Motivation

One of the key questions asked by those who start their journey on the spiritual path is what will be the motivation for a person moving along the spiritual path. The motivation of a person attracted to material possessions is quite obvious. Some are motivated to earn money, some to have good food and comfortable homes, some to have more and more properties, some are inclined to roam around the world to beautiful places and some are attracted to accumulate power and prestige. On the other hand, spirituality is all about getting connected to the divine. In that case, what is the motivation for a spiritual person?

I feel that we first need to examine what these motivations are actually doing to us. Generally, there are two types of motivations. One is driven by attraction and the other is driven by repulsion. For example, a student may prepare for IIT-JEE to get admission into the IIT to get a heavy pay package because he feels that more money means more pleasure in life. On the other hand, another student who has faced an acute financial crisis at home may be motivated to enter into the IITs because he is sick of his poverty and therefore is running away from the same.

In cases where the motivation is driven by the force of attraction, initially, the force is actually quite forceful and makes the student work hard. To get a dose of such motivation regularly, such a person dreams of getting into IIT, getting a good job, having all the comforts of life, and having great fun. His thoughts run faster than time and the more he thinks about the future the more develops the fear of failing in the exam. Thus, two opposite forces start operating. The first one is the force of attraction towards the IIT and the other is the force of fear not to get selected. Initially, the force of attraction is more than the fear of losing. However, as time progresses, the fear of losing overpowers the force of attraction. 

In cases where motivation is driven by the force of moving away from a situation, such a student is frightened by past memories of difficult situations. Making efforts for the examination soothes him because that gives him hope for the future. However, as he moves forward, the fear of not getting selected takes over. This fear makes him travel to the past memories. As time progresses, the fear of not getting selected overpowers the force of repulsion.

That is the fate of every worldly motivation. Most of the worldly motivations are like firecrackers. They burn for a few minutes and then diffuse. They are like the bosons and fermions that take birth from the field millions of times in a second and then again merge into the field. At a quantum scale, such events happen millions of times in a second, and an observer, having the sense of time like human beings, would consider the fixation of a boson or fermion with its form to be a stupid thing. Similarly, on a cosmic scale, human beings also take birth and die just like bosons and fermions. Anybody looking at human life from the cosmic scale of time will consider human beings to be equally stupid to get fixated on their bodies.

Thus, on the one hand, the motivations of attraction and repulsion are unworkable in the long term due to the counter forces, on the other hand, fundamentally such motivations do not make much sense. I have not seen any of the IITian to be satisfied all his life just being IITian. The moment a student enters into IIT, there is another target to set. The same is true for every motivation. The moment the target is achieved, another target takes over. I have not seen any civil servant be satisfied all his life merely due to getting selected into civil services.

When we sit in Vipassana meditation, we experience all these motivations in the form of different types of sensations in our body. We see their temporariness. Different sensations come and go. Some stay for a very short duration while others stay for a longer time. However, each and every sensation in the body disappears sooner or later. The same is the nature of the motivations. As a student, we have the motivation to clear the exams, then to get into college, then to get a good placement, then to marry someone we like, then to have a home, then to have kids, then to get a good school for them, then to get promotions and good assignments, to have good food, to visit different places and the list can go on forever.

It appears that there is some hollowness that we are trying to fill through external means and the more we try to fill that the more hollow we become. We keep running from that hollowness after different external objects till we get tired. Most of us keep running till we get old and the body no longer has the time or energy left to confront that hollowness. It is so frightening to know that we have wasted the whole of our lives running away from reality. Only a few gather the courage to confront this hollowness and that observation does something wonderful to them. Some excerpts from Krishnamurti's notebook are quite revealing:

"On waking early this morning the beauty of that strength, with its innocency, was there, deep within and coming to the surface of the mind. It had the quality of infinite flexibility but nothing could shape it; it could not be made to adjust, to conform to the mould of man. It could not be caught in symbols or words. But it was there, immense and untouchable. All meditation seemed trivial and foolish. It only stayed and the mind was still."