Jagadeesh Krishnan psychologists and international Author

3 Mental Upgrades That Will Propel You to Achievement

Evolution has provided humans with a number of incredible algorithms that have turned us into the most dominant lifeform this planet has ever seen. But evolution has also snuck in some programming that makes us act like idiots. Our job is to figure out which is which, and turn up our reliance on the ones that help and entirely mute the ones that hold us balance

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The trick is knowing how to assess what’s helping and what’s hurting. For me, the answer is very simple: Do and believe that which moves you toward your goals. Everything emanates from there.

Once you know which algorithms to run and which to terminate, the question becomes how to actually stop the original program from running. The answer is… you don’t. Nature is far too clever to let her algorithms be turned on and off so easily. They’re buried deep in our hardwiring. But although you can’t turn them off (at least not quickly), you can use them as the trigger to run the new, more useful one that you want to take its place.

Without knowing what your specific goals are, I’ll stick to some of the universal ones. What follows are three mental upgrades that will work for anyone, regardless of your specific goals.

1. Replace criticism with compliments.

We’re geared to see the things that are wrong. You don’t avoid getting eaten by a lion by noticing all of the things that are right. And although this may be a tremendous strategy to avoid large predators, it’s a pretty terrible way to manage your interpersonal relationships.

According to the Harvard Business Review, high-performing teams have a 5.6-to-1 positive-to-negative comment ratio. People give more weight to negative comments than they do positive ones. This, combined with the fact that people often lead with what’s wrong, and you’ve got a recipe for a default communication style that makes people feel like they’re constantly under attack—even when that’s not the intention.

To combat this problem, when the impulse to criticize someone important in your life arises, instead of letting that become actual speech, turn it into a trigger to find an authentic compliment. This is a powerful strategy for two reasons:

You get what you focus on. If you dwell in the negative thoughts that come to mind, the relationship will be tinged with negative associations. If, on the other hand, you force yourself to migrate your thoughts to positive elements of the other person’s behavior, you will reinforce those ideas.By externalizing your authentic feelings of appreciation, not only do you ensure that your communication as a whole will be balanced to the positive, the people who are most important to you will know exactly what you value in them.

When you communicate what it is that you value in others, you’ll be amazed by how much their defenses lower and their self-esteem builds. Also, once your aggregate interactions are balanced toward the positive, you’ll be able to address any conflicts or issues that need to be addressed without putting people on the defensive. Think of it like a bank: You can only make withdrawals once you’ve made sufficient deposits.

2. Use the pressure to perform as a reminder that all of life is but practice.

Whether in business or life, we all have moments where the pressure is on. A little pressure can improve our performance, but too much and your performance begins to degrade. That’s why when the stakes are legitimately at their highest, you have to force yourself to reframe the situation and see it as practice rather than performance.

When I was a kid, I hated getting nervous and anxious so much that I promised myself that when I’m an adult, I’ll never again do anything that makes me uncomfortable. Needless to say, when that promise collided with my ambition, something had to give. What gave was my fear of discomfort. I made myself a new promise: I’ll always do the things that scare me most.

To that end, I now host a weekly show called Impact Theory where I interview the world’s top thinkers, many of whom are my personal heroes. And I do it all in front of a live audience. There was one episode where I was crashing and burning, misstating facts, flubbing words and losing my train of thought. In the middle of my tailspin, I felt the algorithm for pressure kicking in. I became hyper-aware of the audience, how many eyes were on me, and the fact that I only had one chance to get this right and currently I was embarrassing myself.

 

By choosing to view it as practice, the situation become an opportunity rather than a test.

 

Then I remembered that the very feeling of mounting pressure was my trigger to run the mantra that all of life is but practice. This wasn’t a moment to perform, but rather to practice. I didn’t need to do this perfectly, I just needed to have the guts to sit there in front of everyone and practice so I could improve. As long as I walked off set better than I’d come on, I could consider it a win. Instantly the pressure dropped. By choosing to view it as practice, the situation become an opportunity rather than a test. I now had the rare and exciting chance to practice crawling my way out of a hole and rebuilding trust with my audience. Something I had never had a chance to do before.

When pressure builds, remember that every aspect of your life is just practice. Whether you’re starting a business, raising kids or establishing a morning routine, you’re in the process of learning. If you look at any one moment as the finish line or the sum total of who you are, then every moment becomes final and the pressure overwhelms. Instead, consider every day as an opportunity to grow and improve yourself. This will help you transform a moment of panic into one of empowerment.

3. Substitute feelings of insecurity with the excitement of skill acquisition.

Here’s the hard truth: We all suck at some of the things we want to be good at. If you’re like most people (and statistically speaking, you are), you’re not the best in the world—even at your chosen profession. There might even be someone in close proximity to you who makes you feel insecure about your skill set. Maybe it’s a co-worker, a family member or someone on Instagram, but chances are, there’s someone who seems to do effortlessly what takes you a tremendous amount of effort just to get lesser results. That bet is easy to make, because such is the nature of the human mind—it’s riddled with insecurities. That’s why it’s essential to take Carol Dweck’s advice. She’s the Stanford researcher and professor who wrote the book Mindset and introduced the world to the transformative power of the word yet. You’re not good enough. Yet.

 

People have an easy time believing that winning isn’t forever, but somehow fail to recognize that loss and failure are equally temporary.

 

The next time insecurity rears its ugly head, instead of being paralyzed by it, use that very feeling as the trigger to tack on the word yet. That word will make all the difference in your life. It takes things from the world of the perpetual and permanent to the world of temporary and transient. People have an easy time believing that winning isn’t forever, but somehow fail to recognize that loss and failure are equally temporary. Once you realize that you can get good at anything that you’re willing to put the time into, insecurity loses its power. By remembering that you’re simply not good at something yet, you remember that you’re in control. You can decide to get good whenever you want.

The key to making this work for you is in truly believing the intoxicating idea that you can acquire any skill you set your mind to. Believing the opposite—that today’s version of yourself is the sum total of who you will ever be—confines you to insecurity. So don’t focus on what you’re not good at today. Focus on what you need to do to get good at mastering the skill you’re missing. This moves your mind from the self-defeating loop of not being good enough, to the empowered mindset of the learner.

How to start installing these new algorithms

Undoing innate, or even learned, brain patterns sadly isn’t as easy as downloading the latest driver for your computer, but it actually is startlingly simple. It’s a process called brain plasticity, and it’s how we learn new skills and habits. Although the science of myelination is outside the scope of this article, it remains the backbone of learning a new skill and it happens largely through repetition—neurons that fire together wire together, as they say.

So if you’re to put any of the above to use in your life, the key is repetition. Don’t be discouraged when you make some progress only to slide back. Stick at it, and any new mental habit or skill can be yours. Although you might never be able to silence the negative voices or counterproductive impulses, with enough practice, their mere presence will act as a reminder to run your new algorithms. Over time, you will find the time gap between unproductive thought and the running of your new, upgraded algorithm will get so short that only you will know that your virtuous cycle started with something outdated
By
K. Jagadeesh

Jagadeesh Krishnan psychologists and international Author

Tantrik history

Many people see David White's Kiss of the Yoginī as a definitive book on Tantra in its original South Asian context (as its subtitle claims), so here I'm presenting a section from the conclusion of my PhD dissertation (Berkeley, 2014), which argues both that White's book is mistaken on key points, and, perhaps more importantly, presents a definition of Tantra that premodern South Asian tāntrikas themselves would not have agreed with.

I would have the reader note that this is not just my opinion, but rather the result of careful research in the primary sources and consultation with other scholars. On the latter point, I want to acknowledge the pioneering work of Shaman Hatley, who agrees with my criticism of White and who is doing excellent scholarly work that will both correct and supplant White's (e.g., on sexual rituals in original Tantra). Hatley is preparing a new edition and translation of the Kaula-jñāna-nirṇaya, the Sanskrit work that White wrongly reads sexual rites into. May it soon see the light of day!  And now, on with this week's post . . . 

THE REAL NATURE OF TANTRA

What distinguishes Tantra from other streams of Asian religion? I use the term Tantra to denote the teachings and practices taught in the Śaiva (and Śākta-Śaiva) tantras and āgamas and their commentaries—teachings and practices that were available only to those who had taken Tantric initiation as taught in those scriptures. In a wider sense, we can take Tantra to denote the esoteric traditions of all the South Asian religions that were influenced by these innovations within Śaivism: thus Tantra collectively can denote Tantric Śaivism, Tantric Buddhism, Tantric Vaiṣṇavism, and Tantric Jainism. What gave Tantra (so defined) its specificity in the medieval period was:

a) the liberative initiation ritual (called nirvāṇa-dīkṣa in Śaivism) that utilized an innovative technology featuring the entrainment of mantra, breath, ritual gesture (mudrā), and visualization in elaborate sequences that operated in terms of both theologically defined micro-macrocosmic correlations and in terms of complex cosmologies that were mapped onto initiatory diagrams called maṇḍalas;

b) yogic practices for daily sādhanathat utilized the same ritual technologies and recapitulated the actions of the initiation rite, gradually displacing the socio-culturally constructed self in favor of identity with the Deity; and

c) specific yogic and charismatic techniques that triggered altered states of consciousness in initiates, including but not limited to experiences construed as being the penetration of the layers of one’s being by the energy of the Deity and/or the dissolution of limited selfhood into the Deity itself.

These are the central features that define Tantra and that distinguish it from other forms of Indian religion, in sum: a) liberating initiation, b) innovative yogic technologies, and c) samāveśa. It is simply not that case that, as David White has it, “sexualized ritual practice is the sole truly distinctive feature of South Asian Tantric traditions” (2003: 13). The above three features are distinctive, especially if one realizes that these specific technologies (maṇḍalas, mudrās, uccāra, bīja-mantras, etc.) are only found in non-tantric religious spheres due to Tantric influence. White does state that sexual practices “never constituted the mainstream of Tantric or Kaula practice,” but he contends that the mainstream practice in question was “satisfying multiple and petulant divinities by feeding them” (2003: 14). Certainly gratifying one’s mantra-deity with offerings was central to daily Tantric practice, but the idea of gratifying “multiple petulant divinities” can only apply to the Kaula Yoginī cult, which was not in fact part of the mainstream of the tradition (Sanderson’s distinction of the Kulamārga from the Mantramārga is relevant here). But there are deeper misunderstandings at work here, for White effectively takes this Yoginī cult to be the whole of the tradition. He posits a distinction between “hard-core” Tantra (which is original, in his view) and “soft-core” Tantra (which is a bowdlerized, aestheticized, and “semanticized” version of the “hard core”) and then asserts that:

In both cases, the female Yoginī ‘seizes’ or ‘possesses’ her counterpart. However, whereas in the former case [the “soft core” of the Tantric mainstream], she simply preys upon her human victim (paśu), in the latter [the Kaula “hard core”], the male partner takes an active role, inducing a sort of ‘mutual possession’ (samāveśa) in a sexual mode. (2003: 14).

This dissertation has surveyed virtually all the relevant Śaiva literature for the first five centuries of the documented existence of Tantra and did not turn up a single piece of evidence that corresponds to what White describes here. First, we never saw any mutual possession involving Yoginīs, let alone “mutual possession in a sexual mode.”[1]Second, samāveśa almost never involved sexual intercourse of any kind in our sources. Third, samāveśameans (lit.) thorough or complete entry (samyag āveśana), not mutual entry. Fourth, possession forms no part of the daily practice of the non-Kaula Tantrics (= White’s “soft core”). Fifth, we never saw the use of the term graha(ṇa) (“seize”) in connection with salutary possession. Sixth and seventh (the most egregious errors), Yoginīs are not invoked by non-Kaulas, nor do they “prey on” the Tantric practitioner, who by definition is not a paśu, since that term can only refer to non-initiates. In the latter assertation, White is confusing Tantric propitiation of Yoginīs with occasional assertions in the literature that Yoginīs suck the vital essences from paśus (non-tāntrikas) (e.g., Netratantra ch. 20), an extraction said to be ritually imitated by certain extreme worshippers of Bhairava and Kālī described in the far-left scriptures (e.g., the Jayadratha-yāmala and the Brahma-yāmala),[2] accounts which he seems to conflate with fictional fantasy stories of Yoginīs such as those in the Kathāsaritsāgara and Mālatī-mādhava.Furthermore, even White’s categories of “hard core” and “soft core” are confused, for he associates Abhinavagupta’s lineage with the latter category (2003: 14-15), even though Abhinavagupta himself strove mightily to defend and endorse the Kaula sexual practices, and did not bowdlerize them in the slightest, as can be seen in the rather explicit account at Tantrāloka 29, which is the only Śaiva exegetical source to teach the sexual rite or kulayāga. Thus Abhinava’s practices did not “shade into those of orthoprax brahmanic ritual” (2003: 15) in any way. Finally, White claims that the “soft-core” practice of the “high-caste Hindu practitioners” is greatly outnumbered by the “Tantric mainstream” (Ibid.), a statement based on the erroneous (and completely unsupported) notion that the “cults of (predominantly female) village deities whose worship was often conducted by the socially and culturally marginalized” were, by that very definition, Tantric cults (2003: 5). This obviously neglects the central feature of the Tantric tradition, that of initiation without regard to caste into specifically circumscribed communities of spiritual elites who performed a rigorous daily ritual and yogic practice intended to bring about their spiritual liberation. Conflating Tantra with the worship of village deities not taught in Tantric texts allows one to say virtually anything one likes about “Tantra,” including that it was the “predominant religious paradigm . . . of the great majority of the inhabitants” of India (2003: 3), which it was not. There are countless other errors in White’s book that we could unpack, but suffice to say that we agree with Hugh Urban in his characterization of White’s view of Tantra as “Kaulo-centric” and his view of Kaulism as “sexo-centric” (2006: 283).[3]

Criticizing other scholars’ misunderstandings is not something I take any pleasure in. The purpose of it here is to point out how far the discipline of Religious Studies has to go in understanding Tantra (for White is considered a foremost scholar of the Hindu Tantra by many in that discipline, at least in the American academy), and how well served they would be by putting aside their assumption about what Tantra is and examining the careful philological work being done on Tantric texts and inscriptions. Such work, while painstaking, slowly builds up a picture of things that constitutes a significantly closer approach to whatever degree of historical truth can be determined from textual materials.

(Feel free to email me for a copy of my dissertation if you want to learn more!)

NOTES:

[1] The closest approach to this might be the Vijñāna-bhairava verse (69) in which śaktyāveśa denotes sexual intercourse with a consort, but this is with a human woman not identified as a Yoginī in the text or its commentary.

[2] See Sanderson 1985: n89.

[3] However, we should also note that White gave a much more salient and historically grounded account of Tantra in 2000, when he defined it as “that body of beliefs and practices which, working from the principle that the material universe is nothing other than the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and maintains that universe, seeks to appropriate and channel that energy, within the human microcosm, in creative and emancipatory ways” (2000: xxiii). The main problem with this definition, however, is that the key clause beginning “the material universe” excludes the Śaiva Siddhānta, which as noted is not only Tantric, but constitutes the broad base of the tradition (sāmānya-śāstra), establishing the ritual forms, yogas, and even doctrines which other lineage-groupings nuance or deviate from in varying degrees.
By
K. Jagadeesh