, why is it that the simple act of being able to resist a marshmallow or not resist a marshmallow, why does it have such long-term career consequences? That is because, I talked about, introduced the Bhagavata concept of the modes, that these modes, they shape the interaction between us and the things around us. So, in goodness, I gave the example of, in ignorance, a person will become petrified when there is a fire.
In passion, the person will create a stampede. And in goodness, a person will look for fire extinguisher. So, what the marshmallow test indicates is that those who are resistors, they can act thoughtfully, whereas those who are not resistors but are grabbers, they either act also thoughtless.
So, then I talked about Sigmund Freud concept of, there is the rational intelligence like a canoe and below that, there is irrational emotions like turbulent waves. So, in today’s culture, unfortunately, the advertising industry triggers our irrational emotions and overthrows, torpedoes our rational intelligence. Now, the example of the fair and handsome ad as well as the torches of freedom misleading campaign.
And in a generic sense, this leads to the phenomena of work, watch, shop, and it traps us. So, we all need good feelings, but the advertisements give us a good feeling, give us some good feeling, but in a way, it brings out our lower side. Whereas, if we turn towards Krishna and practise bhakti, our natural need for good feeling will be satisfied and satisfied in a way that will bring out our higher side.
And that way, we will be able to be satisfied as well as be productive, because the good feeling that we get, that will also help us as passion takes our thoughts and our actions out of sync. But by bhakti, we come to goodness where both of them are in sync and we will be much more effective in whatever we do. Thank you very much.
Are there any questions,