Dear James,
Harry: Thank you for sending a third text of your Wee Parables series, Cosplay. It definitely tested my vanity. Help me out on this one: who was/is Daddy Meyer?
James: He was my Geometry teacher back in the Fifties. He was a real person and the event that transpired was Isvara moving me from my family and setting up the path that would lead to total disillusionment in the world, which brought me to Vedanta.
Harry: You mentioned the small fragments as morality plays or/and Vedanta without the Vedanta terminology. Probably due to my ignorance (or because these are fragments and still being scaffolded) I can’t distill this teaching out of it yet. On the contrary, it’s more like a superjiva is being erected whose possible more shady motives are presented in a heroic light. Again, as I wrote earlier, I would need the whole thing to trust my opinions about it on you, but like to follow the making of it.
James: The small texts are examples of nididyasana practice, cleaning up psychic fragments/remnants related to the moral dimension of one’s sadhana. The practice, which is Self-Actualization, should be applied to teaching remnants because the teaching, which is over at this stage, took place in duality. The teaching is no longer a lodestone for the seeker. It is unnecessary because he or she has assimilated it, like the assimilation of one’s name. You needn’t consciously think that you are Harry because it is hard and fast knowledge.
It is about completely wiping out the past and functioning AS the Self. It is the non-eternal jiva committing suicide. It results in constant bliss (anandam). A Self actualized person is always aware that Isvara is the doer AS his or her body/mind/sense complex. As an apparently embodied Self you are always only acting. Nothing is serious, although the world can’t tell. This is why when Krishna realized that Arjuna didn’t get the non-dual teaching, Sanjaya, the narrator of the Gita, said, “Krishna AS IF smiling said, “I have taught you the wisdom of Samkhya (Vedanta). Now I will teach you the wisdom of karma yoga which removes great fear.” He didn’t actually smile physically because that would have been insulting to Arjuna. He was emotional enough; he didn’t need to have his friend patronize him.
The past appears as an attachment to old habits from which the joy has been stripped by time. Relationships become relationships because they were once joyful but over time they often devolve into unsatisfying rituals. Keeping them going doesn’t benefit anyone, particularly a committed inquirer. Self actualized people are totally dynamic; they are always moving forward so they don’t cling. They know Isvara as “time, destroyer of wombs,” which is to say things that begin, end. When Isvara takes the body, everything that goes with it is taken away too. You never know when that will be, so you live life fully in the present, as what is always present. We are all immortal but only a few know how Immortality “feels.”
Love,
James