Dear Ram,

To continue from the last e-mail. So you are saying that there comes a time when someone working on themselves needs to take a decision that they are who they are?? If this is right this links in rather well with some psychotherapeutic approaches in which emotional problems arise from faulty decisions taken in childhood that don't work now. For example a child who is badly treated by a parent deciding that they (the child) are bad ... or deciding, when they feel good when their mom is around that they need someone around to feel good. Then psychotherapy becomes an activity focusing on the correction of faulty decisions...re-deciding. I guess I could say that Self inquiry involves taking re-decisions on who I am, why I am here and what will happen when I die.

Ram: This is good. The answer is yes. Inquiry is a very conscious process that needs to end in a determination that one is just fine as one is. There is no event, unless that event is direct insight into the Self of the words of scripture, that can convince one of that, nor is there anyone else that can make that determination, although a therapist can encourage one to ‘decide’ in harmony with one’s innermost belief…which is always that one is OK. But those decisions need to be based on hard and fast knowledge based on one’s epiphanies, the scripture, the words of Self realized guides, and patient inquiry.

I’m not sure I’d agree that a child actually ‘decides’ to make negative self judgments. It may seem that way with the benefit of hindsight. If a person, owing to a positive self idea brought from a previous birth, is confronted with negative self evaluations from parents and friends, he or she will resist them and know inside that he or she is OK. I was like this. No matter how much shit I got from the world about how awful I was it was like water off a duck’s back…I kept thinking of myself as wonderful and doing what I wanted…irrespective of what elders and peers thought. But the process of forming a self identity is unconscious. The view that one is limited and ‘sinful’ just leaks in many subtle ways and is continually reinforced, so that at the point where you start to individuate and become conscious of yourself you find yourself feeling pretty bad about yourself (teenage when I was growing up and now even earlier) and you can’t for the life of you imagine why. You just accept it as a fact. Mom and pop, one’s teachers, and particularly mass culture have done a good job telling you in no uncertain terms that you are inadequate. And, even more insidiously, the world offers many false solutions to this feeling of inadequacy…religion, materialism, hedonism, etc. So you are really doomed. But when suffering causes you to begin to reclaim your power you understand that the quality of your experience is directly related to the choices you make. I once met a wildly happy woman who had had no therapy or religion or spirituality in her entire life. I asked her what had happened and she said that one day she just became fed up with being miserable and she made a decision to be happy and that was it! This may sound like madness but it is perfectly correct because happiness is the nature of everyone…so she already had it experientially. The only thing that kept her from appreciating it was the conclusion that she was unhappy. So she changed her conclusion about herself from I am a miserable person to I am a happy person. This as you know is rare. In Vedic spiritual science this is called a sankalpa, a hard and fast determination. It can, however, lead to intense suffering if the conclusion that one comes to is contrary to the truth.

Ram