Kevin: I have been committed to self-inquiry and Vedanta for almost a decade now, and thanks to you and James unfolding the methodology of the teachings, so much has improved for me. I know I am the Self, there is no doubt whatsoever there. The teachings on the three gunas has been huge in helping me understand my jiva and its tendencies. I cannot overstate how grateful I am for this. Slowly, slowly, it feels like the scales of ignorance start to fall.
But there is still so much there, so much to ‘do battle with’. The doer is not overcome, yet. And that ego is so prejudiced, and so judgemental of itself and others. Over and over I catch myself both internally judging and giving voice to these negative thoughts inappropriately. Why is this tendency so strong? I get so disheartened sometimes. It feels like ignorance is a force impossible to fight.
Sundari: Well done to you for your commitment to your sadhana Kevin, you have come a long way. Don’t feel bad about the jiva tendencies; freeing ourselves of identification with the personal identity is the hardest and most subtle thing anyone will ever do. And of course, nobody ‘does’ it. Only the assimilation of Self-knowledge can purify the mind of every trace of ignorance. Take courage in the truth that you are never not the Self, despite the resistance and resilience of the small-self identity. You are on the Vedanta bus so trust it to take you all the way. Not that you are really going anywhere, because as the Self you are all there is, but you know what I mean!
We tend to think of prejudice and judgement as something that other people have, but the truth is, prejudice and judgement is an inbuilt tendency all humans are endowed with. As with intuition, which is another coping mechanism, it comes down to how the brain and its conscious faculties is forced to function due to the amount of data it has to process from the vast unconscious, both personal and impersonal. If we had to compare the scope of function of the conscious mind with the collective unconscious, it is like David and Goliath. We would all go mad if we were not protected to some extent from the vastness of that field of information. However, there is a downside, as with all things relating to the apparent reality, or mithya.
Whether we like it or not, prejudice and judgement easily bite into and imprison us. So if we’re going to combat it, we need to change how our minds deal with it. The good news is that Vedanta provides a powerful way to combat it, which is to understand what it is and where it comes from. The world or psychology also offers some very helpful strategies to do this, and it is recommended to avail yourself of them to help prepare the mind for self-inquiry. But there is nothing that compares with Vedanta. Specifically, the teaching on Isvara’s psychological order, the three gunas. I will not go into them here, as I know you are aware of them. The teaching on the gunas is a sophisticated part of the methodology of the nondual science of Consciousness and is unfolded in many of the Vedanta teachings, James has written extensively on the topic (The Yoga of the Three Energies is the best) and we have both covered it in countless satsangs posted on the website.
Negative stereotypes pervade everyone’s lives. Even if we hate them — or are the victim of them — they are in our cognitive network. That means they are available to do mischief, even when we are not conscious of them. If we go to the rigid, defended, frightened, angry, judgmental parts of our own hearts, we will see that bias resides there. We will also see our inability to be dispassionate about this wounded part of ourselves. As long as we are defending it, we are bound to it.When we are ready for self-inquiry with a valid means of knowledge such as Vedanta, it takes us through all the steps involved in unfolding the three forces that make up and condition our personal psychology and our field of experience. Not to validate our personal identity and the world it lives in, but to negate them as only apparently real. Real being that which is always present and unchanging, which only ever applies to Consciousness, the non-negatable factor that knows what we think and feel.
Through Self-knowledge we can learn to use the invaluable recognition the teachings on the gunas give us. We can apply it to reduce the harmful impact that identification with our personal identity and its conditioning has on the quality of our life, and on those in it. This is by no means a walk in the park because our conditioning, and the identification with our thoughts and feelings, is hard wired. It does not give up without a fight.
But by applying the practices of acceptance and dispassion based on guna knowledge — which focus on cultivating not only psychological flexibility on the personal level (rather than projection, struggle, denial and avoidance) to investigate our implicit biases, we become more aware of them. In this way we can bring our actions in line with conscious Self-knowledge, and not react instinctively to emotional triggers. This kind of mindfulness, which Vedanta requires as part of the qualifications for self-inquiry, allows prejudicial/judgemental thoughts to become less dominant, and eventually, to negate them altogether. It’s a long process and requires dedication and endurance.
The nondual teachings of Vedanta reveal that all prejudice originates in ignorance of our true nature as the Self. It’s basically just fear. In psychological parlance, studies on human behaviour have shown that most forms of prejudice, including gender bias, weight bias, bias based on sexual orientation, ethnicity and more, have a common origin and can be largely explained by what’s called ‘authoritarian distancing’, the belief that we are different from some group of “others”, And because they are different, they represent a threat that we need to control. Vedanta calls this the hypnosis of duality, or Maya, that which deludes the mind into identification with the small limited self identity. The belief that we need to do battle to get what we want or avoid what we don’t want. That the world is a place to fear and defend ourselves from.
There are three key common characteristics to instinctive prejudice:
The relative inability to take the perspective of other people;
The inability to feel the pain of others when you do take their perspective;
The inability to be emotionally open to the pain of others and take appropriate action when you do feel it.
In conjunction with the teachings on the gunas, which in fact are all we really need to understand our psychology, here are 3 steps that you can take to start recognizing and disarming your own prejudice:
1. Own your bias
By ‘owning it’ I mean identify it in terms of the gunas. Prejudice and judgementalism are almost always based on rajas, the tendency to project, and tamas, the tendency to deny. Observe the tendencies to judge others or yourself or to enact bias based on privilege. Bring as much honesty, self-compassion and emotional openness to that awareness as you can. When do you notice prejudicial thoughts or biased actions popping up, what guna triggers them?
Let go of any tendency to buy into your bias or judgements or make them more important by avoiding them or criticizing yourself for having them. These are thoughts, feelings, and invisible habits, and they are yours. You are responsible, but you are not to blame because they do not come from you. The all originate in the collective unconscious. They ‘belong’ to Isvara, and not to you. Nobody makes themselves prejudiced or judgemental.
2. Connect with other people’s perspective
Deliberately take the perspective of those whom your mind judges and criticises, feeling what it’s like to be subjected to stigma and bias, sometimes without conscious awareness by the person doing harm. Turn it around and recognize how hurtful it is when you know others are judging or criticising you. If you are criticized, see how the mind tries to defend and attack, how quickly it loses dispassion and discrimination. Allow the pain of being judged or being hurt to penetrate you.
As you do, bring your awareness to how causing anyone that kind of pain goes against your values, and particularly, against the values of living as the Self. Don’t run from the pain of seeing the costs of your prejudice and judgement to yourself and to others, but do so without slipping into guilt or shame. The goal is dispassionate connection and self-honesty based on Self-knowledge, not guilt. Guilt may serve as an indicator that we have broken dharma, but beyond that it is a useless emotion best relegated to the dustbin of what constitutes a free life.
And lastly, stop yourself from the cowardly and dishonest practice most small people have of talking critically and judgementally of others unless you have the courage to be honest directly with them about your own negativity.
3. Commit to change
Channel the discomfort of recognition and the pain of connection into a motivation to act with kindness and karma yoga to yourself and others. Commit to putting the impersonal teachings on the gunas into practice. It’s not easy because it’s so much easier to feel aggrieved and/or judgemental. It’s always easier to judge others than to feel our own pain. But if you truly want to be free of the limited identity of the jiva, there is no option but to dump all of it. Just give it up. No fine print. Give up all feelings of being wronged, and, of being ‘right’. They simply do not matter. Hanging onto to them is making a choice to be unhappy and bound to the small suffering ego.
The bottom line with moksa, which is freedom from the limited identity in bondage to objects, always seeking and never finding satisfaction, is this: You cannot be both the jiva and the Self. The jiva or personal conceptual and limited identity is no more than a thought in you, the Self, that causes a great deal of suffering. All the same, moksa does not require perfecting the person, only understanding them in light of the teachings. If this truly happens, the person changes not because they have to but because they no longer respond to their inbuilt conditioning in a way that limits or causes suffering.
While you will not change your Isvara’s given identity much, it does not matter when you no longer take it to be the real you. When Self-knowledge obtains we will still be the people we were before, free to act/think/feel according to our svadharma or inbuilt nature. We are just not identified with them anymore.
Much love
Sundari