How do you keep up with the news?

Scrolling through your Facebook feed? Listening to NPR? Clicking over to The New York Times or The New Yorker? Or maybe, just maybe, you read a physical newspaper?

There’s a hurricane of news—fake, real, it hardly matters.

We’re drowning in a deluge of data. It surrounds us—streaming through the ever-present screens—simultaneously fixating and fragmenting our attention.

The primitive, anxious, self-protective impulses of our neurology are constantly being pinged, prodded, and provoked.

We can’t look away—and the more we fixate, the less capable we are of connecting to the deeper currents of our lives.

There is a deeper current.

In wisdom traditions, around the world, sages have always recognized that below the shifting, mercurial surface of current events there’s a deeper current of meaning and grace. It’s always flowing. Even when we’re distracted, distraught, and discouraged.

When you connect to that deeper current two things happen:

1. Anxiety dissolves.

2. Right action is revealed.

When you are immersed in the deep current, your nervous system is baptized.

The mind is soothed and the primitive energy of anxiety releases into stillness.

As your consciousness adjusts to the stillness, you see the world afresh. Rather than interpreting current events through the lens of cultural conditioning, you perceive the presence of a deeper, more graceful intelligence at work.

Call it the evolutionary impulse, call it the hand of God, call it innate wholeness and well-being—it matters not. Don’t get hung up on labels.

Dive in and let the current guide you.

As your nervous system acclimates to this wisdom current, right action is revealed. Because the current doesn’t take you away from the world. Instead, it reveals what the world needs from you and how you—specifically and precisely—can act as an agent of awakening, a healing force, in the midst of today’s crazy current events.

There is an essential practice for making this shift from the surface to the depths. It’s simple: read sacred texts.

Swap out 10 minutes a day that you would spend fragmenting your mind on the news, and—instead—spend that time with a sacred text.

Open your mind to wisdom teachings. Read the mystics. Go deep.

Texts such as the Bhagavad Gita offer pure and powerful advice about how to stay sane in crazy times.

What’s the Bhagavad Gita?

It’s a beautiful, profound, and sane alternative to the madness of the news cycle. It’s the ultimate spiritual guidebook for what we’re up against—individually and collectively—at this time.

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>> I’m offering a free teleclass on the Bhagavad Gita—join this call here.

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Author: Eric Klein
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Editor: Leah Sugerman
Copy Editor: Sara Kärpänen 
Social Editor: Sara Kärpänen