Damon: Yes, one thought at the time. In terms of managing this mind, I got a fairly good handle on wanted and unwanted flashes of insight, vision-like events.
I lived on these things, for decades on a daily basis and not without usefulness, but it’s also wearing
Sundari: There is only one thing we need to concern ourselves with and that is thought/emotion management. These endless patterns in the mind wear everyone out sooner or later. If it were simple for the jiva to be totally objective about thoughts and emotions as happening to them instead of coming from them, life would be so much easier. But sadly, that is not the case for most people trapped in their minds. Thoughts and feelings seem so very personal because of the karma associated with them, but they are not, and nor is the karma that comes with them. There is nothing new under the sun, everything is just an apparently real perpetually replaying programme.
Damon: You said: “You are always where you need to be regardless of where you are going. You have nowhere to go and nothing to do, though the jiva may have some karma to take care of.”
‘For a start, it removes a belief that there is a need to justify one’s existence through action as if it were not enough to simply exist. ‘
This is a ‘thing’ for my jiva here. I felt the above (both) always and still do, yet I have a strict and hard tendency to ‘accomplish’. A strange opposite. Taking care of tough karma at the moment shows me this; a deeply rooted sense. I made a mistake which is difficult to set straight, something technical. There is a solution, so that’s good. But I feel failure and the will to fix it, while ashamed. Anyway – this too will end, hopefully within two weeks.
Sundari: Failure is always a tough experience to accept for the jiva, even though if we are honest, we all fail as much if not more than we succeed. Fear of failure, or judging ourselves because we failed or slipped up, is deeply related to a universal samskara, shame. The Christians call it ‘original sin’ and in some ways, there is truth to that statement because most jivas are born with a propensity for it. All religions use shame effectively for control, but even if we were never indoctrinated by religion, shame is part of the human condition. In fact, the only people who never experience shame are people who have no capacity for empathic connection with others – sociopaths and psychopaths. While guilt serves some purpose sometimes, shame about anything is tamas at its worst. The point is, to live is to make mistakes, it goes with the territory of being human. So what?
Here is a speech by T Roosevelt about bravery, called ‘The Man in the Arena’ –
‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
If the shame monster rises, the first step towards freedom from it is to see the program for what it is, where it originates from (beginningless ignorance/the gunas/Maya). It does not come from ‘you’ or your past. Everyone is a product of their karma and vasanas, until and unless Self-knowledge obtains. There is no blame. Taking responsibility for your actions does not require blame. It is another opportunity to assume the ability to respond appropriately to what Isvara has presented to you. While we are not the doer, we are responsible for our impact on those around us, because this is a lawful universe that operates on natural laws. You made a mistake, and you can and must fix it, no big deal.
Damon: In the last days I noticed to not use sadhana to escape from this trouble although it is ‘a way out’ – or something like that.
Sundari: Vedanta is the only way out of everything. Of course, as the Self, there is no karma for you, but that means we always follow dharma and practice non-injury, so we clean up all karma without judgment or shame. Unless there is something very wrong with the mind, nobody sets out to make mistakes or cause injury. There is no doer, remember? But that does not mean that as the jiva you don’t need to clean up your karma. This is a lawful universe, and there is no escape from our karma as a jiva. Taking responsibility mainly requires changing your attitude to the attachment to the idea of who you are while taking the appropriate action towards the karma.
Damon: This morning I had the following thought or thought-like ‘thing’ appearing: ‘my jiva doesn’t know, but I know, as self, myself’.
The jiva-me, seems to know what this means. I do know, and it is not an experience, indeed 🙂 But how it is that knowing this is freedom and yet I am not free completely is mind-boggling.
Sundari: It is only mind-boggling if you are thinking as a jiva. Nonduality is too subtle to work out from the perspective of duality. How can the object understand the subject? The only way to assimilate that you are in fact the knower of the jiva and not the jiva is to step out of duality with Self-knowledge. The jiva does seem to know, but does it really know anything at all? If it is an object known to the Self, how can it know? The knowing belongs to the Self, not the jiva. Duality turns things upside down, it ascribes what belongs to the Self to the jiva, so we tend to credit consciousness to the jiva.
Here is the breakdown of how knowing happens:
1. Pure Awareness does not know anything because it does not modify to knowledge/experience. Both known and unknown do not apply to the Self because it is not a knower’. How can it be if there is only itself? What’s to know or not know if all there is, is you? The jiva is not a knower either because it is not conscious; it is an inert object.
2. When Maya appears, prakriti, the subtlest form of matter and what the creation is created from, appears ‘simultaneously’ in Maya, before the gunas emerge. Prakriti is reflected Awareness and also does not know anything because it is not modified by the gunas.
3. When the gunas arise, Isvara, pure Awareness operating Maya in the ‘role’ of the Creator, knows the world – the reflected medium – because Isvara is conscious. With the appearance of Maya there is something to be conscious of – an apparent creation, the reflected medium. Isvara is in fact, the only knower.
4. The reflected medium is the Field of Existence in which the jiva perceives and experiences. The Field and the Jiva seem conscious because the light of Consciousness shines on them. We can infer that the Field is intelligent and must have an intelligent creator because we know that we are conscious, and the Field is intelligently designed. Consciousness makes everything possible, everything depends on it, but it is unaffected by everything. It is all very subtle, I know, and hard to grasp.
Remember this: The practice “I am Awareness” does not give you the experience of Awareness or make you Awareness. It negates the idea “I am the jiva.” When the Jiva identity is negated the inquirer should be mindful of the Awareness that remains because negating the jiva only produces a void. Nature abhors a vacuum. Many inquirers get stuck here and depression can set it if they cannot take the next step, which is understanding that the emptiness of the void is an object known by the fullness of the Self, the ever-present witness. Or, at that time, many inquirers ‘start’ to experience as Awareness and make a big fuss about it even though you have only ever been experiencing as Awareness all along!
So, the discrimination between Jiva’s experience of Awareness and the Self’s experience of Awareness is essential. The Self’s experience of itself is qualitatively different from the jiva’s experience of the Self as an object or as objects. As we have said many times, it is one thing to say “I am the Self as the Self and another to say it as the jiva. This realization may well be a painful moment for inquirers who are very convinced that they are enlightened without knowing that they are only enlightened as a jiva, or as an ego, not as the Self.
Damon: It’s ok though. I will not make an extra problem out of this. I also read the satsang you posted with Petra, somehow that too reflected something good within the mind.
Sundari: Good, don’t make problems where they aren’t any. Self-knowledge clears up everything, so stick to the teachings and keep watching that mind!
Love, Sundari
