Years ago I asked a six-year-old friend, “If God should appear to you, what would you ask him for?”

Josh replied immediately, “To make me a football star.”

“And suppose he said, ‘Josh, I’ll do that, but only if you eat your zucchini’?”

There was a long pause; I could see the titanic struggle going on in that young chest. Finally Josh said in agonized tones, “Thank you, Lord – but no.”

As grown-ups, we smile at the idea of a life aspiration being nipped in the bud by a harmless squash. But likes and dislikes go deep. Beneath the surface of the mind lies a propensity for passing judgment on anything and everything that comes to our attention: tastes, colors, objects, opinions, and – naturally – other people.

If we could listen in on the mind’s internal monologue, we would be astonished to hear a constant background refrain: “I like this; I don’t like that. I like him; I don’t like her.” It’s only a habit, and a very human one at that. But it means we are constantly judging and dividing – and the goal of the spiritual life, in every tradition I am familiar with, is to go beyond divisions and judgments to discover that all of us are one.

Choices, choices . . .

Paradoxically, the more likes and dislikes we have, the smaller the range of things we can actually enjoy.

Consider ice cream. I had never even heard of ice cream until I came to the US in 1959, when my generous hosts in Kansas wanted me to experience the American way of life. I was pleased to discover I actually had a choice of flavors – vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry – and if I couldn’t decide, I could get all three at once, in an exotic combination with an Italian name.

By the time I reached the University of California in Berkeley, a few years later, one enterprising ice cream chain was offering not three but thirty-one flavors, “one for every day of the month.” When I went there with friends, each had his or her own favorite. It took a while for me to see where that led: each of us had twenty-nine or so varieties to decide we didn’t like.

The last time I visited an ice cream parlor, the board listed 131 flavors – chosen, it claimed, from a collection of literally hundreds – and some of my friends, who considered themselves ice cream lovers, would feel disappointed if they couldn’t find their favorite candy-sprinkled butter-brickle dark fudge chiffon delight in that one particular store “where they know how to make it right.”

Free to enjoy

As we go on splitting hairs about what we like and dislike, the range of what we can enjoy becomes more and more constricted. Increasingly, things have to be the way we like. We must have our particular chair, our special parking place, our favorite brand of cornflakes for breakfast with the proper variety of milk. We can read and listen to only those opinions we agree with. All day long, one thing after another is not quite right – day after day after day.

I think it was Sai Baba who said, “If you don’t have to do what you like, you are free to like what you do.” That’s a very good aphorism to remember. Believe it or not, it is possible to go through life without pronouncing judgment on whether we like or dislike what comes to us. And the more we can do this, the more a third possibility opens for us: joy.

Years ago, when my niece Meera was living here with us, a play by Agatha Christie called The Mousetrap came to San Francisco. Agatha Christie is one of the best-selling authors in history, especially famous for her mystery novels and plays, and The Mousetrap has enjoyed the longest run of any play in the world. By the time it came within my orbit, it had been drawing capacity crowds in London night after night for more than thirty years – and since, by tradition, the audience is pledged never to reveal the ending to anyone, Meera and I jumped at the opportunity to find out at last “who done it.” We took another friend, Mary, who was an Agatha Christie fan long before The Mousetrap.

After an hour and a half drive, we were greeted at the door with the news that the performance had sold out.

In my younger days, I would have been crestfallen. Here we had been dreaming about getting into The Mousetrap for days together, and now The Mousetrap says it no longer has room for mice. Mary was devastated. I saw her face fall and knew I had to make a decision on the spot. It was five minutes to eight. What to do?

We got a paper and discovered that at precisely eight o’clock in this part of the city there was one movie we could watch – starring Woody Allen, whom I don’t profess to understand. It is not that I don’t appreciate him; I just don’t understand. His is a language that is foreign to me. But for Mary’s sake I said, “Let’s go see Hannah and Her Sisters.”

So that is what we did, and the only time I could relate to anything in the whole movie was when Woody Allen, in that special accent of his, starts on the same question the Upanishads ask: “How can we ever enjoy anything when we know how soon life passes?” “Oh,” I said, “this is a great film!” But then it took off in another direction.

Mary, however, laughed from start to finish. I enjoyed her enjoyment, and Meera enjoyed mine. We returned home after a grand time – and I don’t believe any of us yet knows how The Mousetrap ends.

Juggling with likes and dislikes

Likes and dislikes are not graven in stone. They are simply habits, conditioned responses, built up by repetition.

It is the nature of the nervous system to accommodate only one-way traffic, towards what is pleasant and away from what is unpleasant. This is all right for children, but adults need to be able to do something they dislike if they can learn from it, or to forgo something they like if it benefits others or themselves.

We all know how the body grows stiff when it is not used; our muscles tighten until every movement is painful. We may get a wry neck, so that we have to turn our whole torso just to say hello. The same thing happens with likes and dislikes, and the same remedy is required: gradually stretch the muscles out until their natural elasticity is regained.

Great mystics like St. Thérèse of Lisieux or Mahatma Gandhi had a gift for reconditioning their nervous system like this. Such people are no longer at the mercy of petty preferences. They can juggle effortlessly with what they like and what they dislike, doing what seems best whether they find it pleasant or not.

Once you learn to grasp some of these little insights, life can be a lot of fun.

Here again, I can illustrate with ice cream. When I first came to this country, I should explain, ice cream wasn’t simply a delicacy for me. It was a matter of survival. This was in the fifties, when very few people in the United States knew what to do with a vegetarian. On one occasion in the university cafeteria, I wasn’t sure about a particular dish, so I asked the man behind the counter, “Excuse me, but what’s the name of that vegetable?”

“Mister,” he replied patiently, “we call that vegetable a Kansas chicken.”

After that I began to eat more and more ice cream. My lunches consisted mostly of milkshakes. But when I saw a habit growing on me, I started playing games with it. Once, I went into an ice cream parlor and the young man behind the counter asked, “What’s your favorite?”

I replied, “I don’t like mint, so please give me a mint milkshake.”

He was sure he had misunderstood my accent. “Say that again?”

“I don’t care for mint,” I explained. “It reminds me of chewing gum. So will you please give me a peppermint milkshake.”

He so far forgot his manners that he turned to the woman next to him and laughed. “Did you hear what that guy from India said?”

When I told this story in my meditation class on campus, one young woman decided to make a similar experiment – only she was much more daring. She went into one of those hundred-flavor places and said, “What’s the worst kind of ice cream you have in this store?”

Without batting an eye, the man replied, “Licorice.”

“Then give me licorice,” she said. “Double scoop.” And she ate it with such gusto that the man said in awe, “It’s on the house.”

By the next semester, my ice cream adventures had become a hallmark – with the result that sometimes the reason for the exercise got overlooked. I remember one student coming by after an examination to ask why I hadn’t given her a good grade. “As far as I can make out,” I explained tactfully, “you haven’t been meditating properly.”

She retorted, “I detest pineapple milkshakes, and I’ve been drinking them every day – for you.”

I had to tell her, “It is not enough if you do these things. In this course, you also have to meditate.” Reconditioning the nervous system is one of the purposes of meditation, and exercises like these ice cream skirmishes are just some of the ways in which we draw on the power developed in meditation to regain our freedom from a nervous system grown rigid with one-way traffic.

Dissolving separateness

By using this power released in meditation, we are gradually able to dissolve the sense of separateness that makes us feel isolated from the rest of life.

Against this background, let me suggest some ways in which this can be done.

First, once in a way, when you are going out with someone you love, instead of going to your favorite restaurant and ordering what you like, try going to the restaurant she likes – and let her order for you. You will be surprised what a sense of freedom this brings. You are not only putting the other person first; you are showing your love and trust, and drawing on that love to expand your consciousness to include her as well as yourself. This can be done in everything, and it brings a sense of mastery that cannot be described.

Second comes jobs we dislike. When we have to do something we dislike, it is only human for the mind to complain, “This is beneath me! I require work that challenges my creative talents.” Often this is just a polite way of saying, “I don’t like that.” If the job really needs doing, that is the time to ignore the mind’s complaints, repeat the mantram, and get to work. If we can just give more of our attention to work we dislike, we find that it becomes tolerable and even interesting.

Third is closely related: procrastination. Most of us have been conditioned to do the jobs we like first; we leave the disagreeable job for last. St. Thérèse did just the opposite: when she made a to-do list, she took care to do the jobs she disliked first.

The interesting thing is that after a bit of this, those jobs often seem less dislikable. The real burden is not the job itself, but our habit of disliking it. What’s the point of the mind complaining “I don’t like this” if no one is paying attention?

My grandmother sometimes used to ask me to do something important, but I had so many unimportant things of my own to attend to that the task she had entrusted to me didn’t always get done. When she would ask, “When are you going to do it?” I would answer, “One of these days, Granny.” She wasn’t impressed. “One of these days is none of these days.” The mark of the mature person is the capacity to take up a job immediately and do it cheerfully with concentration.

Fourth, when you’re doing something you enjoy, practice dropping it at will. That’s a very important step in freeing ourselves from likes and dislikes.

When we are doing a job we dislike, we can drop it instantly without a second thought. But when we are working on our pet project and something comes up that demands more urgent attention, it is very difficult for the mind to let go. And in the evening, when we leave work, our pet project comes running after us, yapping like a terrier at our heels. We don’t taste our dinner, we don’t hear what our family or friends are saying to us, all because this little terrier keeps yapping in the back of our minds. It is good to apply ourselves completely to our work, but we should never let ourselves be driven by it.

In many of these exercises, you can make your daily schedule work for you. When it’s time to stop work, for example, see if you can stop then and there, at the stroke of five – in the middle of a sentence if need be. (Try it; you’ll find it much easier to pick up your writing the next morning.)

Similarly, if you’re meditating, try to start your meditation every day at the same time in the same place. And whether you’re meditating or not, try to get up at the same time every day, giving yourself a little extra time so as not to start the day in a hurry. When the alarm starts ringing and the blankets are whispering, “Why don’t you stay here where it’s so soft and warm,” don’t lie there weighing pros and cons. Jump from the bed repeating the mantram; you are beginning the day with a decisive act of personal freedom.

Make a game of it

All this, of course, should be done in the spirit of play. What is the point of making life more grim? Make a game of these things and you will be amazed at how much freedom it brings.

On the other hand, I hope it is clear that I am not recommending that you play ducks and drakes with your ideals. Mahatma Gandhi used to say, “Make concessions everywhere on the peri-phery, but hold fast to what matters at the center.” Most of us do just the opposite. We are prepared to com-promise at the center and connive at “adjustments” to fundamental principles, but on the periphery, over Tweedledum and Tweedledee, we’ll fight to the last. “I don’t like the way you cook my eggs. You don’t like the way I crunch my toast. I don’t like his looks, I don’t like her hair, I don’t like the way you walk. Let’s stay at loggerheads always.”

The spiritual life means turning this right-side up. When we dislike somebody, we don’t want to work with that person, we don’t want to talk to that person, we don’t want even to see that person. That is a great opportunity for expanding consciousness beyond ourselves, by working with that person with respect.

There’s a very creative element in learning to like people who are difficult. When I said likes and dislikes run deep, I meant that behind each little preference lurks the primordial drive to set ourselves apart from others and judge. The very act of liking and disliking itself is a conditioned habit. When this compulsion is rigid, it is rigid everywhere – not just with food, but especially with other people. Wherever we can learn not to act on this habit, the whole compulsion to pass judgment is weakened. As a result, the more freedom we have with our likes and dislikes, the more our relationships improve.

When we are children, our Waterloo might be zucchini. As adults, it is more likely to be people. The challenge is learning to work cheerfully with people we dislike or who dislike us – learning to be, in St. Francis’s language, an instrument of peace rather than one more instrument of discord in an angry world.

Growing in beauty day by day

My simple formula for reducing separateness has been bequeathed to me by my spiritual teacher, my grandmother: be with people, work with people, talk with people, bear with people. Don’t plough a lonely furrow, and don’t go about in twos or in cliques. Learn to be patient with others, just as you would like them to be with you. Learn to be kind even when you are provoked; learn to listen even when you feel frustrated. If you try to do this all the time, you can go very far on the spiritual path.

Those who are inclined to view the world through their own needs, their own likes and dislikes, cannot help feeling more and more separate with the passage of time. But those who work continuously on reducing their separateness grow in beauty day by day, and everyone who lives and works with them participates in their growth.

This is the essence of the spiritual life: the simple discovery that all of us are one. When we dislike others, we are violating this fundamental unity, which the Buddha called the fundamental law of life. All we need to do to grow spiritually is to love those around us more than ourselves, and let that love guide our every action. In practicing this, we not only develop spiritual awareness; we reveal our inner beauty more and more in daily living.