21 Insights & Ideas for 2021

It is always with renewed hope and eagerness that all of us welcome a new year.

2020, the year of a pandemic, lockdown, and work from home has taught us a lot. As I will continue to read articles, insights from my peers, and friends on how their 2021 went to learn & grow, I share my 21 insights & ideas for 2021, distilled from about 200 pages of daily journaling over the last year. Never before I wrote my diary so frequently and copiously, capturing thoughts, ideas concepts, and insights that inspired me to live a life of happiness and contentment.

The first seven introduces a few concepts ['Awareness'], the middle seven deepen your understanding of the concepts ['Understanding'] and the last seven are how one can practice ['Practice'] these in our daily life. Some of these are also covered more elaborately in my book, Happiness beyond Mind, which was published in July 2020.

If any of the ideas and insights inspire you, but you need additional clarity, feel free to reach out to me. I am happy to help – either explain it to the best of my knowledge or point you to the right source for you to self-learn.  And, I would also love your feedback – either in private or through a comment to my LinkedIn post if any of these inspired you to consider a new way of looking ahead in 2021.

I hope you will enjoy reading these.

Awareness

1.    Cause of stress and unhappiness

Unlike animals, humans are self-conscious and self-judgmental, giving rise to stress and unhappiness. In self-judgment, we have a sense of incompleteness and self-inadequacy. That is the reason why we can never come up with a day in our life when we had zero desires. We cannot stand ourselves, therefore there is a constant effort to become different from who we are. Such a person is a born seeker who will cease to seek only when one becomes ‘whole’. Every day of our lives, most of us are constantly inquiring who we truly are – whether we openly acknowledge it or not. In all our interactions, we are trying to discover who we are or create a better version of ourselves. What are our knowledge, skills, aptitudes? What are our limitations and fears? What are our aspirations? What do we want to do to be content? What do we want to let go to be happier?

All human activities are a quest to discover our fullest potential, but we start with the wrong assumption that we are inadequate and need to acquire ‘something’ to become contented. The self-judgment gives rise to stress because we notice there are innumerable things about us (and some new ones crop up daily!) that we want to be different – physical looks, attitudes, values, possessions, relationships…..

2.    Three broad categories of all our pursuits

Abraham Maslow says, ‘self-actualization’, as the desire to become the most one can be. What next after we have gone past the basic physiological, safety, security, relationships, and esteem needs? All human initiatives – whether at work, relationships, contribution to society, chasing power, titles, positions are an overt or covert effort to discover limitless happiness, peace, contentment.

All human pursuit is to seek material progress either in the form of money or possessions. Or, it could be to build relationships – like family, love, or friends. The third pursuit is seeking power, prestige or position. All our pursuits and goals - whether in career or academics or anything else, can be thought of to fit into these three broad categories. Irrespective of our pursuits, the deeper reason why we follow any type of pursuit is only one – happiness, contentment & peace.

3.    Hierarchy of love

Whatever we do, we do to be happy, peaceful & content. Our happiness is at the top rung in the ladder of love. When we say we love something, we are only expressing that ‘something’ is (likely to be) a source of happiness to us. When we don’t know this truth or can’t express it clearly in our own mind, we express it in different ways that form a hierarchy of happiness. And, when something or someone no longer gives us that feeling of happiness, peace & contentment, we are ready to discard them.

The happiness gets expressed as love for humans, that we form through relationships as the next lower level in the hierarchy. Following this is love for other beings – animals, plants. The lowest in the ladder is love for objects, inanimate things. That is why we observe that in general, we prefer human relationships to money or material possessions. Most times, we are ready to trade off our pursuits for money, possessions to experience the love and joy of relationships – people and animals (dogs, cats for example).

4.    Happiness is not in objects or experiences.

Happiness or peace, contentment is natural and intrinsic to us. Like heat which is intrinsic to fire and will bring forth that property irrespective of whether we are in hot sub-Saharan Africa or cold Siberian winter. On the contrary, water that is heated up will lose its heat after a while but will retain its taste because heat is not intrinsic to water, whereas its sapidity is. Like the intrinsic nature of any object, the intrinsic nature of a person will always shine through and what is not intrinsic will be let go. That is why we don’t accept any sort of pain or unhappiness and strive to get back to our intrinsic nature. The times we felt happy are the times our intrinsic nature has shined forth breaking the thick veil of our ignorance in our mind - wrong notions, values ideas, and concepts. All other times, the veil of ignorance has managed to hide our intrinsic nature like an opaque lampshade that is able to hide the brightness of the light. Irrespective of the lampshade, the light is shining always.

If happiness were in any object external to us, then it must give happiness equally to all people at all times. Neither is happiness found within our physical body or mind. On the contrary body, the mind is perhaps a source of great misery, given the health issues and mental turmoil we all go through. When we notice that the same objects don’t give happiness to all at the same time (they can give us completely opposite emotion), and importantly, the same objects don’t even give us the same levels of happiness at a different time (think of the car that you bought which is now ten years old and requires a lot of maintenance), then do we still think happiness is in objects or experiences?

5.    Happiness manifests only in a peaceful mind

When we identify ourselves with body, mind, or intellect, we notice that their demands become our desires. Like ripples in a crystal-clear lake whose bottom we can’t see because of the ripples, our desires propel us toward some activity so that the desires in our mind are abated. By acquiring objects and experiences we are deriving happiness because our mind has become temporarily calm without those desires goading anymore for a little while. It is like not wanting to eat anymore once our stomach is full; only to look for food after a while once the hunger pangs set in again.

Conversely when the lake is calm, one can easily see the bottom of the lake. Similarly, when the mind is free from desires, even if it for a few minutes, we are able to achieve that elusive happiness. Happiness manifests itself when the ripples of desires are low in the lake of our mind.

6.    Mind, body are our instruments, not our true identity.

Most of us accept going to a doctor or even talking about our physical illness, but we are hesitant to talk about our mental ill-health because we identify ourselves as ‘mind’. But is our identification true? Intuitively we all know, there is ‘someone’ else within us because we don’t identify with our body or mind as ‘us’ all the time. When we have fallen sick physically, someone within us recognizes that our body is weak. When we are angry, sad or depressed, someone inside us again knows that these emotions are an experience in our mind, so they cannot be ‘us’. Even when we take any decision, there seems to be an impartial observer of the decision-making process. That ‘someone’ inside us is our true self-identity.

It is that ‘someone’ who is using body, mind as instruments to experience and enjoy the pleasures of life. For some strange reason - as a consequence of our past conditioning, we identify ourselves with body, mind, intellect. Individuality and ego are a result of such a  misplaced understanding of who we are. We wrongly assume that our intellect, emotional or sensory personality is our very own self. Like, mistakenly considering the car we are driving as our very self, without recognizing that we are using the car for a purpose. Similarly, we have to recognize that beneath the sheaths of physical, sensory, emotional and intellectual personalities of who we think we are, is our true identity and it is unitary in all.

7.    Events and Personality

  Events are just that – happenings. They become important to us when we attribute meaning to it. Births and deaths, for example, are events. Likewise, diseases, illness, pandemics, droughts, famines, cyclones, earthquakes and accidents are just events in time and space. The moment we associate an event with our personality and relationships, they assume importance. Like the birth of our child or an earthquake in the neighborhood, we live in.

Our personality has four components – physical (sensory), emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. These four components react to events in the way they are conditioned based on past experiences, tendencies, and proclivities. Sometimes, these different parts of our personalities have contradictory goals, and the part that dominates determines our response to the event. Over time, the responses to events follow a pattern – some bad and some good. For example, someone with a sweet tooth will end up eating chocolates, even if their rational mind wants them to avoid it. Because of such conditioning, meaning and perception of the magnitude of an event are subjective, and surely not objective. Yet it is misunderstood by all of us. Perhaps a good idea is to rearrange the mind than to wish events not to occur at all.

Understanding

8.    Vicarious living?

Who likes to live the life of someone else? If we consider our body, mind, intellect as our very own self, we are affected by the impact of the external environment. It is similar to our state of mind when the new car that we have driven off the showroom hits the curb and gets a minor scratch. At that moment, we have identified ourselves so much with our car that we cannot but feel that emotion. Similarly, unfortunately, most of us also live the lives of our likes & dislikes and our binding desires, that occur in our mind. We also act out as if compelled by our strong emotions like anger, jealousy, greed, pride. We live a life of guilt, remorse and regret thereafter. This is clearly vicarious living. After the moment passes, we are often surprised why we behaved irrationally and may even think that it was just a ‘bad moment’ for a genuine, authentic sincere person within us.

We have to recognize that a subject is always different from an object. A subject is the one that is able to experience everything else either directly or through perceptions. Just because a camera is not seen in a photograph does not mean the camera does not exist. Similarly, the true identity within us is the real subject, who is able to perceive the world of objects, experiences, feelings, ideas, and thoughts. Being free of clutches of compulsion from our likes, dislikes, and emotions – rather than using the mind and their properties instruments to achieve our life goals is a powerful shift in the way to live. Living an authentic life is a life lived rationally, deciding consciously on everything that we would like to do in our life – small and big, that aligns to our primary ‘self-actualization’ goal.

9.    Thought, word, and action

Our thoughts are the source of what we speak and how we act in this world. Quite often, wrong thoughts lead us to say something or act out in a detrimental manner, harming people around us and ultimately ourselves. Our values, beliefs, attitudes are all part of our thoughts and can be changed by determining for ourselves what is right and what isn’t.

Being in harmony within ourselves is an integration of our personality. The complete congruence of thoughts, words, and action is harmony. It involves clarifying our thoughts first before speaking or acting. It also means clarifying the core values we stand for and demonstrating those in words and action. It means the four different parts of our personality are working in harmony as we interact with the world.

10. Trusteeship, rather than ownership 

We can claim ownership to only that we have created independently. If we think about this, we can claim nothing in this entire universe as our own. All we can do is to combine, recombine elements that are already there to form new entities. Ownership cannot be claimed as the original material has already been given to us by nature. Just buying a piece of land from another does not confer ownership to that land in the true sense. Likewise, even our body cannot be claimed as our own, because it has its beginnings in parental nurture, as well as nature, in the form of food we eat – neither of which we have created independently.

Developing an attitude of trusteeship, responsible to take care of our body, mind, environment that we find ourselves in, is a much better approach towards happiness than an ownership attitude. A trusteeship approach automatically attenuates the sense of identification with mind, body and reduces the weight of ego in our transactions towards everything including our own body. Such an approach also makes us more careful towards everything that we take for granted, like nature and the environment. This automatically creates harmonious living with the environment.

11. Space between stimulus and response

Viktor Frankl’s said, ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom’. Our growth and freedom are nothing but finding that perennial source of happiness, contentment, and joy. The ‘space’ between stimulus and response is the rational decision making, exhibiting freewill and actively choosing rather than behaving impulsively due to our likes, dislikes, desires, and emotions that are seated in our feeling mind and perceiving mind.

A sponsoring thought in the form of stimulus – either from the external world or from our memories, triggers a chain reaction of successive thoughts or responses within us. There is no choice in sponsoring thoughts because we have no control on either the external environment or even our own deep subconscious memories and desires. However, what we have control over is how we process the thought. Only an untrained mind will think in disconnected sense impressions, irrelevant memes, nonsensical scraps of sentences, little darting fears & resentments, positive or negative anchoring, experiences of physical sensations of discomfort, excitement, etc. Our next thoughts to the stimulus received are dependent on our mind and we can train our mind to think any way we want.

12. We all have three super-powers

Comparing and contrasting humans to animals, we can safely say that the commonality is eating, sleeping, procreating, and showing fear. Animals are pre-programmed and instinctual, but humans have an innate ability to exhibit free will and make choices.

Humans have three super-powers that emanate from the unique ability of freewill: to desire something, to know /learn something, and to ability to work/act to make those desires a reality. Desiring wisely, knowing right, and acting correctly determines the happiness quotient of our life.

13. Repeatedly ask ‘Why?’

We usually do not ask ‘why’, rather ask ‘how’ to go about any situation in our life – be it studies, career, money, relationships, or big events like buying a home or getting married. It is important to know the purpose of why we do what we do, in addition to knowing how best to do it.

If we repeatedly ask the question ‘why?’ to whatever we do, we will finally reach a conclusion, ‘to be happy, contented, peaceful,’ This can happen within eight times of asking the question repeatedly. Ultimately, all we do is to be happy, contented, and peaceful.

14. Ask ‘So What?’ instead of exclaiming ‘What!’

Any life situation can be faced by greeting it with ‘So What?’ instead of being surprised and exclaiming, ‘What!’: Such an approach immediately shifts our perspective from non-acceptance to acceptance.

Asking ‘so what’ means we take responsibility for the situation. We start searching for a suitable response to the stimulus the situation creates for us. This lends purpose to our life and meaning to our pursuits, driving us to action, rather than succumbing to fatalism and desolation.

Daily Practice

15. Three essential disciplines

We all have a lot of fluctuations in our mind – an expression of our desires, expectations, asks, emotions, and ideas. These fluctuations are random, and they would not follow a pattern. Even on two different days, we have no control over how our minds will think about the same topic. Psychologists create a broad bucket of personality types (like MBTI for example) similar to the zodiac signs but most of us intuitively know we don’t fit the stereotype, because ‘we are different’. This is because the mind does not have a consistent pattern of thinking.

Three disciplines help to subjugate the emotional mind and shift the control to the intellect to drive a purposeful life. To cultivate and culture the mind, we can train ourselves on – (a) setting limits to our eating/drinking/entertainment to control the sense organs, (b) charity to expand our concept of self beyond selfish ‘I’. The charity can take the form of donating our money, time, knowledge without expecting any return and (c) selfless work – that one would do without expecting any return for the benefit of a larger set of beneficiaries.

16. Secret of work and action

The entire universe is interconnected and interdependent. We can’t even live for an instant if we were not provided with air. It is a fact that our very life is dependent on nature’s grace and also the kindness of others in the entire ecosystem. Even if we think we are a cog in the wheel, we have to recognize that we play an important part to keep the cycle running. The importance of the part we play has to be assumed and accepted by us that it is only us who can do this part at the time, the place we are in. Then, we automatically give enough weight to the work we are supposed to do (our duties), based on the roles we have - for example a parent, child, friend, employee, boss, spouse, neighbor etc. Every day, we consciously decide to offer our best to the work we do. At the same time, we must realize that we do not have a hundred percent control over results. So, they may fall short, meet or exceed our expectations. And, with this knowledge, when we adopt an attitude to accept all results that come our way, we are not attached to the outcomes but are attached to the work to be done.

The secret of work is simply being attached to work with a detachment to results. It is doing selfless work with all our attention, focus, and energies. It should never be misunderstood that we should not plan or expect results. On the contrary - we must, but we must also be detached from the outcome that finally comes out of it. This detachment automatically removes fear, the burden of guilt & stress from our minds. In this new paradigm, we now measure ourselves by the quality of work we do instead of the results. This automatically improves our self-worth & decision making.

17. Minimalism is a path to happiness

When we acquire any material goal, we are adding additional responsibilities, like home insurance & repairs when we buy a home. In the initial days, the goal of acquisition and additional responsibilities will look like fun, but over time it becomes a burden. Either the subjective importance in our eyes or the objective value of the goal itself has reduced. Also, protecting what we have and acquiring what we don’t have becomes a pursuit in itself, lending life to morph itself into serving loans, and craving for newer experiences. The wardrobe we have, the car we drive can be used optimally, as long as we can and perhaps we can re-use the same in some other way? What if we consciously give away all those that we don’t use anymore? A website to barter unused objects will be a great way to sustainability.

The lesser we have, the happier we become because we are not burdened with unnecessary graphs of material connections that are truly desired, we were chasing in the past which may not serve well our current self-identity. It sounds contrary to common knowledge about life and human pursuits, but minimalism is a simple idea worth its weight in gold.

18. Breathe right for stress-free, healthy long life

The majority of humans breathe shallow, using less than 10% of our lung capacity leading to inefficiency in the respiratory process that cascades into health challenges, both at physical and mental levels. There is also a direct correlation between the lifespan of a species and the number of breaths per minute (bpm). For example, a dog breathes about 50 bpm and lives approximately 15 years, while a tortoise has a 3 bpm and lives up to 400 years. We breathe at 15-30 bpm and our normal lifespan is between 60-80 years. Breath also is a flywheel between our physical body and mental body. Just as our mental state can influence our breath, our breath can exert a similar influence on our mental state. Calmer breath means a calmer mind.

Breathing deeply, using the technique called ‘yogic breathing’ or ‘belly breathing’ where we breathe through our entire lung capacity, first of all, calms our nervous system – sympathetic and parasympathetic, as well as reduces stress while building immunity to diseases, not just respiratory diseases. A healthy idea worth adopting daily is to drop everything we do and breathe deeply for a minute at the stroke of every waking hour to induce that calm, focus, and stress-free mindset for us to get things done.

19. Fasting regularly and eating right

Humans consume much more than what is required for sustaining our bodies. We observe that animals never over-eat and research indicates that most of the lifestyle diseases are caused by over-eating. Eating three or more meals daily, along with copious snacks in between has, unfortunately, become an expression of our good life. Contrasting this, eating two meals a day, and only when hungry is key to health – physical and mental. Also, fasting once every fortnight, aligning our bodies to the changing natural lunar cycles that occur, is not only beneficial but highly recommended practice, followed for thousands of years by millions across the globe. Fasting is also a proven technique & natural cure to improve health by cycling out diseased cells from the body. It also has the potential to cure incurable, chronic diseases.

Just by cutting down a daily meal, eliminating unnecessary snacking, and fasting regularly, we not only improve our health and lifespan, but we also have the potential to provide basic food for millions who go hungry every day.

20. Daily meditation

Nobody needs to tell us how important it is to hit the gym, put on our running shoes, or play a sport to keep ourselves physically fit. Unfortunately, we pay enormous importance to just a quarter of who we truly are. Health is not just being physically healthy and three-quarters of who we are is beyond the physical – the sensory, mental, intellectual personalities of our mind.

Daily meditation practice will help us to calm the lake, reducing the ripples of selfish, unwanted desires in our minds that keep raising their ugly head often. A calm mind helps to rationalize what we truly desire and eliminate irrelevant demands of our likes and dislikes. This saves time and makes us more efficient and focused on achieving our long-term goals. Certain advanced meditation practices also help us to use our mind as a laboratory and convert our natural, unwanted behavior (like anger) into sought-after, positive behavior (like compassion).

21. Reflecting and journaling

Daily, we go through our day knocking off action items from our list. These actions are meaningful for a shorter duration of time, like submitting a proposal by end of the week or booking tickets for a vacation. We then work and fill in the time available at hand to strike off those actions from our list.

Seldom we do ask ourselves what we truly want. Even more rarely we reflect on understanding who we truly are. Spending a few minutes to reflect on what the day’s events have taught us about our personality – identifying which component of our personality is dominant mostly and making corrections proactively to bring our spiritual and intellectual personalities to the fore will help us integrate our four personality components. Understanding the difference between our self-identity and roles is asking powerful, yet simple questions with a calm mind -  preferably early morning as soon as one wakes up. Over time, we will shift our perspective and not define ourselves by the roles we do and will surely gain knowledge into our true self-identity and the life goals that truly matter to us.

I would love your comments /feedback.

Happy New Year 2021. May each one of us learn, grow & contribute,