The eye of the hurricane

Asked for a first step for someone in real distress, the swami gave four, in order, and none of them was a belief.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 18 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

I live in a country that gets the edge of a typhoon most years.

Swami Sarvapriyananda was asked for a first step for someone in deep distress, who naturally looks outside themselves for help. He gave four, and I am recording them mostly in his order.

The first is that suffering is universal. Death visits everyone. Sickness and loss have visited every human being in history and will visit everyone now alive, him included. He says this broadens the suffering mind, because it turns the thing from a personal insult into an impersonal fact. As a side effect it produces sympathy, because now you are feeling what the others feel rather than reading about it.

The second is to take help. Therapy, counselling, meditation, devotion, whatever it is. He does not rank them. He says that all of them, including reliance on a higher power, end up pointing you back at yourself. He is generous about the devotional route. It is hard to do this alone. A person is one small being against the weight of the universe, however clever or well read, and what bhakti offers is a vast power on your side. He quotes Jung's remark that among his patients past middle age there was not one whose problem was not, in the end, that of finding a religious outlook on life, and he does not say Jung was wrong.

The third is stillness, and it is the one I have been turning over since. Most people think the mind is restless because the world keeps throwing problems at it. The yogi, he says, reverses it. The problematic world is there because of the restless mind. The quieter and more inward the mind, the less the suffering, though some remains, and the suffering itself, he adds, has a meditative quality. It stills us and makes us serious.

A good doctor, a good friend or a good Buddhist would give those three. Only the fourth is specifically his tradition, and I think that is a strength. He did not tell a person in distress to read the Upanishads. He told them they are not alone, to accept help, and to sit down.

The fourth is the knowledge. The non-dual understanding of the oneness of what exists, which denies neither suffering nor science, and which lets you cry and at the same time know that beneath the tears there is a place that is not disturbed. His image for it is the eye of the hurricane, calm in the middle of the storm. The eye is real and it does not last, and the storm on the other side of it is the same storm.