Inner Well Being
“Now, many people are concerned about inner wellbeing, and they’re wondering about the importance of inner wellbeing. But honestly, inner wellbeing on the face of it, is an ideal, which we do not have. Ff we are honest, we have to make that declaration right in the beginning. And then if you do not have that inner well-being, then what is it that we have? Now what do we do have is, we have a lot of conflict, and we have a lot of chaos in our thinking, and we have a lot of hypocrisy, and we have an enormous amount of confusion. And with all these things, we are living because we seem to be living in a world and in a society where the existence of the inner man and the primordial importance of the inner man has been lost sight of. And instead, what are we doing? We are concerning ourselves with the outer man.
“The outer man being defined by his professional success and by his body and his appearance, not only physically but by the status in society, what his friends think of him and how his position is perceived and so on, and how much money he’s earning and how well he stays connected with the community at large. These seem to be the variables we are concerned with. To our eyes or our perception, we don’t even realize that there is an entity like the inner man, who is defined by his thinking and his feeling, and by the movement of the self and his conflict. And the truth is that the inner man is in great suffering and is in great chaos. And the question arises, can this chaos be understood, transcended and ended? How do we do that?
“Now, Krishnamurti has drawn attention to the importance of the inner man. We have to start with self-Knowing and we have got to be true to ourselves. And the initial impulse is, that we deny the existence of suffering and we deny that the inner man is suffering and that he is unwell. We deny that fact, and we don’t want to hear anything seemingly negative. But in doing that, I believe, we are failing to address the root of the problem of human sorrow and human suffering, which is always in the inner realm. And once you put your house in order, as the Master Krishnamurti says, by going very deeply into self-Knowing so that the self fbecomes very calm and falls silent, then you will find that one can live life without much effort.
“Well to post a letter you may have to go to the post office and to drive your car there has to be little bit of effort. But on the whole, it’s like a boat, you get into a boat and the boat man is the Divine, not us, and we just have to set sail along with the boat man and we keep coasting.
“And then we will find that we are in harmony with life and life has got three faces- the good, the bad and the ugly. And our usual tendency is want to be always good, want to be always recognized and want to be always trouble free. And we turn a blind eye to the bad side of life and the ugly side of life. But when once our house has been put in order and the inner man is silent and intelligence has been awakened, then we embrace the totality of life and we have a sense of harmony and wholeness with life in all its expressions, not just the expression of the so-called goodness, which we are trying to seek all the time.
“Then there is a peculiar fullness of life, and there is a peculiar intensity of feeling. It’s there all the time that the intensity of feeling is probably the ground of creativity. It’s probably the very essence of who we are and we have to act from that centerless center. There’s no individuality there, but there’s only an intensity. And there is an essence and from that, we have to act depending on what is appropriate to the context of life. So it will invariably be right action and it’ll be right speech. And that’s a very peculiar thing. It’s very hard for us to even listen to this and to receive it. But that’s the truth.
“And I even go one step further. I say that when you have put your house in order and when you have renounced the former way of living, which is through the effort of the self, through the way of the self, then I would say another thing that a peculiar thing takes place, that the entire universe somehow seems to offer you a helping hand. I don’t know how to communicate this, but I found it true to my experience that just wishing for something, provided that wishing is not coming from the self, from the ego. Somehow that wishing is automatically answered by the Divine or by the Universe or whichever way you want to see it. And there is a symphony and a harmony now, after the inner man has been attended to. Whereas formerly, there was disharmony and conflict and enormous strife. So that is called inner wellness, we call this inner wellness and it’s very easily said, but how do you get it? And you get it by paying attention to the drama, which is happening in consciousness, the movement of the self, studying the movement of sorrow, studying the divisive activity of the self. And then it comes to pass that the self falls calm and silent. And then that’s the milestone, ushering in the new life, whereby there is going to be outer wellness as a result of this inner wellness”.
– Sankara Bhagavadpada