Your biggest enemy🔗

26 October, 2010

One of the biggest engrams, one of the biggest enemies of your sadhana or enlightenment or achievement is laziness. Once the laziness enters into your system, nothing can be done. Any big idea... tomorrow. Immediately your mind says - Good idea, great idea, but tomorrow is a good day to start... our elders always say you should find out the right day, right time to start something new! Laziness is Maya. So understand, have no sympathy towards laziness. He is a demon, so no question of allowing laziness. The first lesson they teach in Zen is awakening your whole system and breaking the laziness pattern - because Zen is based on silent sitting. You can very easily slip into laziness in the name of silent sitting.

The very word Zen means dhyan, meditation. Zazen means silent sitting. You can very easily slip into laziness in the name of silent sitting. You can also very easily slip into that laziness in the name of Samadhi. So Zen first breaks that mental set-up of laziness. You need to first break the mental set-up of laziness to work on your engrams and create the new awakened lifestyle.

Zen monasteries have a tradition where even the Master who is the head of the monastery will not have food if he does not work for a certain number of hours! You need to do physical work for eight hours and mental work for eight hours (meaning sadhana or some other teaching or learning). A teacher works mentally when he teaches. Disciples work mentally when they learn. So eight hours of physical work, eight hours of mental work, and last eight hours, you will naturally rest in consciousness. There will not be any unexhausted engrams, so the sleep will be deep sleep. Only when you don't work eight hours physically and eight hours mentally, you will have a stressed sleep, disturbed sleep, disturbed memory and disturbed mental set-up the next day. You will not feel as if you slept.

Laziness is one of the worst engrams. It is not even an engram, it is almost like your breathing! Anybody who leaves the ashram due to the laziness engram will not be accepted back. No question of coming back. If they leave because of any other engram, maybe lust, they can go and get married and suffer for a few years and come back. They would have learnt the lesson. If they have the anger engram, they can leave and come back, because, when you express your anger in society, you will get nicely beaten! That mental set-up will be broken.

If you have greed, then you can go and learn the lessons of the greed engram, what you need to do and need not do, if you want to come back. But, if there is a laziness engram, and if they leave, nothing can be done. Laziness is the non-return zone of spirituality. Enlightenment, videha samadhi, and laziness both are non-return zones. If you are caught in laziness, you can never be lifted. If you are relaxing in videha samadhi, you will never come back.

The first thing you need to do on the spiritual path is break the laziness, especially during that early morning brahma muhurta.

Wake up before sunrise and work out, doing either 108 surya namaskar or other yogasanas and pranayama. Take a bath in cold water in a sacred water body and then sit for your puja (offering of gratitude to the Divine). If you do this, your day is set. You will break all samskaras. Once you break one or two strong samskaras, you will simply know how to break the others. The science of breaking samskaras is learnt. The science of handling your body and mind is learnt.