In one of you recent e-mails you
made a distinction between Self realization and enlightenment in passing. This seems to be an important issue. Will you please elaborate? I think I need to hear this.
Keith
Hi Keith,
I guess I didn’t send you my
pamphlet, 'What is Advaita Vedanta?’ In
it I explain the difference. I’ve pasted
the section on the stages of enlightenment for you. Hope this clears it up.
Ram
If the problem is ignorance and
enlightenment is the understanding backed by experience that I am limitless, to
say that there are stages of enlightenment is like saying that a woman is a little
bit pregnant. Contrary to popular belief
no enlightened person is more or less enlightened than any other because the
self is one unchanging awareness.
Then how does one account for the
apparent differences in understanding and experience that one sees from one
enlightened being to another? There is
no question of enlightenment from the self’s point of view because there is no
ignorance. And because the self is non-dual
there is no experience in it. But the
self is capable of creating the appearance of duality. Just as a spider is both the substance of its
web and the intelligence that shapes it, the self appears as the world and
shapes the individual entities in it.
What is called experience is the self functioning through the various
entities (plant, animal and human) just as electricity functions through
various appliances. Expressing through a
bulb it produces light, through a heater heat, and through a radio sound. Though the manifestations are superficially
different all are just electricity transformed by its contact with the
appliance.
There are no ‘enlightened beings’
because there is only one formless Self.
So when knowledge destroys a person’s sense of individuality, the
individual ‘becomes’ the self by default.
The ‘becoming’ is not a physical change or the experiential removal of
the individual. It is a change in
understanding. Just as knowledge of the
nature of a mirage will prevent one from taking it to be water, the knowledge
that I am the self allows one to understand that the experiencer, the
individual, is only an apparent, not a real self.
An ‘enlightened being’ is just the
self functioning through a mind whose self ignorance has been removed. But the removal of self ignorance does not
automatically remove the vasanas in
the mind although it eventually renders them non-binding since they bind only
because of ignorance. Since from the
self’s point of view all the vasanas
are known to be only the self, it has no preferences as to the type of vasana it illumines. Therefore it works through the existing vasanas.
Because the vasanas are the
cause of the mind’s energy, attitudes and opinions, ignorance and knowledge and
every mind has unique and varied experiences, the self seems to be unique and
varied. This ‘seeming’ is caused by lack
of discrimination, the power to separate the real from the experiential, so
that an indiscriminate person will
wrongly assume that there are many types of enlightened beings and many stages
of enlightenment.
(1) Endarkenment
Nonetheless, from the individual’s point of view there
are three ‘stages of enlightenment.’ The
first stage might well be called ‘endarkenment.’ We come into this life experiencing our limitlessness
and oneness with everything but, because the intellect has yet to develop, we
do not understand what we are experiencing.
When the intellect does develop it is trained to think of the self as a
limited, incomplete, inadequate creature and encouraged to solve the problem of
inadequacy by picking up experience in life.
At a certain point, the individual comes to realize that no matter how
much experience he or she can garner, the experienced objects and activities do
not do the job. This is usually an
unpleasant realization, often resulting in a profound disillusionment with life
and is frequently referred to as the ‘dark night of the soul’ in religious
literature or ‘hitting bottom’ in popular culture.
Most react to this existential crisis by sinking into
distracting habits, mind numbing substances and/or frivolous entertainments,
but for unknown reasons a few begin to enjoy a variety of peculiar and
invariably confusing religious or
spiritual experiences that lead them to the idea of God or some sort of ‘inner
light’ or ‘higher state.’ And at some
point during this period the person becomes convinced that he or she can find
happiness ‘within’ or in some relationship with God.
(2) Self
Realization/Self Inquiry
The second stage might be termed the
‘seeking’ or ‘questing’ phase and usually heads off in two apparently separate
directions. The religious road leads to
the development of a personal relationship with God who is conceived as a pure
and perfect someone other than one’s self.
The idea of the self as inadequate, incomplete, and separate is retained
and often conceived of as corrupted by sin.
Salvation is meant to lie in invoking the grace of God through prayer
and the study of scripture and working hard here on earth for a place in the
‘promised land,’ a heaven far from this veil of tears which can only be
accessed by relinquishing the physical body.
The religious life offers a positive alternative to the belief in the
world as a source of meaning.
The other branch of the road leads in a less doctrinal
and belief-laden direction into the experience of the ‘inner’ world and an
investigation of the self. In its
worldly form it may incline one to the study of psychology but in its
‘spiritual’ form the person experiences epiphanies, fleeting samadhis, satoris
and the like that give rise to the conviction that the ‘the truth’ dwells
‘within’ as the ‘higher’ or ‘inner’ self or as some transcendental state of
consciousness. He or she will probably
characterize the changes during this phase as an ‘awakening.’ Although the experience of the inner
self/truth/state is invariably uplifting and intensifies one’s quest, it is
always confusing because the information one gathers challenges the habitual view
of oneself as a needy, incomplete, inadequate, separate creature. Many of these experiences can truthfully be
described as the experience of oneness with all things, limitlessness, and of
transcendent bliss.
During this stage which might be also called the
meditation stage, the mind, formerly riveted on happenings in the outer world
turns inward and fixes itself on the self, the ‘light within,’ and at some
point, usually after intense investigation, ‘realizes’ the self, since the self
is the source of all experience. This
‘realization’ is always in the form of an experience and is thought by many to
be the end of the search...and the ultimate ‘state.’ But Vedanta says that while this is a
welcome and enjoyable ‘state’ it is not the end because there is still a sense
of separation between the experiencer and the object of experience, the
self. When there is separation there is
doubt and the doubt is always that this ‘state,’ like all states will end,
plunging the experiencer back into darkness...which invariably happens because
what is actually happening is that the experience is actually not the
experience of the self but a reflection of the self in a still mind and since
both the experiencer, the ego, and the mind are in time they are subject to change.
This doubt is due to the failure of the experiencer to
understand that what is being experienced is just his own self...in which case
it could never be lost. The failure to
convert the experience to knowledge is usually caused by the belief in the
experiencer that knowledge is merely intellectual and that there is such a
thing as a permanent experience. So when
the experience happens the intellect gets submerged in the bliss, peace, and
radiance and switches off, as it does in most intense sensuous experiences, and
stops inquiring.
To enter the ‘final’ stage, which is not a stage,
inquiry must continue during the experience of the self. In ordinary perception a thought wave arises
in the mind that corresponds to the nature of the perceived object. You see a tree and you know it is a tree
because the self, awareness illumines the thought of tree as it arises in the
intellect. Similarly when the ego
experiences the reflection of the self in a pure mind a thought corresponding
to the nature of the self, called an akandakara
vritti, an unbroken ‘I’ thought arises, and this thought needs to be
owned. When it is taken as one’s own,
it is this ‘I’ thought, backed by experience, that destroys the notion in the
ego/mind that it is limited, incomplete and separate.
(3) Enlightenment
At this point everything stops and there is a subtle
shift in awareness in which the foreground becomes the background and the
background the foreground. The ego/mind,
the subject, meditating on the self, the object, becomes the subject and the
subject, formerly the object, becomes the subject. And this never changes because it was
obtained through the knowledge that what I experience is me but I am not what I
experience. In other words, one
‘becomes’ the Self. Unlike an
experience, the self can never be lost because it is me, the basis of
everything...and there is nothing other than it to lose it.