Sandra: Thank you for your last email on the three gunas, Sundari, it was incredibly helpful. I am just starting to understand how these three energies create the thoughts and feelings that seem to take over ‘my mind’ and cause me so much grief. The one I struggle the most with, and it pops up out of nowhere, seemingly regardless of what is going on in my life, positive or negative, is a deeply rooted feeling of anxiety. I can’t seem to control it, even when I can understand (more or less) where it comes from and apply karma yoga. I feel helpless and at its mercy. I know you have talked about free floating anxiety, but could you please expand on it for me
Sundari: This is such a common problem, one that most people experience on a regular basis throughout their lives, so don’t feel bad about it. It goes with the territory of being human! Self-inquiry basically boils down to managing the mind with reference to Self-knowledge, and not giving in to its fears and desires. What makes it so hard to do is that the willful mind/ego under the spell of Maya (duality, i.e., identified with being a person as the primary identity) is like having another mind that controls ‘your’ mind.
And that ‘other’ mind is very powerful. It is also called the collective unconscious, or the Causal Body, the repository of all fears and desires. Our puny little conscious minds in comparison with the collective unconscious are like David and Goliath. From it is generated all thoughts and feelings, as well as the belief that I am separate, small and incomplete, that I need something or someone to fix me, complete me, and produce happiness. The only problem is that expecting the world to give you permanent satisfaction is the cause of all anxiety. Nothing the world gives you lasts or can complete you, for two simple reasons: the joy is not in any object, and nobody can give it to you because you are what you seek. An object, as you know, is anything other than you, Consciousness, the knower of all objects, whether they are subtle objects like thoughts/feelings, or material objects.
As I explained in my last email to you, the three gunas, rajas, tamas and sattva, run the field of existence and are behind everything everyone experiences. All three gunas generate very predictable thoughts and feelings, which are not a problem unless we identify with them. All fear is rajas, and the ever present but often unseen and unnamable anxiety you feel is a by-product of macrocosmic or universal rajas (projection). This anxiety is a universal tendency (vasana). Most human tendencies exhaust themselves after a while, tapering off and inevitably returning. But universal anxiety is constantly “on”. It never really goes away.
It is caused by the precariousness and unpredictability of life, the fear of not getting what we want or losing what we have. As we all know, the only thing guaranteed in life is change and death of the body. We chase good experiences and try to avoid the negative ones, but nothing is really under our control as people. The anxiety this generates is sometimes called the fear of ‘being and becoming’, what the Christians call ‘Original Sin.’ It is hidden in the Causal Body (the unconscious mind), and it is always looking for objects to attach to. It is related to ‘others’ because it is the ultimate experience of duality or ‘otherness’. At its worst it is the fear that causes knots in the solar plexus, taking over the mind rendering it incapable of discriminating fact from fiction.
As the Self, it doesn’t bother you at all because it is just another thought object known to you, one you can easily dismiss. For those who are Self-realized but not Self-actualized, this unnamed fear will still come and go. But for those under the spell of Maya it is ever present. Though it feels personal and unique, everyone who is identified with being a person is affected by it to some degree and experiences it in the same debilitating way. This is because humans are born in ignorance of their true nature, which is the root cause of all fear and worry.
Yet this very troubling universal anxiety is no more than a thought born of the belief in separation, of duality. It is not real. Real being defined as that which is always present and never changes, a definition which can only ever be applied to Consciousness, or the Self. This fear is the ‘wound of humanity’ as I sometimes call it. It is the king of all universal tendencies, also what we call primordial beginningless ignorance, another name for Maya. The more user-friendly term for it is “free floating anxiety” because it is like the ocean that fish swim in. Yet if you had to ask a fish what the ocean is, it would not know. If Self-knowledge is not firm, this ocean of fear causes an ever-present non-specific unnamed existential fear, or worse, dread.
Not everyone experiences it directly and acutely, although many do, without even knowing it. The sky rocketing number of people experiencing anxiety attacks is testament to this. It makes people neurotic, driving many crazy, destroying relationships and lives. It is the cause of most mental health issues and suicides. Circumstances don’t kill people. Their thoughts do. But for most people,existential anxiety works out in petty mundane and indirect ways all day long, year after year. A death by a thousand cuts. It makes us feel like we are always missing something, that we never do enough, that we are never enough, no matter if we fail or succeed in life. We feel hopelessly flawed and at the mercy of forces beyond our control regardless.
You can see the accretions in the faces of many people as they age—the exhaustion of existential suffering, the disillusionment, the weight of many losses and disappointments, the unresolved fears and unmet desires etched in faces who have normalized the abnormal. But anxiety is hard to avoid because of its pervasiveness, especially with social media and our current outrage culture and PC society. The fear thought is reinforced at every turn, through advertising, the media (only bad news sells after all) and of course through ‘entertainment’. The more violence or threat of violence in a book or a movie, the more it sells. It seems people are addicted to fear and are drawn to it like moths to a flame.
Unfortunately, there is no solution to existential anxiety in the world. Therapy helps a bit to reduce the noise but not the presence of fear. Religion gives offers a life-line to cling to but no real answers to anything, unless blind belief works for you. Meditation and mindfulness also help and are definitely a good thing, as are devotional or gratitude practices. But they alone do not remove the ignorance of your true nature. You are still the same suffering person after meditation that you were before, with the same problems. Nonetheless, living a good life with good values is your best hope of a relatively peaceful life as a person in the world.
But if you want more, and you are fortunate enough to be a knowledge seeker, Vedanta offers the only true solution to existential suffering because it addresses the real problem. It removes ignorance of your true nature as the ever present unchanging untouched Self. It frees you from dependence on objects for happiness, and provides permanent peace of mind regardless of what is happening in your personal life. It does so because it is based on Self-knowledge, the logic of existence. It gives you the tools to apply to your mind in order to manage its involuntary thoughts and feelings, so as to live well in this crazy but beautiful world, without being affected by it.
It can do this because ignorance (or Maya), though it is called ‘beginningless’, the implied meaning is that it is not endless, because Self-knowledge ends personal ignorance. And therefore, ends existential suffering, for you, for good. However, the nameless fear complex is one of the last to go for most inquirers. Self-realization is no guarantee that it has been rooted out. Often, Self-realization is often not enough to slay the fear dragon for good. For most people, it disappears for a bit, then reappears. Extreme vigilance is the price of freedom. Sadly, for most people, fear is so ever present that it goes unnoticed because it is considered ‘normal’, even smart. Cynicism and lack of trust destroy the purity of the soul but are seen as the mark of a ‘worldly person’.
As you are an inquirer, the only way to deal effectively with anxiety is to take a stand in your true nature as the Self, observe the fear thought playing out, know it does not come from you or belong to you. Just reason it out: anything known to you cannot be you. Your thoughts do not speak the truth about you unless they are based in Self-knowledge. Apply karma yoga to the negative thought, that is, surrender the thought back to the universe or macrocosmic Unconscious mind (Isvara) from whence it came. Most important: think the opposite thought deliberately and immediately. Do not waste time on this one, even if it’s hard or feels phoney.
There is no peace of mind without managing the involuntary thoughts and feelings that arise unbidden in the mind. The mind will eat you alive if you do not understand it or manage the wild horses that stampede across it in the forms of thoughts and feelings. Just trying to ‘be positive’ only puts a band aid on the feeling; it does nothing to negate it. With practice, you get to manage the mind by understanding the three gunas, rajas (action/desire/anger/passion/projection, etc.), tamas (dullness, negativity, denial, sloth, etc.) and sattva (peace, intelligence, calmness, satisfaction, beauty, etc.).
Do a gunas scan on the mind at all times, and jump on those rajasic and tamasic thoughts like a cat on a mouse. Do not give them time to lodge in the mind and cause suffering. Aim for sattva at all times. It takes practice and determination, and we need to be very aware of our inborn conditioning (likes and dislikes), which can easily trip us up if we do not have a handle on it. But it can be done if you apply Self-knowledge consistently to the mind. If duality (ignorance of your true nature) takes over, fear takes over, and you are back in the mess, trying to fight your way out of drowning in the ocean of samsara, ignorance.
You have the knowledge and the tools. Use them.
Much love
Sundari