Tamas, and the gunas in general, are not widely known concepts, but they are worth putting some thought into. The Bhagavad Gita, India’s most famous scripture, goes to lengths to explain the concepts, and we can do well to take note. The idea is that every state of mind and matter is a combination of the three gunas. This is extremely vague and doesn’t quite do the concept justice, but hopefully as this story goes on, the pieces will come together. The three gunas are 1.) Tamas or inertia 2.) Rajas or activity 3.) Sattva or harmony/equilibrium. We will go over all three but Tamas is what we will focus on here the most.
Tamas: Eknath Easwaran explains tamas in terms of consciousness (as opposed to matter) as being like the basement level of a house. The basement tends to be piled up with a bunch of old junk and tends to be very chaotic. So too with the mind when we are full of tamas. Our minds tend to be cluttered and we ride the wave of inertia, not trying to do anything to better our situation, or in other words, not bothering to ever go down and clean up the basement. People heavy in tamas tend to have very low energy levels and have very little desire to do much on a day to day basis. They often don’t have much zest for life, they leave issues unresolved, and they don’t put in much effort to better their own lives or the lives of those around them. At the same time, tamastic people tend to be very selfish, which intuitively makes sense because people who lack the energy to care about others often don’t take the feelings of others into account. Their own feelings occupy their minds most but ironically without the energy to improve whatever ails them.
Rajas: Continuing with the house example, rajas is the main floor of the house where all the action, hustle, and bustle are. Mentally this equates to a racing mind with a lot of worrying, wanting, plotting, planning, resenting, and so forth. There is a lot of energy here, as opposed to the dreary tamas level, but the energy is out of control and ego-based. The mind has not been trained to harness this energy for higher purposes, so the energy is very sporadic and often very selfish.
Sattva: Sattva is the higher mind. It is detached from the ego and it is self-controlled. We reach this state when our purpose, desires, and overall character are in harmony. We can still experience feelings of negativity and sadness, sure, but we are not impulsive enough to act on them. This is the level of great control.
The goal here is to evolve from tamas, to rajas, and finally to sattva. Just because you may consider yourself to be extremely deep in tamas, or even in rajas, does not mean you’re doomed to be stuck there. We can all touch sattva. We are called to evolve not only as a species but also individually. We must transform away from the selfishness and sluggishness that come with tamas into the passion and energy that come with rajas. After this step, we can evolve into sattva with a centered, uncluttered mind, an abundance of energy, and selflessness.
It is clear that so many of us are currently resting in tamas. It’s nothing to be ashamed about, but let’s look into it so we can maybe acknowledge these tendencies within us, and look for a way out.
In the Gita, Lord Krishna says, “Tamas, born of ignorance, deludes all creatures through heedlessness, indolence, and sleep” (Ch 14 V. 8).
The first thing we see here with tamas is a lack of attention. Many of us can identify with this. Most of us have big goals in life, some may be simple and others may be a bit more robust. Some of us simply want to be happy, others want to grow more patient, and others still want to become scientists, surgeons, etc. Many of us even know a few of the steps we need to take to make this happen. Each case is different, but perhaps we know we need to spend more quality time with our families, rebuild some shaky relationships, or study more for our big exams. But then come the distractions. We can’t focus our energy on our goals or the individual steps required to get there. Our energy gets diverted into our phones, Netflix, alcohol, politics, drama, or anything else that keeps us from doing what we know is good for us. Achieving a big goal requires focused and concentrated effort. If we allow ourselves to be susceptible to all forms of distraction, then we let life guide us, we don’t guide our own lives. The people and things around us, in effect, control us and we allow it to happen. We have willingly relinquished control. This is big.
The next thing we see with tamas is laziness. This goes back to the low energy we discussed above. In this state we are both here and gone. For example, you zone out easily, you slouch when sitting or walking, or you are physically with people but your mind is far gone. Your mind is either fixated on your own issues or maybe on what show you want to watch when you get home.You just don’t have the energy to be fully engaged, and the mental fatigue you feel shows through the way you carry yourself physically. You know you have things you need to do, you just don’t feel like it.
The last thing we see is that tamas enjoys sleep. This doesn’t mean that all sleep is bad, in fact the opposite is true. Getting enough quality sleep is extremely important for our health. The kind of sleep Lord Krishna means is the sleep we rush off to when we have things piling up on our plates that we don’t want to deal with. Many people who are in a stressful situation choose not to address their problems head on, but instead, just go to sleep. You see this a lot with people who are addicted to alcohol or certain prescription pills. Oftentimes people use these substances not for any sort of high, but simply to put them to sleep. They have hard decisions to make, or life feels like it’s getting too heavy, and sleep seems much more desirable than riding out the storm. The motivation to solve problems is non-existent, the desire to avoid problems and let them “work themselves out” takes over.
If you identify with any of the above descriptions of someone heavily guided by the tamas energy, there’s no real need to be bummed out. The whole point of this discussion is to point out the fact that nobody is stuck in any particular category, we can all rise above tamastic tendencies and move up the evolutionary ladder if we gather up the intention and resolve to do so. If you know someone whose personality just screams tamas, there’s also no need to judge. There is always room for improvement, but harsh judgment and criticism help nobody.
So what’s the issue with tamas? The real problem, besides the ones that are obvious when you read about how limiting it can be, comes when you couple this concept with the Hindu (and Buddhist) concept of reincarnation. Many people in the West think of reincarnation as some sort of crazy voodoo, but it’s worth hearing out the concept. Reincarnation very broadly means that the soul, or consciousness, survives death, and is reborn into a new body. There is a department at the University of Virginia that has been looking into the idea of reincarnation since the 1960s. Their aim is to look at reincarnation, mainly stories told by children who claim to remember past lives, in as scientific a manner as possible, and they try to see if these claims can be verified. Many children can indeed give enough information about their claimed past lives for an actual identification of their previous identity to be verified. Some of these previous lives were those of complete strangers who lived hundreds of miles away from the child who was making the claims, which is absolutely mind-boggling. For now, we will look at one story and see what implications it holds.
In 1992 there was a police officer in New York City named John McConnell (this is apparently a fake name for privacy purposes) who was in an electronics store that was being robbed one night after work. He pulled out his gun and found himself in a firefight with multiple gunmen. He was shot six times and sustained injuries to his lung, heart, and his pulmonary artery and ultimately did not survive. John was a loving father who used to tell his daughter that no matter what, he is always going to take care of her.
This daughter had a son five years later named William, who almost didn’t survive birth. He had problems with the valve of his pulmonary artery making it difficult for blood to travel to the lungs and resulted in heart problems. Thanks to multiple surgeries and modern medications, he survived the ordeal and, at the time of the reporting, was doing quite well.
One day William was being naughty (every parent can relate) and his mother told him to sit down or she’d give him a spanking. He replied by saying that when she was a little girl and when he was her daddy, he never hit her. At first the mom was shocked by this, but eventually the shock turned comforting as she realized her father came back to her. William went on to discuss his previous death and to tell details about his previous life as his grandfather. He once asked his mom what their cat’s name was when she was young. She told him the name was Maniac. William said that wasn’t the cat he was talking about, he was trying to figure out the name of the white cat. When she told him it was Boston, he remembered that to be correct and even asked if he used to call the cat “Boss.” He in fact did used to call the cat Boss, and he was the only one who did so.
The mother used to quiz the son about which day of the week he died and which day of the week he was reborn, intentionally trying to confuse him. He always corrected her to tell her that he died on a Thursday and was born on a Tuesday. This was coming from a young kid who was not good with his days of the week yet. He also described going to heaven, which in my opinion was the most adorable part of this whole story. He said that you don’t go to heaven right away, you go to different levels, starting at a lower level and subsequently going higher and higher. He also said that animals go to heaven too and that the animals in heaven don’t scratch or bite. There are many things about William that remind the mother of the father she lost, but the biggest is when William tells her not to worry and that he will always take care of her.
A big takeaway from this story comes when we look at the birth defects of the son that match the gunshot wounds sustained by the grandfather who William clearly remembers being. The pulmonary artery valve, the right ventricle of the heart, and the lung were all affected in the body of William by the gun-shot trauma experienced by the grandfather. The odds of this being a coincidence are low, especially coupled with the other cases of kids who sustained wounds in their past lives that physically manifested in some way onto their present bodies. This can also happen in the form of birthmarks. Sometimes bullet wounds or IV sites on cancer patients, for example, show up in the next body as very prominent birthmarks in the exact location of entrance and exit wounds and the IV sites. Other sorts of injuries transfer to the next body as well, many of which aren’t fatal wounds, just very traumatic injuries. Phobias can transfer over as well. For example, a person died by stepping in front of a bus, and the child who claimed to be the reincarnation of that person had a massive phobia of trucks starting at a time before the child could speak.
This is the tragedy of tamas. People find themselves unwilling, or unable, to address the problems, situations, and traumas of their lives, often trying to mask the pain with sleep, pills, screens, booze, or just a general attitude of “I don’t care.” But what a mounting body of evidence shows is that this current life may not be our last. Granted, the cases studied at the University of Virginia aren’t representative of every person’s transition off of this planet, given that about 70% of the cases they see are the result of sudden or violent deaths of the previous individual, so we miss out on what happens to people who die old and peacefully. The people in these cases tend to have big stores of trauma and plenty of unfinished business. But so do people stuck in tamas. People stuck in tamas think that they can sleep away their problems and trauma, but it seems like we can’t even “die away” our problems. It seems that letting go of trauma and resolving our personal problems is not only imperative in this life, but it can save us a great deal of hardship in the next. In the East where reincarnation is accepted by a large majority of the people, life is thought of as a sort of school. We are expected to make progress in school to move up to the next level. The theory goes that if we are full of tamas in this life, for example, we will be put into a family full of tamas in the next. Until we learn to transform tamas into something better, we will be stuck life after life working on it before we can move on. It’s hard to think so long term, but it truly would be a tragedy to live the same broken cycle over a span of multiple lives. If our goal as humans is to transition from tamas, to rajas, to sattva, it seems like the steps we take here and now are the determining factor in how long it takes us to evolve. We can’t jump into a new life full of sattva, or even rajas, until we finally clear up our unfinished business right now. If our emotional issues are very difficult or extreme, it may also be comforting to know that we have plenty of time, and apparently plenty of lives, to work through them. It’s imperative that we begin the journey, but we don’t need to rush at a pace faster than we can handle.
On a very positive note, it also seems that love transfers from life to life as well. Many children feel burning love for their previous families, so much so that it often puts the new families in an odd situation. Some children who died at a young age even report coming back into the womb of the same mother as her next child. It seems the good and bad energies we allow in this life have strong implications not only in the here and now, but also in the next life. In my opinion, this concept is very empowering because we can choose right now to live a life more full of love than we did yesterday. We can choose today to ask for help and learn to resolve old trauma and pain. We can choose today to embark on the journey to learn how to forgive. It’s all a choice, and the power to choose is ours for the taking.
Long story short: Even when it seems difficult, baby steps towards living a healthier, happier, more loving life can have implications beyond what we have the ability to comprehend or investigate right now. There is no reason I can think of why we should continue to live in an angry, hostile, or apathetic fashion towards ourselves, our families, or those around us. Lastly, spread and receive love freely. Love apparently can last a great deal longer than one lifetime, so please, make love the main focus in your life, even if it’s the most difficult thing you do. Love will allow you to evolve, and if enough of us evolve, imagine our human potential. The choice is ours.
Sources:
The Bhagavad Gita For Daily Living Volume 3 – Eknath Easwaran
Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives – Jim B. Tucker, M.D.
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