The Beginner’s Guide to Cultivating Dispassion

How do we define dispassion or vairagya?

The Bhagavad Gita defines it as niskama karma, or committing all actions by surrendering the fruits to the higher power. But that is extremely difficult, and it is a higher degree of dispassion that can be achieved only as a result of years of sadhana(spiritual practice).

However, to enter a stabilised spiritual life, a certain degree of dispassion is essential. Without that, a person would be trapped in the worldly cycle of pleasure & pain and would not develop any interest in spiritual development. Here, I would focus on how the beginner sadhakas(spiritual seekers) should cultivate & maintain the initial degree of dispassion.

So, for a beginner, dispassion can be defined as follows

1. Getting involved only in those activities that are useful and essential.
2. Consuming only those items and information that are necessary and in the required quantity. 
3. Using speech to convey only the meaningful, useful, and necessary information.
4. Maintaining only those relationships that are needed to sustain a harmonious life.

The primary interest of a spiritual seeker should be in seeking the ultimate truth. Sparing the time and energy required to conduct the essential worldly activities, every bit of a sadhaka’s existence has to be utilised in the sadhana.

Having this as the goal, how should one cultivate dispassion?

A three-fold approach to cultivate dispassion. 

1. Listening to the wise masters and reading the scriptures, books, and material that offer nibbles of profound wisdom. 

The importance of reading, associating with wise people and listening to the masters to retrieve the mind back from its habitual outward tendency can’t be stressed enough. 

Let’s hear one such teaching from the life of Buddha.

Once a monk curiously asked the Buddha, Oh, lord! When did this samsara originate, and since when have I been bound to it? 

He answers, Oh monk! You have been in this samsara since its beginning, and you have taken countless births. Every time you were born, you shed tears when you suffered in pain, when your father, mother, wife, husband, son, or daughter died, and so on. If we accumulate those tear drops, then it would be greater than the amount of water in the 4 oceans together.

We can’t see the entire truth and are held in our limited views. The wise masters show us a glimpse of reality, which motivates us to embark on a journey to find meaning in life. 

2. One needs to be attentive and practice mindfulness to maintain dispassion. 

Without practice, reading and listening to wise people alone would not bring any serious transformation in our lives. It has to be coupled with dedicated practice.

Mindfulness of your body sensations, thoughts, and feelings acts like showing you a mirror. You get the awareness of how your physical and mental faculties are functioning under the influence of sense objects. In the absence of it, body and mind continue to function in their set pattern.

It acts like the inner guide that constantly brings you back on track, every time you wander from the path towards your goal. 

Mindfulness is just one form of practice; you can have any other practice recommended to you by your teacher, like yoga, Kriya, etc. 

3. Apart from listening, reading, and mindfulness practices, a seeker must have a strong determination to bring the mind under control. 

The tendencies would drag you again and again to fall back. Some intense moments of lust, anger, greed, jealousy, fear, and attachment would force you to commit an unwholesome action. In those moments, a strong will is essential to exercise self-restraint. Without that, the patterns can’t be broken.

Forging a willpower as strong as iron will safeguard you from all the obstacles that are going to come in your path. On the night Buddha attained Nibbana, he made a firm determination not to move even by an inch until he got liberation. 

These three, therefore, form a foundation to arise from the mundane life governed by our mental tendencies. Each of them helps the other and needs to be strengthened equally. If one remains weak, then the entire structure is liable to fall. So right effort in cultivating these three is key to progress.