Simon: Before I received your email a few days ago I had a dream in which you said to me “send me the details” and so I was planning on writing a slightly longer version of my jiva’s journey over the past year in which the causal body produced a perfect storm of monsters that required an ongoing battle for some time! I am so thankful that my fundamental Self-knowledge is firm enough to have kept keep anchored despite some dark unresolved stuff that arose from the depths!
The most challenging was that my son (who has two children 4 and 6) had a total breakdown, mental and physical and has required a lot of ongoing support and therapy over this past year. He was diagnosed bi-polar and is on medication now and recovering slowly. His therapy involved his “PTSD” from his years as a teen in the spiritual community we lived in, during which time he was emotionally neglected by me as my attention was directed elsewhere. Having thought I had dealt with most of the effects of my time there, this re awakened a lot of self-reproach and guilt that I had to face down and see for the dark monsters that they are. Anyway, gradually these samskaras started to lose their grip and I began to feel joy in life again ( all the time knowing that the Self is not touched or changed at all and trusting that Isvara would help me see through my doubts). Â
Sundari: Thank you for sharing your story with me, my heart goes out to you. I am so happy for you that you were able to stand up to Isvara in the form of that awful shame samskara, and beat it back into submission in the Causal body, where it originated. How hard it is to be free of that small jiva identity with all its flaws and larger than life demons. We all must walk that road – it is inevitable, regardless of how we have lived our lives. Everyone makes ‘mistakes’ in the process of learning, it’s human. And everyone has a hidden wounded place within we most want to avoid that holds our deepest fears and hurts. We have spoken about this before, and it is why I bring up what I call the Durodhyana factor so often.
As an inquirer, facing the psychological demons is an essential part of the jivas’ journey to freedom. I love the metaphor of Ariadne, who gave Theseus a thread which he unwound as he entered the labyrinth to slay the minotaur. After he succeeded, he followed the thread back out to freedom. The thread we have when we enter the dark place within is Self-knowledge, and if we hold tight to it, it will always lead us to freedom.
It is is scary and brutal but it cannot be avoided, unfortunately. Isvara does not make the process of freedom from and for the jiva easy, that’s for sure. Thank God Self-knowledge slayed the minotaur, you withstood the onslaught of demonic thoughts, and won through to the peace of knowing none of it has anything to do with you. The jiva did what it did or failed to do according to its Isvara-given program, its knowledge or lack of it. Nobody is to blame. For the jiva, being accountable does not include beating ourselves up. It just means seeing things as they are and being transparent.
The hard part in situations like these involving our children is being dispassionate about how they perceive us as parents, and what they hold in their hearts and minds as ‘true’ about what we inflicted upon them. There is nothing you can do to change that, other than being patiently open and honest. The truth that seems harsh for us and our children to accept, is firstly that they are not ‘ours’. They belong to life. As the Prophet said, they come through us not from us. We do the best we can, and what they experience is their karma, not ours. They are part of the universal dance of the one Jiva, experiencing and resolving their karma on the way to freedom from it. What is hard for us as parents to witness is when our children cannot see this and are totally identified with their story and blame us.
That too is a burden they alone must bear. We cannot take it on. Nobody can resolve another’s karma, not even that of ‘our’ children. If we get hooked by it and dispassion fails us, we become prisoners of the ruthless voice of diminishment and shame that sucks us dry of all discrimination and joy. Good for you for going through it without getting sucked in, and may that relentless mental movie of self-recrimination be gone forever. In its place, may the permanent peace of the Self abide.
With much love
Sundari
