TRANSFORMATION
Introspection
By Ramesh K Khandhar Ramesh Khandhar is a former secretary of executive board and past head teacher of pathshala at Jain Center of Southern California. He travels around to deliver spiritual discourses and continues to do intense introspection and contemplation. In addition, his special interest is reading and contemplating Jain scriptures, listening to spiritual discourses, enjoying solitude, and writing spiritual articles in ‘Divya Dhvani’ and in Jain Digest magazines. Currently he is serving as Section Editor and Advisor of Jain Digest.
What is Introspection? In all walks of life, many solutions and insights rely on introspection. All eastern ancient traditions, philosophers and omniscient have described introspection as a path to wisdom, truth, and the process of knowing thyself. It is the process of conscious self-awareness. The word itself translates from the Latin introspicere, meaning “to look within.” It happens when we look inward and examine our behavior, emotions, thoughts, and motives with a purpose of critical assessment of our actions and behavior. It is a process to stop and assess our life situation. We zoom in to the problem if any and find the root cause and orient our actions to move forward in life’s journey. We learn about our own currently ongoing, or very recently past, mental states or processes. The objective is to look back and reflect on behaviors and processes to create a deeper understanding in the present.
How does Introspection impact our life? We can scrutinize our deep feelings by exploring ourselves which helps us to connect dots that were not connected previously. Introspection helps us to find solutions to our problems and helps us in making critical decisions. Simply sitting down and thinking will bring us insight into what makes us happy and what brings us fulfillment and purpose. Otherwise, we may
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never realize what our values, dreams, and passions truly are. It helps achieve the fullness of our truest essence. We become aware of our wants, desires, shortcomings, and how they impact our life, our state of mind, and obstruct our spiritual progress. Our personality, performance and spiritual progress are enhanced through self-reflection, self-awareness, and selfknowledge. We understand our inner psychology and help us further to understand the soul. In this article we will discuss the role of introspection to make social and material life more meaningful and satisfying. What prevents us from doing Introspection/Selfreflection? It is necessary to focus attention on the external to make social and material life more meaningful and satisfying. We live, desire, and struggle to achieve, without knowing what we truly want and without knowing ourselves. As a result, we have externalized meaning, and hence every aspect of our lives. We’re trapped in a culture of doing, and where pause is literally a waste of time. The fast-paced life has made it difficult to sit back and reflect on what we are doing or how we are feeling. The drive for achievement, productivity, and peak performance has their place, but they quickly become signs of neurosis. Many times, we have not set the right priorities and waste our time watching TV, YouTube or play video games. Both busyness and mind-numbing activities are ways to avoid self-reflection. It runs against the grain of a busy culture. It requires us to set specific time aside to be quiet, still, and alone so that we can do self-reflection to get more insight into our desires and feelings.
