The sacred lotus offers an inspiring rags-to-riches, slime-to-sunshine metaphor of growth and enlightenment. We might consider the lotus to be the ultimate Cinderella story: it cleans all day and never gets dirty. The self-cleaning lotus exemplifies an empowering narrative of integrity. It manages to remain itself, pure and unaffected, and to grow to its fullest amidst the impurity of its circumstance. Unsurprisingly, the lotus flower (padma in Sanskrit) has a position of great cultural and spiritual significance in Asia. In Buddhism, the lotus represents purification and disentanglement from the trappings of conditioned existence (samsara), liberation from suffering, and the achievement of enlightenment. The cross-legged “lotus pose” (padm’asana) in yoga is a universally recognizable symbol of wisdom and serenity. As a visual symbol, the lotus flower is inescapable: it is a core element of Asian iconography. As a sound, the lotus invocation is forever resonated in the om mani padma hum mantra (“jewel in the lotus”).

As intriguing as this scientific and cultural lotus trivia might be, this book, of course, isn’t about the bio-mimetic (nature-mimicking) nano-technological applications of the lotus effect; nor is this book about sitting in the lotus asana. This book is about a psychological kind of lotus effect; namely, about surviving the informational muck that constantly bogs us down.

Case in point: you wake up feeling good. You step up on the bathroom scale and see a number that you don’t like. Suddenly, your mood goes down the drain. What happened? Technically, nothing happened: you—in your essence—are still exactly the same as you were before you weighed yourself. The only difference is that now you have a toxic piece of information on your mind: a number. A moment ago you were feeling fine, but now this informational tidbit is eating at you.

As banal as this case of informational poisoning is, it shows the potent toxicity of information. This basic scenario is the story of many lives. Whether you gain a pound, lose your car keys, fail a test, pass gas in public, have a bad hair day, or get a good administra¬tive lashing, your brain continuously translates life into information, and this information transforms how you feel about your essence. Information disrupts our hard-won calmness with the ease of a stone skipping across a sleepy pond. The number on your bathroom scale is just a tiny pebble, but look at the (emotional) waves it makes! The goal of this book is to help you thicken your psychological skin and teach you how to shed the informational dirt, lotus-like. I’m not talking about ignoring information—that wouldn’t be helpful. What I’d like to explore with you is the very real possibility of healing from the toxic information that wounds our sense of self. This book is about surviving this stream of information, about not getting drowned in it. Our goal will be to remain in our essence, unaffected, unstained, and free, cultivating a lotus-like capacity for self-cleaning from the informational residue that stands in the way of our growth and well-being. In sum, this book is about cultivating the lotus effect—the skill of informational detoxification—and about rediscovering the lotus of your essential self.

excerpt from The Lotus Effect: Shedding Suffering and Rediscovering Your Essential Self by Pavel Somov, Ph.D.