As life goes on and we manage to master some of the challenges that come our way season by season, other challenges crop up. Thus the feeling of mastery can be short lived. We may feel a degree of success in one field only to feel like we still have far to go in another. The journey of life brings its tests, but then those tests are what brings out the best in us. So it’s usually good to have some challenges to ultimately motivate us to try harder for the prize.
It’s actually good to have some pressure or low level stress to push us to new heights apparently. In my journey over the years, I have felt like I was failing in certain aspects of my life where I knew I was missing the mark and falling short of my highest standards. As the years went by and the senses grow weaker, as they do with age in certain regards, I felt happier at the degree of mastery over those demanding senses. But then other feelings of failure in other aspects of the personality would crop up from a different angle.
When we remember that the ultimate goal of life is not merely survival or reproduction or external achievements in dealing with the material energy, we have seen things in the correct perspective. The ultimate goal of life is self-mastery, and awakening of higher consciousness. All the rest are secondary by-products. Our modern civilization has steered us in the other direction however. It has trained us to think of the external results as the proof of success. That is part of the failure of civilization today.
Besides that, when I look at the handbook on self-mastery, namely the Sanskrit yoga texts on self-realization, I feel quite fallen, as if I have such a long way to go. There were times when I felt as if I was making progress but with the shifts of life over the decades, that immature feeling of achievement has dwindled somewhat. The humbling experience is apparently not a bad one for the ego to endure, so it’s not all in vain. My current obsession is based on my discovery of cryptocurrency over the past four years. It has brought me to great platforms like this where I can be inspired to write and produce creative output, but it has also made me pre-occupied with money.
I find myself obsessed nowadays with my trading pastime, where I practice my self-taught skill of day trading. Seven days a week, from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, I am interested in price action of certain cryptocurrencies in which I have buy and sell orders. I was never interested in finance or making money all my life – until the past four years ago when I discovered crypto and saw the possibilities of investing and – even more lucrative – of day trading.
The problem is, when I look in the text book on self-realization I find instruction like this:
ज्ञानविज्ञानतृप्तात्मा कूटस्थो विजितेन्द्रिय: ।
युक्त इत्युच्यते योगी समलोष्ट्राश्मकाञ्चन: ॥ ८ ॥
jñāna-vijñāna-tṛptātmā
kūṭa-stho vijitendriyaḥ
yukta ity ucyate yogī
sama-loṣṭrāśma-kāñcanaḥ
“A person is said to be established in self-realization and is called a yogī [or mystic] when he is fully satisfied by virtue of acquired knowledge and realization. Such a person is situated in transcendence and is self-controlled. He sees everything – whether it be pebbles, stones or gold – as the same.”
Bhagavad Gita As It Is chapter 6:8 translated by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta (www.prabhupadabooks.com)
I have become materially bewildered by the allure of money in the form of cryptocurrency, and so am now far from seeing pebbles and crypto as the same. In my latter years, it seems that previously unknown material attachments have arisen that weren’t there as much in my youth when other attractions were stronger. I have substituted one material desire for another. In this way the material energy still has me entrapped, one way or the other.
The key in this particular verse, is in the first two words. “Jnana” (pronounced “gyaan”) translates as “theoretical or acquired knowledge”, while “vijnana” translates as “realized knowledge”, as seen in the actual translation. I have acquired the theory here from the Gita but I appear to still lack the realization. I have not yet been able to take the words to heart, so that they purify my heart of the material desires still present there.
I can console myself by justifying my obsession with trading by telling myself that we need money to survive, but it’s not much of a consolation. And I tell myself that one day I will have enough money and then quit. The problem is that once you acquire the ability to keep making money via day trading, you always think you are missing out. You succumb to FOMO (fear of missing out), with the allure of possible profit always lurking there in the charts.
When does one say I have enough? So my life has been balanced between my desire and attraction to self-realization on one hand and my desire for monetary profits on the other. Perhaps it’s a good balance and I should simply continue for now with one foot on each track. I will see how it goes and continue to be self-reflective along the way. So much work still to do it seems. I’m trying to give up my material attachments but new ones are cropping up with each decade. Fortunately it has taught me that we can never become complacent and that life is a razor’s edge, with danger at every step for the vulnerable mind.
(image pixabay)