Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Charging the Will-Battery
Build the will-power that concentration depends on by deliberately suppressing unnecessary impulses, words and small desires — ‘charging the battery’ through renunciation.
All day, alongside the seated work: catch a needless impulse, word, or small craving and let it go — each restraint “charges your battery.” Start tiny (skip the meaningless remark, the extra sweet, the shortcut), scale up to bigger renunciations, and pick one habit to confront (“who’s boss?”). Suppress only what’s truly unnecessary — never real speech or real needs. Then spend the steadiness on the will-demanding work of concentration.
What it is
Sadhu states the premise bluntly: “the success of concentration is proportional to the amount of will-power in a student.” So before and alongside the seated exercises he gives a life practice for generating that will — a discipline of small, deliberate renunciations.
Every time you suppress an unnecessary impulse, a meaningless word, or a petty desire, “a trickle of force immediately enters you”; he likens the accumulated effect to “a car-battery when connected to the current from a generator.” Notably he excludes thoughts from this drill on purpose — controlling thoughts “is a science in itself” and belongs to the later exercises — so this is restraint of impulses, speech, and desires, not of the mind’s contents.
It is the shadow-side companion to the concentration course: working on the appetites and reactions that otherwise “suck your inner strength like leeches.”
The Method
Sadhu’s graded programme of self-restraint:
- Anticipate and disarm an automatic emotion. Take a reaction you know you have — his example is flinching at a locomotive’s whistle. Anticipate the trigger and “prepare yourself not to be affected.” Then take another habitual reaction and neutralise it the same way, and so on.
- Put speech under control. “Suppress every unnecessary and meaningless word.” If a sentence “has no special value or meaning, refrain from it.” Each suppression sends “a trickle of force” into you. His warning: be reasonable — suppress only what is genuinely needless. “If your friend or boss speaks to you in a matter of business, it would be nonsensical to remain silent. First and foremost cut the words which you pronounce on your own initiative.”
- Feel the charge. With practice you sense the “battery” charging — usually “something like slight tension (not unpleasant) in the head,” and a feeling of being “more composed, self-assertive and less nervous and anxious.”
- Scale up to larger renunciations. Once the small injections work, attempt bigger ones: “cancel a visit to the cinema; forego a portion of your beloved ice-cream or a cigarette. and when desiring to get home as soon as possible, overcome it by taking the longest route” — provided no real need compels you. “The greater the desire overcome and dominated, the greater the power which enters your ‘battery’.”
- Spend the charge wisely. A charged battery makes hard, will-demanding acts “come to you much more easily.” Sadhu observes that even asking someone a favour succeeds more readily “with the support of your store of suppressed desires” than when the battery is “flat.”
- Declare war on one negative habit. In the Exercise-1 chapter he sharpens this: pick a habit (he names smoking) and ask it “just which of you is boss?” — using the habit itself as resistance training for the will. He is careful that this is not a demand for total purity, but a way to stop “succumbing.”
Source & Lineage
Chapter XV of Concentration (Allen & Unwin, 1959), in the passages on developing will-power before and during the numbered exercises, reinforced in Ch. XVI. Sadhu grounds the principle in the example of ascetic saints and sages — St Jean de Vianney, Seraphim of Sarov, Ramana Maharshi — whose near-complete renunciation, he argues, was the source of their power; and in the plain analogy of the weight-lifting athlete: “there cannot be and is not ‘something for nothing’.” Mouni Sadhu (1897-1971). → (sadhu mouni).
Common refinements
Over-suppressing. Sadhu’s repeated caution: cut only the genuinely unnecessary. Silence in real business, or denying real needs, is “nonsensical” and harmful.
- Suppressing thoughts. Out of scope here by design — thought-control is reserved for the later exercises; trying it now backfires.
- Grim asceticism. The aim is a light, almost playful self-command (“which of you is boss?”), not joyless self-punishment.
- Hoarding the charge. The point is to use the gained steadiness for will-demanding work, not to accumulate it as a feeling.