Greetings Dear Ram,

When I attended your seminar and hung out with you, the more I observed you the more difficult it became to get a clue who you basically are.

Ram:  Complex, apparently contradictory people are always difficult to understand; I can appreciate how hard it must have been for you.  For some reason I have had the luxury to develop many facets of my personality and when you throw Self realization into the mix you get an even more enigmatic person.  But there a less personal reason why it is ‘difficult to get a clue who I am.’   Because the ‘I’ you are trying to know is in Maya.  You can never get definitive knowledge about anything in Maya, the apparent reality, because things are neither real nor unreal.  Every thing in Maya is in a constant flux and depends on everything else.  It is like getting to know a river.  You know it is a river but you can’t grasp much more than that.  The small ‘I’ is a work in progress; it is never the same from day to day.  Once a particular need has been fulfilled (or not) one ‘becomes’ something different. 

Look at your own life.  The ‘Helen’ that we see today is not the same person she was ten years ago.  She is not even the same person she was a year ago.  Some things have gone out of her and new things have come in.  Yes, if you look at a person who is a prisoner of his or her vasanas, then you can reasonably say he or she is this or that.  Most people, like your brother, for example, are an open book, just a bunch of crystallized vasanas.  They will never be a mystery.

But when you look at people who have for whatever reason transcended their minds to some degree, it is much more difficult to get a concrete idea.  People who stand apart from their minds will sometimes follow their vasanas and sometimes not.  This is the meaning of spiritual freedom.  You are free to ‘do,’ to ‘not do’ or to neither do nor not do.

If you are established ‘in the Self’ as the Self then you can see through the small ‘I’ into the real person, the Self.  This allows you to appreciate the small ‘I’ as the ever-changing imperfect entity that it is.  You seem to understand this when in the next sentence you say that ‘I have to enlarge many of my views quite a lot.’
    
Helen:  I think I will have to enlarge many of my views to do justice to such an enigmatic and many faceted character like you.  When I was with you I was very, very open; it was a very peculiar period.  I felt amazingly free, wide and spacious.  I felt so natural and there was no tiny little doubt about the fact that I am all I experience, I sense, I see, I feel...no Helen, only a name remained.

Ram:  I very much appreciate hearing this. This is what it is to experience yourself as you really are.  In this ‘state’ Helen is only a name, not a solid real entity.  Now, if I was trying to figure out who Helen was so that I could relate to her it would be disappointing  because she is just pure experience, not anything concrete.  Or you could say that she is the container for experience, like a glass which is filled and emptied over and over again.  The glass is unaffected by the liquids that it contains.    

Helen: My judging and classifying mind completely disappeared for almost a month.  It kicked me out of this wonderful state and back to the Helen who was very much hurt.  My whole system was upset and the strong headache you blew away with your love and your hands was the physical effect of my soul’s contraction. It was so good that you could help me. But the process of judging had started already and went its own way. 

Ram:  I understand.  Your discrimination needs work.  Discrimination is knowing the difference between your real nature and the mind and keeping your attention on your real nature when a vasana is trying to push it into identifying with the mind. 

What I am talking about is called yoga.  Yoga is the use of one’s understanding to keep one’s attention on the Self.  It is the proof of one’s enlightenment.  In the stage you are in there is a continual struggle to keep one’s attention on the spaciousness of the Self and off the vasanas.  It is what I call the ‘firefly’ stage.  The ‘light,’ the experience of the Self, blinks on and off.  One feels free one minute and bound the next, in heaven one minute and in hell the next.  One’s hurts and rejections are not fit subjects for meditation according to the science of Yoga.  The mind should remain on the Self.

Helen: (from the previous email)  Another reason why so many people get stuck in their spiritual search might be rooted in certain psychological obstacles.  I'm a very good example of that. You said I had a very good and quick grasp of the knowledge.  I guess I had it so quickly because I already knew it in an unclear way through many books and teachings but could never talk to anybody like you to be sure that it is so simple.  But although I have the knowledge now I cannot say that happiness always bubbles up like it does with you. Here the question arises if there is a psychological problem or if I’m lacking something, some other information.  What kind of obstacle is it? Is the lack of experience for example to fasten the knowledge and to trust the knowledge?

Ram:  I mentioned the solution above.  Knowledge tells us that it is wise to keep one’s attention on what never changes, not letting it run along with the mind.  It is not a psychological problem or a lack of psychological information.  It is a practical, mechanical problem.  Non-identification with the mind is hard work if the vasanas are strong.  Young people who get awakened to the Self may have quite an easy time of it because the vasanas are not as deeply entrenched as those of older people.  For example, you carried this abuse/rejection vasana along with you all your adult life.  I don’t know how you feel now but I noticed a certain attachment to it because when I mentioned forgiveness and unconditional love vis-à-vis your father/husband you were not ready to take it on board.  Ignoring a vasana is not the same as purifying it.  Purification is an active embrace of something painful until it no longer hurts.  When you see the value in the hurt you are free of it. 

Helen: (from the previous email)  Contrary to your statement elsewhere I often trust my experiences more than any ideas because the body gives clear statements.

Ram: I understand what you mean but the body also gives contradictory statements.  So one really needs a way to evaluate information coming from the body, mind, and intellect.  This is where Self knowledge comes in.  It provides the ultimate context for every experience.  It is not experience denying at all.  Although the Self is free of experience, experience is the Self too.  If the ideas one operates from are sourced in truth and not in belief, they are reliable.   The most valuable idea is the discrimination between the Self and the Self as mind.  If that is clear one’s experience flows smoothly and blissfully. 

Helen: At present I often meditate, sometimes two or three hours, mostly in the early morning. What I experience reminds me of my first very strong and long lasting experiences of 15 years ago when I read Nisargadatta’s books.  I expand in an amazingly spacious way. There is complete timelessness.  There seems to be no body and a stillness…though I'm aware of noise…so deep that even sounds disappear.   Mostly I witness a few thoughts passing or pictures evolving and dying back but sometimes the witness disappears too. This experience is actually always the same…sometimes more or less deeper and stronger.  It is the state between being awake and sleep without falling asleep.  These experiences seemed to enliven the knowledge which often seems like dead stuff in my mind.  After a while they have the effect of recalling the wider perspective of life and I see the little Helen thrashing about in the small cage of her ego. I was witnessing her before too but suddenly I was detached. Only now the knowledge - I - was complete again the way I experienced it with you.  So as you see I'm on the experiential trip at the moment!!!

Ram:  Good for you!  I’m very happy to hear about this.  Your most important statements here are: ‘these experiences seem to enliven the knowledge’ and they ‘recall the wider perspective.’  They ‘make you aware of ‘the little Helen’ and ‘the witness disappears.’  It’s all there in you, Helen.  You are definitely getting a handle on this spiritual business.  Keep at it. 

Helen: Sensation and knowledge go together; they seem to need each other.  My experiences are the essence of my knowledge; therefore it is always basically the same experience and not variable within me.  But the fact is that those experiences are very different from person to person because human beings are very different culturally, socially and psychologically…different for very many reasons.  Therefore these experiences in their innumerable manifestations provide no specific insight into Self realization. 

Ram:  You’re a good thinker, Helen.  This is correct.  The teaching of Vedanta are called anubhavanga tarka, experience based logic.  Knowledge and experience are interdependent.  Your last sentence points out what I have been saying all along; experience itself is not enough for Self realization.  If you can find the essence of experience in experience then you have the Self but to do this you need to know that what you experience is the container of life and that the one to whom experience occurs is the contents.  Experience is this Self but the Self is not experience. 

Helen: They are an experience of the Self like any other and very common also, but knowledge seems to be very helpful (at least for my sceptical mind) to sense what experience tells me.

Ram:  Knowledge is reliable. Experience is not reliable…unless the mind is consistently sattvic…because the mind is the instrument of experience.  In any case, the important issue here is using one’s understanding of the nature of reality to keep one’s attention on the Self and away from subjective problems…what I call the yoga of no contact.  Yoga means contact.  If the mind is firmly locked on the Self (in yoga) it will resist tamasic and rajasic tendencies…like the rejection vasana…and they will burn out without causing a loss of contact with the Self.  When a person feels good one’s attention is with the Self but when the attention shifts to rajasic or tamasic energies suffering begins.

Much love,

Ram