Self-Actualization Are You a Tourist or a Pilgrim in Your Own Life
Girish Jha, Coach and Guide, Eastern Wisdom . Blog for Self-Actualization
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Stop Treating Peace Like a Weekend Getaway
Are You a Tourist or a Pilgrim in Your Own Life?
A tourist is a person who travels to a place for a few days as a visitor. Similarly, the mind is filled with stress and suffering. How can we achieve freedom from stress and suffering unless the mind is transformed. The transformation of the mind is a pilgrimage of mind to understand suffering, cause effects, means, and results. This is what Eastern wisdom is all about. It includes cognitive understanding, mindfulness, evaluation of the change in attitude, behavior, conduct, and thereby living life in peace and harmony.
We often treat inner peace as a vacation. We plan for a vacation from time to time. We enjoyed the vacation for a few days. After the vacation is over, we come back to our regular routine. Similarly, we plan for inner peace from time to time. We enjoy the inner peace for a few days. After the inner peace is over, we come back to our regular routine of stress. This is the reason why Eastern wisdom says that this is not a miscalculation. This is the reason why our inner peace and happiness never last.
You Can't Crave What You Don't Understand
We often say that “follow your passion” and “desire for inner peace must be strong.” Eastern wisdom explains that the desire for inner peace is the fourth in the sequence. The first is discernment. The second is dispassion. The third is inner discipline. The fourth is the desire for inner peace. You cannot desire something that is abstract. First, you must understand what exactly inner peace is. You must understand what exactly happiness is. You must understand why our worldly pleasures have suffering hidden in them. “You cannot have a desire for something abstract… first we have to really understand what exactly this peace and happiness is and why our worldly pleasures have suffering hidden in them.”
Your Mind Wants Objects, Your Intellect Wants Peace
The mind seeks cars, promotions, partners, and experience. It thinks in terms of “that thing out there.” What intellect wants, on the other hand, is the ability to see the concept of the abstract goal of peace. The real journey starts when the intellect, and not the mind, concludes that the goal of the journey is to arrive at freedom, and the role of the mind is to simply calm down and not intervene.
Winning Is Optional; Being Present Isn’t
In one parable, the son plays cards with his 101-year-old mother and gives up the habit of needing to win. The game is no longer about winning and losing but about the doorway to love and presence. What the pilgrim learned was simple and radical: the worth of the moment lies not in the result but in the quality of the awareness brought to the moment.
“It doesn’t matter who wins or loses… we’re together, just enjoy the moment.”
Living in the Now Will Confuse People Around You
When one pilgrim stopped living “three to five steps ahead” and chose to live in the now, the presence and calmness he developed caused tension with the people around him, especially his partner, who misinterpreted his new calm demeanor as either apathy or the onset of old age and not as a choice to stop overvaluing the insignificant.
Progress Is Not Perfection, It’s Noticing Detours
A practitioner started to identify the repeating, conditioned patterns as “low vibrational thoughts” and let them go. The more detailed definition is quite remarkable: “Whatever is changing in the world, and if we have a thought pertaining to anything that changes, it is a low vibration.”
Final Reflection
If you stop what you’re doing for a moment, what do you think would characterize your decisions? A tourist wandering from distraction to distraction, or a pilgrim going steadily, stubbornly, towards a place that doesn’t move.
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