The Fourth law is the most critical law to understand. For this is the law which governs and determines the whole of our life experience. If we can understand this, apply it, master it – Life would definitely be joyous. Life becoming joyous doesn’t mean that pain would vanish away from our lives. What would actually happen is that suffering would become less. And that’s what Buddha meant when he said, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
We all have a mind, a mind that produces thousands of thoughts. Our thoughts determine our feelings and through actions based on those feelings we experience life. But we yet haven’t managed to understand how the mind works. We also do not understand why certain experiences continue to take dominance in our lives, when we try so hard to get rid of them, or avoid them.
The Law of Attraction is inextricably linked to the Laws of the Mind. When I first heard, “we don’t attract what we want, we attract who we are”, I really couldn’t connect the dots. There is a lot of buzz going out there in the so called spiritual, materialistic world around manifesting through meditation, , manifesting your desires, attracting all the things that one wants like loving relationship, wealth, success, more spiritual equanimity etc. In order for us to understand how the law of attraction works, we need to understand the Laws of the Mind.
There are only two essential components when it comes to the Laws of the Mind.
1) Awareness
2) Focus
and whatever we are aware of, and whatever we focus on, becomes our reality.
So what really is the first law of the mind – “Awareness” all about?
Awareness means that we are conscious or we have knowledge or perception of a situation or a fact. For example, while driving I am aware of the other vehicular traffic, signals, pedestrians, or diversions. And when I am driving, whilst I continue to breathe, I lose that awareness towards my own inhalations and exhalations. It doesn’t mean that my breathing has stopped – it only means its not a part of my reality at that particular moment. But if while driving, I choose to practice awareness of my breath, I have chosen to be more conscious of my breath which I had unconsciously taken for granted. Its the same with the food that we eat. Most often we are so unaware of the flavours, the texture, the aroma of the food we consume – hurriedly gulping down our coffee, rushing through lunch, checking our phones, reading emails, or watching our current favourite series on Netflix or Prime, checking our social media accounts or having a heated discussion of the political situation at the dining table. And unknowingly we pass this unaware way of living even to our children by placing the tablets before them when they are eating.
There is a reason why the nose comes before the mouth. The smell of the food triggers our glands to release saliva which in turn sends message to the stomach to be ready to secrete the gastric fluids to breakdown our food. Its our sheer lack of awareness of it all – only because we take the food for granted, our bodies for granted for the reflux action to work. There are hundreds and thousands of things that are not part of our awareness, only because we take them for granted. The sunrise, the bright moon lit sky, trees blossoming beautiful yellow, orange, red flowers, birds chirping, the helps we have at home – the list is pretty endless.
When we start becoming more aware, we start becoming more conscious of our very life itself.
The second law of the mind – “Focus”. Whatever becomes a part of our awareness, when we start focusing on that, it becomes part of our reality. Focus is about paying attention to that which becomes a part of our awareness. For example, if my awareness shifts to how bad the global economic situation is in the current pandemic, and if I choose to continue paying attention to it either by watching news, or reading articles which promote that feeling of apocalypse, then that is exactly how I feel about the entire situation – that we are all doomed. However, if I choose to focus on the thought that whilst there may be close to 4.5 million affected with the virus, there are are still 7.5 billion people who are healthy, that will shift my focus to being doomed to a state of gratitude and abundance. We always have the choice to focus on the lack or the abundance.
The best way to explain the concept of Focus is Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm’s story of the two crooked bricks. This is what Ajahn Brahm had to say
“We were poor monks who needed buildings. We couldn’t afford to employ a builder — the materials were expensive enough. So I had to learn how to build: how to prepare the foundations, lay concrete and bricks, erect the roof, put in the plumbing — the whole lot. I had been a theoretical physicist and high-school teacher in lay life, not used to working with my hands. After a few years, I became quite skilled at building.
Being a monk, I had patience and as much time as I needed. I made sure every single brick was perfect, no matter how long it took. Eventually, I completed my first brick wall and stood back to admire it. It was only then that I noticed— oh no! — I’d missed two bricks. All the other bricks were nicely in line, but these two were inclined at an angle. They looked terrible. They spoiled the whole wall. They ruined it.
By then, the cement mortar was too hard for the bricks to be taken out, so I asked the abbot if I could knock the wall down and start over again — or, even better, perhaps blow it up. I’d made a mess of it and I was very embarrassed. The abbot said no, the wall had to stay.
When I showed our first visitors around our fledgling monastery, I always tried to avoid taking them past my brick wall. I hated anyone seeing it. Then one day, some three or four months after I finished it, I was walking with a visitor and he saw the wall.
“That’s a nice wall,” he casually remarked. “Sir,” I joked in surprise, “have you left your glasses in your car? Are you visually impaired? Can’t you see those two bad bricks which spoil the whole wall?” What he said next changed my whole view of that wall, of myself, and of many other aspects of life.
He said, “Yes. I can see those two bad bricks. But I can see the 998 good bricks as well.”
The 2 bad bricks were part of the awareness of the visitor but he chose to focus on the 998 bricks that were good. That was part of his reality versus the reality of Ajahn Brahm who for the longest period was focusing on the 2 bad bricks. The reality for the visitor and Ajahn Brahm was the same only when they both chose to focus on the 998 good bricks. It did not make either the Visitor or Ajahn Brahm right or wrong. It’s a matter of perspective. Whether its 6 to you or 9 to me, is a function of the place we are looking it from. We always have the choice to see the glass filled with water as half empty or half full or absolutely full ( just because we can’t see the air, doesn’t mean the air is not there filling the glass). In our relations, what brings us suffering is the inability to understand this difference in perspective and our unconscious desire to our perspective as right and the others perspective as wrong. The expectation that our reality will match their reality brings about the disagreement and discord – it’s a difference of opinion based on how each person perceives their reality. If we can bring this understanding and become more and more aware that the realties of two people will never be the same – they may coincide but then they will refract again, we can manage to avoid a fair degree of disagreements or disharmony and the unhappiness that it brings it forth.
The good and bad always coexist – its part of the Law of Duality and Impermanence. We always have the freedom of choice to either focus on the good or the bad. Whatever we focus on becomes our reality – becomes a part of our experience.
The place where we operate from, our mind, and the actions we choose, makes it our Karma.
The choice of living an enriching life depends on how aware we choose to be, where we lay our focus on and how we choose to label it.
What’s your choice for yourself?
…..to be cont’d