Life is stressful. The simple exercise of surviving on this planet involves unavoidable stresses. The only way to survive this stress is to accept it. And that can be made easier with a little help from a friend. Welcome to Basic Sanity.
Basic sanity was first introduced in the West by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who also presented Vajrayana Buddhism from Tibet in a refreshing new way. He brilliantly stripped dogma and traditional views in favor of a universal language, aiming to turn the esoteric and difficult-to-understand teachings into everyday tools.
Basic sanity is perhaps one of the most fundamental concepts in Vajrayana Buddhism. But to think of basic sanity as a concept embedded in tradition would be a contradiction. Any religion, ideology, or dogma does not automatically possess basic sanity. So, to understand it, one does not need to belong to any school of thought or identify with any philosophy or religion.
Basic sanity is not a privilege of any religion and is accessible and available at any moment to anyone. There is no need to change your name, wear different clothing, or move to a cave in India to find it.
Basic sanity is present within all of us at all times; we just have to uncover it. This article is not intended to be a Buddhist or religious study. Mentioning the contextual history here is merely a reference but not the most crucial point.
The most important thing is to advance the concept of basic sanity so everyone can use it and enjoy its benefits. This text is only valuable if it helps you discover your fundamental basic sanity and use it every day, wherever you are.
Developing basic sanity is working with ourselves and bringing awareness to a basic ground level. It involves becoming aware of the world we live in. It is also the raw understanding of our vulnerabilities and neurosis without altering anything.
It is quite simple because there is nothing to do and nothing to achieve other than look at our being as it is; we don’t assume we are spiritually qualified or disqualified, and we don’t pretend to be someone we are not. We don’t pretend we can help others when we can’t even help ourselves. Here’s kind of how it works.
In our quest for spirituality, we seek happiness. Although there is nothing wrong with seeking bliss, we often bring the opposite to ourselves. There is a basic insanity in our quest for spiritual bliss; we enforce it on others, too, and we think we know everything and we want others to follow us. We propagandize what we think is the only right thing when we, deep inside, know we don’t know crap.
So, basic sanity involves letting go of this façade and becoming truthful to ourselves. It involves realizing your inadequacy when it comes to understanding the mysteries of life. Finding yourself first requires that you realize that you might be lost.
Basic sanity is like marrying your spirituality with the world you live in and where you are rather than inventing some faraway place or sometime in the future. Living it is much harder; we prefer the stories because they are safer, and we can always add one thing or another to embellish it just the way we want. In essence, this is what dogma and religious fervor are made of: stories of past experiences. Basic sanity is about being present in this present moment and appreciating what we have just the way it is.
Too many people live their lives thinking that someday in the future, things will happen for them. We work hard, hoping that someday, we’ll be able to escape to a place where we’ll be happy. Instead of being happy now, we create conditions we must fulfill to get our reward someday. If I could buy this house, if I could just have that wife instead of this one, if I could be more beautiful—then I could be happy.
We look at pictures on Facebook of people smiling in some faraway place, and we think everybody else is having a perfect life. We think we are the only ones not happy, but everyone is having the same experience. We think we’ll be happy when we go on vacation or on the weekend, so we go day-to-day chasing our happiness, but it never arrives because it is a dream.
We propagandize what we think as the only thing that works, when we ourselves deep inside know we don’t really know crap
Even when we finally get what we want, we are still not happy, and then it gets even worse because now there is nowhere to go. This is called basic insanity. It is so pervasive that we see our entire world engaging in some kind of “collective insanity” as we seek distant, habitable planets so maybe we can go there and have a better world instead of simply fixing our beautiful planet.
The saddest thing about this approach to life is perhaps that we create more pain and suffering and pit ourselves against others while chasing our dreams. To understand basic sanity, we must be aware of our lack of attention to the here and now.
When we achieve basic sanity, we begin focusing on what’s around us, and the mind is quiet and attentive. When we achieve basic sanity, things curiously get twisted around. The ordinary things of everyday life become amazing, and the amazing, extraordinary things become mundane. If you feel that way, it is a good sign.
We become more attracted to the raw and what’s within reach in the world around us. This is much to our advantage since that’s where we spend 99% of our time. Going to work becomes more bearable and even fun. The dull moments have more meaning because we don’t expect anything from them. The fun here has a different meaning because things no longer have to amuse us; we are not afraid to be bored. Boring things no longer bore us because we don’t need to be entertained 100% of the time.
Basic sanity is about being present in this present moment and appreciating what we have just the way it is
We are just there. Noticing we are alive becomes a pretty extraordinary thing. The ordinary is cheaper and available in abundance, so the heap of compost becomes your new gold. Imaginary happiness in the future becomes more like a movie we watch and know is just an illusion. Cultivating a quiet mind is the first step to achieving basic sanity.
Basic sanity is an unspeakable concept. It is all about being and not conceptualizing. Anyone can experience basic sanity at any time. We might feel basically sane one day and feel basically insane the next. Basic sanity is not a stable or guaranteed state of mind. Once achieved, it is not yours to keep. You might also experience parts of it, but even a little bit of basic sanity can go a long way.
Everyone experiences it at some point in their lives because we all know what that is; we just keep forgetting it. Children spend almost all their time in basic sanity, but as we grow old, the sky becomes cloudier. It all depends on how much we practice quieting our minds. Our busy minds are a factory of thoughts, and like a torrent, they roar down a river, and there are usually emotions.
We must be able to quiet down the river and bring it down to a small brook. We ought to be able to sit and hang out with all of it, not leaving anything out, knowing that it is all good. But the first step is to notice your mind, the world, and your thoughts; nothing is excluded, and nothing is included. You can start right here and right now.
Image credit: Pixabay
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