by Eknath Easwaran
Strength in the Storm, chapter 6

For most people, I imagine, radio has lost its magic. But I remember vividly the awe I felt as a boy in my remote Indian village when I first heard, as if by magic, a box with knobs and dials pull out of the air a thin voice from thousands of miles away: “Good evening. This is the BBC . . .”

Today, of course, the air around us is awash with messages at different frequencies. Music, news, chatter, advertisements – we can tune to whatever we like.

It is very much the same with the mind. All of us know how sensitive we can be to feelings around us. We sense tension when we walk into a room, register the hostility in a meeting, vibrate with the emotions of a football crowd. And in times of crisis, when the very air seems full of fear and anger, everybody’s internal radio picks up the mood – and, all too often, passes it on.

This is a useful illustration, because it reminds us that the mind can be tuned. We do not have to accept the fear or anger around us; we can tune to a more positive channel. And when we do this, we are not the only ones who benefit. Just as everyone in a café relaxes when loud music is turned off, not tuning in to anger creates a zone of calm that helps those nearby calm down too.

This is easiest to see by negative example. You must have noticed how easily one person’s irritation is picked up by others. We bring it home and pass it around until everybody in the family falls asleep in it. Whenever we are discourteous, unkind, inconsiderate, selfish, we are broadcasting emotional states for others to pick up, even if we do not express our feelings in words or action. It’s not the passing event it seems. The signal has been sent, and like sound or light, it goes on spreading.

We broadcast our emotional states – positive
or negative – to others. And the signals go on spreading.

Similarly, when we are kind to somebody, a little force of kindness is released in the field of consciousness around us. If we go on being kind, the force becomes stronger. And when we do this every day, even to people who are unkind to us, the force becomes potent and reaches far. Even as you read this, such forces are at work within and around you. Kindness is working against unkindness, and the stronger it is, the farther it will reach.

This is crucial, for as Emerson says, “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” How we think shapes how we act, and the net effect of how each of us thinks and feels shapes the behavior of the groups we live in. The family is affected; co-workers are affected; eventually there is an effect on society itself.

And just as personal interactions shape the dynamics of a home or office or community, the sum total of all these interactions shapes the events of history. Markets are moved by the fear and greed of millions. Collective fear and helplessness can put a dictator into power. Anger multiplied a million times erupts in violence and triggers wars: leaders arise who are attuned to those emotions and express them in destructive action.

The mental states we tune to actually gain strength from the attention we give them. The more attention we give, the stronger they become. And just as people become addicted to drugs, the mind can become addicted to certain kinds of thinking. Fear is a drug; it can alter consciousness. So can greed. Anger is one of the most powerful of drugs, far more addictive than cocaine.

Nothing is more important for the modern world to understand. Any decision or action taken under the influence of fear, anger, or greed has to be disastrous. That is why most international policies are not successful: they are taken under the influence of fear, greed, and anger.

Negative states fade if they are not reinforced. Remove negativity, and what remains is our original goodness.

Fortunately, negative states of mind fade if they are not reinforced by repetition. However strong they appear, they come and go. What is positive in consciousness is permanent, unchanging. That is why I say that original goodness is part of our very nature. When we cease to feed negativity with our attention, what remains is positive. We can strengthen what is positive by removing negativity from our minds. That is what spiritual practices like the mantram can do.

The mind, then, is not only a receiver. It is also a repeater, passing on what it receives. Most of us have only a few watts to broadcast with, while someone like Gandhi could send his message around the world. But each of us is on the air. We broadcast what we are, and others pick it up. When Gandhi said “My life is my message,” he was speaking for us all.

Most of us do not like the idea of being a passive repeater for other people’s messages. We want to have a positive influence. Why do our lives seem to have so little effect?

The answer is that most of us have minds that are scattered or distracted: sometimes positive, sometimes negative, constantly changing with our shifting moods and desires. If we don’t seem to have much effect on the world we live in, it’s because the signals we broadcast are weak and confused. It is the concentrated, focused mind that reaches people. All the great changes in the world for good and for ill have come from the impact of men and women with an overriding singleness of purpose and a concentrated mind. In our own times, on the positive side, Gandhi is a perfect example.

Fortunately, none of us are stuck with the mind we’re born with. With practice, a distracted mind can be made one-pointed. By skills like repeating the mantram and learning to focus on one thing at a time, the mind can be made one-pointed on the essential goodness in every human heart. Then every negative emotion can gradually be transformed into a force for good. Anger, the most destructive of emotions – destructive of health, of peace of mind, of relationships, of life itself – can, when transformed, become a loving force that can change the world.

We have been born to be of help to others.
To make our full contribution, we need to train the mind to be one-pointed and at peace.

It has been said that anyone who wants a peaceful life has chosen the wrong time to be born. The last hundred years have seen incessant turbulence, change, and danger. Around the world, people are living with a deep anxiety about the future.

In such situations it is only natural to ask now and then, “Why was I born into times like these?” The answer I would give is that we have been born to be of help to others. Desperate times are a sign of a more desperate need. To make our full contribution, we need to train the mind to be at peace and then radiate that peace to those around us.

Very few of us really know what peace of mind is, the phrase has become so hackneyed. To think peace of mind comes by using chemical aids or moving to a quiet cabin on the seashore is to deny the very understanding of the word mind. In order to have peace of mind, thinking should be under control rather than at the mercy of fear and anger.

I was never a very angry person, but as a boy I was known for my fear. My cousins and classmates were brave, but I was not. I would never get into a fight, not out of noble motives but out of fear.

I can tell quite a few stories here at my own expense. In our village there was a particular street I had to take in order to get to school each day. (In a village, you often can’t just go around the block.) And on that street lived a number of much older boys whose goal in life was to terrify boys who were smaller. Every morning and every afternoon, they would be lounging around waiting for someone to taunt.

We didn’t all draw their attention. Some of my cousins, who were small like me, loved nothing better than a good fight. They were never bothered. But I made an attractive target.

I have to say my tormentors could be creative. Even in those days, for example, my hair was rather sparse, and that provided material for all kinds of jokes and jibes. I would go down the street with my heart pounding and one of them would call out derisively, “Caw, caw!” and make signs with their hands like a crow’s nest. (A crow’s nest is rather flimsy. If you look at one, you can see the crow inside.)

That really bothered me, so finally I went and told my mother.

“Never mind them,” she said. “You’re a nice-looking boy. Why should you care what they call you?”

That didn’t make me feel any better, so I went to my granny.

“Son,” she said, “there are two ways to deal with this. One is that I can help you deal with it yourself. The other is, I can do it for you.”

“Granny,” I said, “I like the second way better.”

Granny was a woman of action and completely fearless. She went and told those boys something that almost made them leave town, and after that I never had trouble walking down that lane again.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t take my granny to college. At age sixteen I began the long journey of learning how to deal with such problems on my own.

I took heart from the example of another fearful boy who had made himself fearless and showed all India how to throw off fear. By the time I went to college, Mahatma Gandhi had taken center stage in India, and he made his life an open book. Everyone in India knew that as a child he had been subject to all kinds of fears. Even as a young man, he confessed, he was afraid to go out at night without his wife.

And he was terrified of public speaking! Early in his law career he had to plead an open-and-shut case where all he had to say was, “Your honor, the accused owes my client fifty rupees and he won’t pay.” He stood up, opened his mouth, and couldn’t get out a word. Finally he had to hand the case over to a colleague and rush out of court humiliated.

That is the man who went to South Africa as a timid, untrained clerk and got drawn into selfless service. By the time he returned to India, twenty years later, all that fear had vanished. Against overwhelming odds and brutal opposition, he had led a completely nonviolent campaign against racial legislation in South Africa and won. In India, he could stand against the greatest empire the world had seen and say, “Do your worst. I will not retaliate, but I will never retreat.”

Through selfless service and the mantram, Gandhi changed his fear into fearlessness, anger into compassion, hatred into love.

Today we would ask, “What kind of therapy did he undergo? What workshops did he attend?” But Gandhi never set out to make himself fearless. He simply began trying to serve those around him, spending less and less time on indulging himself and more on helping others. And the primary skill he used to support himself in these efforts was repetition of the mantram. Effort and the mantram together changed fear into fearlessness, anger into compassion, hatred into love.

That transformation is the reason I consider Gandhi a beacon for our times. “I have learnt through bitter experience,” he said, “the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.” And he added, “I have not the slightest doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” That is what the mantram can do.

To see how the mantram deals with fear, it helps to look again at the mechanics of the mind. Fear is a frantic flickering of attention: the mind is being whipped like a flame in the wind. Whatever the provocation, what handicaps us at such times is not so much an external threat as this inability to concentrate, this incapacity to hold our attention steady. And the practical application is that as attention becomes steady again, fear has to subside.

Flickering attention is a sure sign of a divided mind. Division is tension. Division is friction. Division is ineffectiveness. Division is futility. And a mind divided cannot stand. Most of us have a mind that is divided; that is why it sometimes cannot stand under the impact of life.

The mind can be compared to a huge highway with traffic racing along twenty-four hours a day. The problem is that thoughts don’t know how to drive. They stop here and there, weave in and out of traffic, and race out of control, an utter danger to everyone around.

This is what most of us call thinking. And the practical problem is that if a thought creeps up alongside us in the next lane, we get distracted. It steals our attention. We see the license plate, FEAR, and we start trembling. We keep glancing over, get jittery, and abruptly find ourselves darting over into its lane. The next thing we know, Fear has a tow hook on our bumper and is dragging us wherever it likes.

This gives a practical clue to how to solve the problem of fear. If you learn to keep your attention steady, a negative emotion like fear can wave, honk, do anything it likes to distract you into its lane and get its tow hook on you; you won’t react. Eventually it will have to go away, because you scarcely know it is there. Like a concentrated driver that cruises along smoothly in one lane, you cannot be distracted from your purpose.

Having a calm, steady mind is like driving a long distance in a powerful car on cruise control. You select the carpool lane and drive smoothly to your destination without any difficulty, danger, or delay – no compulsive darting into other people’s lanes, no U-turns in the face of traffic, no being totaled and towed away.

And the mantram can help us get where we want to go. The mantram has the power to transform negative forces in the mind into positive ones. There is nothing magical about this; the mantram simply takes advantage of the fact that when the mind is in the grip of negative emotions like fear and anger, thoughts are always racing. In positive states like love and compassion, consciousness is calm. So whenever the mind starts to race in fear or anger, repeating the mantram simply touches the brake.

Whenever a negative emotion starts to rise – a wisp of anxiety or fear, a rush of anger – if you can immediately start repeating your mantram in your mind, that gives the mind something to hold on to. If you can continue to hold on to the mantram at such times, the energy in that emotion is transformed, very much the way the energy of a rushing river is transformed into electricity. That is the secret of the mantram’s power.

Hold on to the mantram when fear or anger arises – it will steady your mind. Then you are free to respond to life’s challenges as you choose.

Today, after years of practice, I can assure you on the basis of my own experience that when you are repeating the mantram with full attention, no fear can enter and oppress you. The mantram will be cruising the highways of consciousness like a traffic officer on a Harley Davidson. That is the surest way of preventing the mind from wandering into strange byways where nothing but what is unpleasant waits for us.

The mantram is particularly precious for children dealing with fear, because it is so simple it can be practiced at any age. The other day at the hospital, for example, I saw a small child being given an injection. The wailing wrung my heart. That’s why I take every opportunity to tell mothers to teach their children to repeat the mantram at the earliest possible age. When they go to the dentist, when they feel threatened, when they hurt themselves or have nightmares, the mantram is of immense help.

In the depths of consciousness, even the bravest among us lives in a world of fear – the result of deep evolutionary conditioning that tells us we are separate and alone in a hostile world. We are protected from this awareness by a merciful amnesia that allows us to function outside the jungle, but deep in consciousness these fears are always present, manifesting themselves whenever we let our minds get agitated by events around us.

We could make a catalog of these fears, but they all stem from one fatal superstition: the belief that we are merely physical creatures, separate from the rest of life. A fragment cannot help feeling constantly alienated and alone, desperate for protection, always anxious that what it has will be taken away. Whatever face such people present to others and themselves, those who are acutely aware of their own separateness – their family, their community, their country, their race – are, beneath appearances, fragile and insecure. Their primary responses to life are to fight or to run away.

With the mantram, this sense of being separate and threatened by those around you gradually falls away. You will feel at home wherever you are, whoever you are with. You have a third alternative, beyond the conditioned reactions of fight and flight: the freedom to meet life’s challenges with the response you choose.

In Indian mythology, the times we live in are called Kali Yuga, the “age of darkness.” I call it the age of anger. With the world torn asunder by war and violence invading our cities and even our homes and schools, uncontrolled anger has become the hallmark of daily life. It saturates our media, our entertainment, our personal relationships, even our speech.

Over the years, I have witnessed a steady decline in the quality of life throughout the modern world as anger and violence become taken for granted as part of life. This is a trend that threatens everyone, for anger in one corner of the globe now can find expression thousands of miles away. With the technology of destruction within easy reach, one person full of hatred can wreak havoc and terror anywhere.

All of us harbor a good deal of anger; that is the human condition. But an angry person can never help lead an angry world from darkness into light – a responsibility that each of us needs to assume now if we want a safer world.

In the Truman Museum in Independence, Missouri, I saw an ancient clay lamp that had been presented to President Truman by the Jewish community of Boston. At its base was an inscription from Proverbs that is well known in English: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.”

Clay lamps like these are still common in village India. People pour in a little coconut oil, insert a wick, light it, and keep the lamp in the window on festival days. When the lamp is placed outside, the flame flickers wildly and may even go out if a breeze blows. But when the lamp is inside the home, in an alcove or shrine, the tongue of flame is absolutely still; it does not flicker at all.

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

That is how the mind should be: like the flame of a lamp in a windless place. It should not even flicker. When the mind does not flicker, there can be no fear. When the mind does not flicker, there can be no anger. All negative emotions are wild movements in the mind that vanish when the mind is still. In this state, we find the fulfillment of the wonderful prayer of Saint Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”

A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love. Ordinary people like you and me may not be a Gandhi or Saint Francis, but to the extent we can quiet our minds and light the lamp of wisdom within, we too can add a little light to the world around us instead of feeling helpless in the dark.