Dear James,
I have followed you for many years, and always read to this day your wonderful email exchanges. An issue, but important, I would like to provide you with a recent posting from an Atmananda Facebook entry and get Vedanta’s viewpoint.
Atmananda: “Both intellect and experience are not static. It is a movement and therefore always temporary. If we try to stabilize permanency in our experience we also establish and strengthen the dual nature of our experience. If we try to retain any experience or try to remove any experience we start fighting to establish a permanent state in our psychological experiences. The intellect tries to regulate and have control over the mind. It contradicts itself by setting itself in to two.“
James: The first statement is basically true. Trying to intellectually control experiences that are happening causes suffering because they are the result of previous actions that fructify whether you want them to or not. It is the mind’s nature to change; it is never the same from one moment to the next. If by intellect, he means knowledge, then the concluding statement is not true. The intellect doesn’t actually control anything because it is an inert material instrument. But when the Self, consciousness, which seemingly becomes conscious owing to the presence of Maya, wants to know its true nature, it should exercise its apparent free will to effect a cognitive shift in the intellect and generate sattvic experiences, which will transform the intellect into an instrument that is capable of assimilating the knowledge of what it is.
Furthermore, if the Self knows that it is ignorant and wants to obtain freedom-ready mind, it should get its apparent emotions on the same page as the intellect’s thoughts. The heart and the head should be fused together in the pursuit of truth, not to mention the doer, whose actions should be joined to the united mind and intellect to create one strong single pointed instrument capable of prolonged contemplation on the Self. (samadhana)
Atmananda can be taken seriously because he was a Self realized person. Having said that he is more or less impossible to understand because he teaches knowledge in own elegant experiential language, so people are easily confused. Intuitively you may accept his conclusion and may gain some kind of realization, but you will not be able to remove the ignorance of others effectively because you will not have a complete teaching. A complete teaching is necessary since ignorance pervades every aspect of the Subtle Body and is extremely resistant to change. I will try to contextualize his words by presenting the errors in this quotation, even though he arrives at the right conclusion. Actually, I don’t think the quotation is direct from Atmananda. Or it was copied incorrectly or someone interpreted it. It is quite unclear. If you read Atma Darshan and Atma Nivritti you will see that he was a precise elegant, eloquent thinker. Anyway, word usage and meaning is everything because these are subtle concepts that should have as little ambiguity as possible.
Atmananda: “When we do not indulge in such regulation, our experiences come on their own and disappear on their own. We need to not have any necessity to regulate our experiences. They are being regulated by them…”
James: Well, they come on their own when you do regulate them because they go back into the Causal Body, the Unconscious, and appear later during crisis situations when the mind is incapable of repressing them.
But what he is saying is generally true. He’s talking to samsaris, not sanyassis. Samsaris don’t understand the intellect and how to transform it into a vehicle that is useful for Self-realization. However there is a good reason to plan experiences that generate sattva in so far as it facilitates the actualization of moksa. Furthermore if your experiences, which means your Subtle Body, in so far as they take place in the Subtle Body and can’t be easily separated from it, is predominantly rajasic and tamasic, not changing it by changing one’s habits only results in more rajasic and tamasic thoughts, emotions and actions. So there is no way that it can gain and assimilate the knowledge “I am the Self.”
So his statement that there is no necessity to regulate one’s experiences is useful on one hand and unhelpful on the other, unless he is speaking from the Self’s point of view, which is likely, but not helpful considering that his words are aimed at people who don’t understand the nature of the mind and want to somehow arrest it, crystalize it into a some kind of permanent state. Even then there a better reason to leave the mind alone: to whit: the Self is completely non-associated from the mind in the first place. So what’s the point of trying to change it. Accept your identity as the Self and leave the mind to its own devices.
However, this statement contradicts Vedanta’s instruction that the intellect should use its apparent free will to create a Subtle Body capable of prolonged contemplation on the teachings.
Atmananda: Regulating or setting right our experience does not mean to retain good experiences. Allowing the appearing experiences to disappear on their own, is the correct way of setting right experiences. Contradiction creates duality. Duality is contradiction. When the contradiction disappears, duality also disappears.
James: Again, the language is suspect. What does “setting right experiences mean?” I doubt that Atmananda said it that way. He may have said “setting experiences right” which in this context may mean letting them be, not trying to control them, which seems to be his point. I shouldn’t really spend any more time on these words because they are second or third hand and really need a much bigger context but I will indulge you, Tom, because you’re a good guy.
Anyway, just as experiences appear on their own, they disappear on their own independent of the apparent person who allows or disallows them. From the Self’s perspective there is actually no doer to allow or disallow what happens in the mind. And from the jiva’s perspective, life, our present karma stream, happens in spite of us…unless we set about to change it.
However the answer is a qualified yes. But duality doesn’t disappear on its own because it is caused by hard-wired ignorance. You have to work at it, usually long and hard. It seems as if contradiction creates duality but actually duality, ignorance, creates the belief that experience is dualistic, whereas when knowledge removes the belief, one understands one always was, is and ever will experience only the bliss of non-dual existence. The nature of experience is bliss. We know this because everyone wants to live one more day.
Perhaps I should add that the experience of duality is continuous throughout one’s life but the belief that it is real goes when one understands what one is. So in this sense even though it remains it is as good as non-existent because it has no effect on the self.
He is in the ballpark and some of his premises are more or less correct but he can’t close the argument. It seems he cracked the code but his teaching is extremely subtle, erudite and not terribly useful for the general public. A few of his disciples seem to have attained Self realization, but they were mostly exceptionally intelligent, committed, disciplined people Sometimes this kind of inquirer/teacher comes to the right knowledge even though there are difficulties with the teaching if as I said above these are his own unabridged words. That it appeared on Facebook gives me pause because it is not a good forum for disseminating subtle concepts. People are mostly egoic and eager to guru each other. I tried to use it to disseminate Vedanta but it was a waste of time.
The intellect thinks, but it isn’t the thinker.
Atmananda: Then the boundaries, made by our intellect and experiences, also become powerless.
The boundaries aren’t made by the intellect; they are made by ignorance. Vedanta removes ignorance, not the intellect. The intellect remains when ignorance goes. I think what he means is that when Self-knowledge removes Self ignorance one’s thoughts are known to be mithya, apparently real, and are rendered powerless i.e. negated. As I mentioned the language is experiential. The intellect thinks. but it isn’t the thinker. It is an inert material instrument. It looks like it is conscious because of its intimate proximity to consciousness, which does the thinking with the help of Maya, but it isn’t. It is seemingly conscious.
His problem is that he didn’t like sanyassis but he had a tremendous spiritual vasana and was a disciplined intellectual. So he somehow got the knowledge and put it in his own words. If he been open to sanyassis (he thought they were social drop-outs and leaches) he might have had the good fortune to have been taught by a mahatma and his teaching itself would have been easier to understand.
Atmananda: Then, even though there is duality it becomes powerless. Even though it is dual, it is non-dual and this is Advaita.
James: Yes. The experience of duality exists but the belief that it is real disappears once ignorance is removed. Here he comes to the right conclusion in spite of his apparent lack of knowledge of the material “aspect” of consciousness. But provisional acceptance of duality, in this case the belief that the intellect is conscious, is acceptable in Vedanta. He has to conform to the level of understanding of the person to whom he is communicating.
Atmananda: This is also a kind of oneness which we have not created as it is there from discarding duality, and it happens by itself. How does one this is not at all and experience it is only in existence when there is no contradiction.“
James: This statement is gibberish. “a kind of oneness”? I doubt that this is a direct quotation. Obviously English is not the speaker’s native tongue. But it seems like he has it right, a leading error. However, his words are useless as a teaching. He’s either trying to say that experience is non-dual even when you are ignorant that you are existence/consciousness or he’s saying that the contradictory nature of experience is not real; that it only seems to contradict the non-dual nature of experience itself. Experience can only be non-dual because reality, the satchitananda atma, is non-dual, meaning there is only existence/awareness (satchit)
Tom: I am sorry for providing this excerpt at such length and btw there are no toys, I wrote exactly what was printed and my print page stopped short at the … Anyway, I read this shortly after I read your email exchange that discussed samadhana.
There you wrote: “Samadhanam Is keeping the mind on the Self for extended periods of time, which is essential for self inquiry. If the greedy, monkey mind hijacks the mind through the senses, concentration is lost and along with it, usually, discrimination is lost too…..”
Tom: Your article continues making valid points for all the psychological reasons. We need to discipline our mind, meaning our thoughts and actions. I would love to hear from your response to the virtues of these very different treatments of the intellect and how it is to be considered in our spiritual growth and understanding.
James: Honestly, Tom, Atmananda would have had a much greater impact and his words would be more useful now if he had had the benefit of receiving the traditional Vedantic teaching. He could not have not known about Shankara and the Vedanta sampradaya. He was an upper caste Indian intellectual. I think he was put off by all the irrational mystical spiritual stuff that hovers around on the periphery of true Vedic culture so he went on to put Self knowledge into his own words. So to make sense of him, one needs to have a very refined intellect and a strong desire to know, like his most clear disciple, John Levy.
Love,
James