Guru

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Satsang with Acharyas

June 2008

Question:

People go through ups and downs. It is said that you are your own friend and you are your own enemy. When you go through a low, where do you seek your strength / resources from? How do you know that your mind is telling you the right thing or it is just going along with what you want to do?

Answer: In spiritual pursuit you ultimately seek help from Ishvara. Helplessness is the problem. Aatmaiva aatmano bandu, Aatmaiva ripu Aatmanaha. The message from the Gitaa here is ‘do not put yourself down’. This is a major source of a human being’s problem; putting oneself down.

Putting one self down is connected to one’s self esteem. I feel I am not worth anything. Self esteem is not ego, it is self estimate. To estimate is to put a value on something. Self estimate is putting a value on one self. We all create some frame work based on which we evaluate ourselves. We all have a self esteem; we all put a value on our self, on who we are as a person. This self esteem can be very high (thinking very highly of oneself) or it can be very low (thinking of oneself as good for nothing). Besides being high and low, can also be realistic or unrealistic. It can be unrealistically high (when I think I am ‘Gods gift to humanity’ and everyone should treat me that way) and it can be unrealistically low (when I think I am ‘lower than the lowest’ and everyone is better than me). Or it is realistic more or less. I am no better, no worse than anybody else. Nothing is exceptionally wrong with me.

What is self esteem born of? Self esteem is born of self appraisal. How do I do self appraisal? I do it based on my assessment of myself, how good I am, how bad I am, how others think of me, behave with me and so on. Initially I appraise myself based on what others think of me. When I am young what ever my father says, my mothers says, I use as benchmarks to estimate myself. If father tells me all the time I am good for nothing I end up concluding I am useless. Hence self estimation is dependent upon self assessment and also others assessments of oneself. If every one around me keeps telling that I am useless, I start doubting myself. Thus self esteem has to do with others opinion of me and as a consequence my opinion of myself.

The more self esteem has to do with others opinion of me the more tenuous it is. The more I depend on myself for my self esteem better off I am. Why is this so? This is so because others can never know me properly. Really speaking nobody knows anybody for that matter. How can anybody know me well? I don’t know myself well enough. We surprise ourselves by our thoughts, by our actions. I am supposed to know myself the best, but if I don’t know myself fully, how can anybody else know me fully? Not possible. Even a spouse will not know me fully. That is why even after 40 you wonder why does he or she behave in this manner? What happened to her? Nothing happened to him or her. It is our knowledge which was incomplete. Thus nobody knows me well. If nobody knows me fully, how can I assess myself depending on somebody else’s opinion about me? But we are so vulnerable to other people’s opinions / comments. Somebody says something and we are so vulnerable that we obsess over if for days on end. They don’t know you, so they are going say things. If they really know you, they won’t say these things. But you can’t expect them to know you also.

I’ll tell you a story. There were two firemen that responded to a fire in the woods. They succeeded in putting it out and were returning to their base. Because of the direction of the wind while putting out the fire, one’s face became black with soot and the others was totally clean without a single black spot. As they returned they came upon a stream. One of them went to the stream and washed his face clean. The other did not. Which one of the two washed his face?

If you think the one with the soot on his face the answer is wrong. It was the one whose face was clean. Looking at eachother, and not seeing their own faces, the one with the clean face looked at his friends dirty face and thought “this is what my face looks like I need to clean it”. Thinking similarly the one with the dirty face looked at his friend’s clean face and did not feel the need to clean his face. They both concluded about their appearance on the basis of the others face.

Similarly we estimate ourselves on the basis of others’ opinions. We look at something from our own standpoint; from one angle. If we are little wiser, we may look at it from two angles. However we do not look at it from most relevant angles. If this is clear to me, I can’t really be affected by what other people think about me. So the more my self esteem depends on my own self appraisal, not on a reflected appraisal, the more realistic it is. Then I learn to be realistic about myself also. Not too high, not too low. So we are all average in the world. It is nice to be average. There is always somebody up, somebody below. It doesn’t matter how many people. I can merrily go along my way.

Self esteem is a big thing in dealing with oneself. Ups and downs in life are there, will be there and are to be expected. I don’t let it give me a label that I live with all the time. We become very vulnerable because we depend on others to make us feel good. That is why I need some acknowledgement. Everybody needs acknowledgement / acceptance. I don’t see one human being who doesn’t need to be acknowledged by some body. Even a Sannyasi will check with other Sannyasis. He will feel happy if others recognize him as a mahaatmaa. Some recognition, some acceptance is always necessary. We think peer problems are only for children. Peers are there at every stage. You look to your peers as a professional, as a parent and so on. That is where you get validated, by your peers. I am a doctor and I take my car to a mechanic and he says I am a good doctor. That is not a big acknowledgment for me. But if another doctor says that, then it is acknowledgment. Social work is also like that. It is a very human thing to seek acceptance, acknowledgement. There is nothing wrong with that. But then if my self esteem, my very identity depends on being acknowledged, I feel I am a nobody unless I am acknowledged then I make myself very vulnerable. It is not real also. In the sense you should not be dependent on others for this. So one can see how self esteem, need for acknowledgment, need to be accepted makes us vulnerable and gives rise to our ups and downs. In this I feel helpless when the world doesn’t respond to me as I would want it to respond to me. Everybody has similar needs. Everybody wants to be acknowledged by everybody, then we should have a mutual acknowledgement society. Like some world wide societies which are constantly giving each other awards. When this does not happen, you end up feeling deprived; unaccepted, unacknowledged, depressed, and helpless.

So where do we ultimately go to seek our strength if no one around us can provide it?

Ultimately we turn to the final source of strength, Isvara. Isvara is not only the source of strength but our own source as well. It is the one relationship that is fundamental as it is universal and invariable. All other relationships are variable, they are transient, and they change. They are dependent on many factors. This is one relationship that is constant as it is a relationship between an individual and the total. Every body has this connection between individual and total, in the form of Jeeva and Ishvara. If I can appreciate this fundamental connection, then this is not something that is unreliable or unstable. I am at once non separate from Ishvara. He is my strength, my resource, in fact my source. When my source becomes my resource, then my mind will not go wrong. When the fickle world becomes my resource, my mind will naturally be unenlightened and confused.

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