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We are concluding a study of our likes and dislikes through Easwaran’s book Love Never Faileth. We began in week 1 by talking about successes we’ve had with trying to playfully go against habitual ways of thinking and acting.
This week, think of a relatively small dislike that you’d be willing to look at changing playfully. Experiment with being aware of when that dislike comes up for you, and actively apply the mantram. You might apply the mantram in the moment by silently repeating it, writing it, or going for a mantram walk. You could also repeat it when you realize you forgot to try changing it!
What happened when you became aware of the dislike?
How did you apply the mantram and did it have an effect? Do you have any other observations you’d like to share?
Please share as much or as little about your chosen situation – and your mantram application. We’ll all be inspired by our collective efforts and shared gains.
The excerpt below is from Love Never Faileth by Eknath Easwaran.
At present, as I said earlier, our internal freeway is set up only for one-way traffic, one-way responses, conditioned by our likes and dislikes. When we have to go against our dislikes or do something unpleasant for the sake of others, it is like driving the wrong way into a one-way street. All the traffic of the nervous system is against us, honking, dodging, and complaining bitterly. Very much the same thing occurs when we have to deny ourselves something we want: it is like stalling our car across two lanes of rush-hour traffic, a highly unpopular maneuver. In general, I would say that many psychosomatic ailments like allergy and asthma may be the result of going against a dense, one-way stream of traffic of likes and dislikes: the nervous system cannot brook it, and the body complains. But we can learn to open up traffic in both directions; and when we do, we can move in either direction freely. This gives us the freedom to choose our responses even in tense, difficult situations.
But this is not just a matter of removing a roadblock or two. For practical purposes, half the mind’s freeway has never been constructed; we have to lay down a whole new road. Many years of sustained, often frustrating effort must go into building this road, but you will be more than satisfied when you see where it can take you. At first the endeavor may not seem so difficult. The terrain is flat, so to speak, and if you encounter an obstacle, you can build a detour without much extra work or cost. At this stage of getting over likes and dislikes, you probably are not sacrificing anything you care about deeply. But as you proceed, you run into places where likes and dislikes have hardened into habit. These are sedimentary formations of self-will, which can stop spiritual enthusiasm cold. Most of us never attempt to climb over these petrified habits of mind or to go around them. They hem us in, limit our vision, and prescribe our action. That is why Augustine speaks of habit as the main obstacle in the life of every human being. The enemy is our selfish conditioning: some of it imposed from the outside, by circumstances, by friends, by the media; some of it imposed by our own choices and behavior. In the long run this selfish conditioning saps our will, until we finally forget that we have the choice of fighting it. Augustine describes this process in a vivid passage in his Confessions:
The enemy had control of my will, and from that had made a chain to bind me fast. From a twisted will, desire had grown; and when desire is given satisfaction, habit is forged. When habit passes unresisted, a compulsive urge sets in. By these close-set links I was held. . . .”
***
Repeating the name of the Lord can be of enormous help in this. When the Holy Name is repeated it becomes like a jackhammer, rattling away at the wall of solid rock that is conditioning. The amount of rock you dislodge per hour is not of primary importance; what is important is the number of times you remember to use the Holy Name and the enthusiasm with which you repeat it. Put as much enthusiasm into it as you can muster. When you can recall the Holy Name in times of stress, you will be making much more progress than you realize.
With the Holy Name, of course, goes meditation. Daily meditation enables you to bore deep into the rock of a compulsive like or dislike and set charges of dynamite at strategic points. Once meditation reaches a certain depth, the words of an inspirational passage like the Prayer of Saint Francis – “Where there is hatred, let me sow love” – can be truly explosive. Gradually deep cracks in the structure of self-will appear. Then the name of the Lord can serve as the kind of loader I saw the other day repairing a county road: it comes and clears the rubble from those explosive charges, so that the work of laying your new roadbed can proceed.