making progress

[Rajan Arulganesan]

what are, if any, practices that enable one to break out of habits - things that you do repetitively, sometimes out of boredom, sometimes for comfort other times for a buzz , sometimes even to the detriment of your physical and mental well being, e.g, over - eating, binge drinking.
In my experience, some of these tendencies are difficult to overcome with just awareness and reasoning. I can't help feeling that overcoming the dependency on habits is somehow linked with one's mental evolution.

What can one do to become more attentive and develop better intuition in everyday life?
Is this only achieved as part of an overall spiritual development or is it the case that one has to develop these in order to 'step on to' the path?

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Rajan,

It occurs to me that people with little or no spiritual interest can and do break bad habits with only awareness and reasoning (plus willpower!)

That being the case, to what extent can the presence of bad habits be linked to the absence of spiritual development? I’ve heard that Idries Shah smoked like a chimney, only giving up after at least one heart attack. His brother Omar, also a teacher, was alleged to have drunk like a fish and womanised. Osho was reported to be addicted to laughing gas, luxury cars, and women. Sir Richard Burton, whom Shah states was a Sufi, seemed in some respects like a pretty scurrilous person, particularly in reference to sexual mores. Some thought Gurdjieff a scoundrel. Some say that’s because people like that are malamati, deliberate courters of opprobrium, in order to repel spiritual dilettantes.

I really can’t say; But I get this feeling that to spiritually advanced people, a lot of what we think of as “bad habits”, are pretty small beer. It could be more the orthodox religious types who see them as signs of “sinfulness”. However, I wonder if certain ingrained habits of thought that aren’t generally considered as being in the same category as “bad habits” aren’t at least as, if not more, problematic, because they may be accepted as normal even if they are noticed.

I say they are “problematic” rather than “sins” (or even “shortcomings”) because it could be that thinking the latter way is in itself an undesirable ingrained habit: one that can lead us to regard ourselves as hopeless cases, providing an unconscious excuse not to try hard enough to resolve the problems it causes. Our lower nature seems so powerful, and we, so weak. We may think we need help, but if it doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, we may feel sorry for ourselves; and habitual self-pity may also become a habit of thought. One that prevents us from challenging the notion that we can’t do anything to change things for ourselves.

I’d say the first step is to identify what our ingrained habits of thought are: they can be very hard to spot because we are daily immersed in them like a fish in water. Maybe the second step is to examine them carefully, and ask what assumptions they are based on. This may ring a bell, because Idries Shah says as much in his books. The third would then be to question those assumptions. Is it true that one is helpless, can’t make progress without any external help that one can identify?

In part answer to that, I’d say that even if we have a teacher, we still have to do the work ourselves, and a lot of that is daily grind that isn’t the least glamorous. We don’t have to feel helpless: nor is it written in tablets of stone that we can’t do something useful to combat that.

Something I’ve come to suspect through personal experience is that the very act of trying, even if it doesn’t seem to be succeeding, can eventually lead to a breakthrough.

It’s not so much that the effort one makes is the direct cause of a breakthrough. It’s more that intention, if sincerely held and acted on, may be able to effect some kind of real inner change. The effort one puts in may supply the “energy”, and something beneath one’s ordinary consciousness harness it to further one’s intention. A number of times, I have struggled with something for some time, possibly years, only to find one day that the problem has disappeared, and I can’t for the life of me explain why or how. I intuit that making efforts has helped in some way, but can’t come up with a blow-by-blow logical description of how that might be.

This may be related to what I said in my “The Postman” blog entry. The universe seems to be so structured that if we try, then eventually, our caravan of dreams may arrive, but not necessarily in a way we expected it to. The connection between a desire and its realisation can be inexplicable. First of all, of course, the object of desire has to be feasible. I might want to grow wings and fly, but that isn’t realistic. However, wanting to shed certain ingrained habits of thought, perhaps, is realistic.

Maybe, until they have been shed, one can’t begin to work on more refined desires. Sure: one can express them in words, such as “I want to become enlightened”, but before then, we may need to pave the way through smaller victories against the nature of the lower self. Just dealing with a few of these could take a lifetime: who can say? Maybe many lifetimes are needed before we are ready to aim for the bull’s-eye. Maybe this time round, we are destined to hit only one or two of the outer rings.

I have met people who don’t seem to have some of the issues I have struggled with in life. They aren’t necessarily spiritually-orientated, either. Were they born that way? Did they overcome those issues in previous lives? Did they avoid developing them because their conditioning was different from mine? I can’t say, but I’d hate to think that in every life (if reincarnation is a fact), we have the same old issues to overcome or fortuitously avoid every time.

Maybe I’m rambling a bit. All I can say is that these are the reflections that your post raised in my mind, and they’re yours to take or toss.

[Rajan Arulganesan]

Far from that being rambling Michael, what you are saying is really thought provoking stuff. Yes, you are absolutely right. Instead of keep trying to overcome the ingrained habits, I am simply looking for a miracle cure and abdicating responsibility. I was a bit apprehensive about my enquiry after posting it thinking that this is not strictly speaking, stuff that concerns HR and expected some stern responses. Thank you for being gentle with me. A little hope goes a long way.