Adam: Ha ha! I have no idea how to open with pleasantries to a Mahatma. So let that suffice?
Sundari: Thank you, Adam, as the Self we are all Mahatmas, and no pleasantries are necessary!
Adam: I send you the correspondence below with the hope that you will correct me where I have erred in presenting the teaching.
I received the following email from a friend
This summarizes what I have been saying for years why it is easy to say ” I am Awareness” but very difficult to remember that ” I am Awareness”
When those vasanas come back, Awareness is out the window.
Sundari: Yes, indeed! See below.
[Adam again]
Then, following Ram’s advice that it is good to discuss these matters with fellow Vedantikas, I wrote back earlier this evening:
Hmmm … for the karma yogi, yes, exactly.
For the jnana yogi, however, this may or may not be the case. It is possible to be wholly self-realized without enjoying the fruit of that realization, which is to say, you know you’re not that person suffering under that vasana load.
One’s personal suffering, which is to say, the suffering of the jivatman, may be merely prarabdha karma playing itself out — and [or but] because you do not identify with the jiva’s suffering, you do not create more karma for your poor, suffering jiva.
Sundari: Yes, true. If it is true. If you really are free of the jiva, the suffering does not come to you, and the perfect satisfaction of the Self is not affected one bit by the prarabdha. There is never any identification with the body or the mind, so no experience can change you in any way, no matter if it is apparently difficult for the poor jiva.
Adam: Moreover, a sign of ‘enlightenment’ is catching yourself slipping (from Sattva into Rajas and/or Tamas [actually they always come together in a bundle, in different proportions]) and correcting your mind, your thinking/feeling ego. This can be done by thinking through the logic of Vedanta’s teachings in whatever way works best for you.
Sundari: Karma yoga is the perfect tool for mind management, as is triguna vibhava yoga – don’t waste time psychoanalyzing the jiva, just go for the guna. Without manipulating the mind, just observe dispassionately without judgment what’s going on, and if necessary, take action, or not, with the karma yoga attitude. Effortless, if it is done right. Not so effortless if not. Ignorance is very sly, and Isvara will make sure to pull the carpet from under your comfortable confident little feet if there is still something lurking. Know this for certain: if there is a reaction, there is a jiva, and there is ignorance. Go that way, and there be dragons there.
Adam: Gradually as this mental response becomes habitual (which is to say, as you strengthen your satya/mithya vasana in actual practice), it takes less and less time to ‘escape’ ignorance, which is to say, to destroy it and the suffering that comes with it, simply by knowing better (‘It’s simple, but it ain’t easy’ … at first for sure and perhaps for a very long time after — say, an indeterminate length of time [days, weeks, months, years, decades] — for the vast majority of us in any case).
Sundari: Yep. It ain’t easy. As long as there is a doer doing practice, still no cigar.
Adam: Then of course, again referring to the ‘electric fan theory’ of how prarabdha karma works, the jnani never loses touch with Awareness; the electric current perpetuating the turning of the blades of the fan have been turned off — you no longer believe in karma, you recognize it as an ignorant fantasy; though the momentum of the past keeps turning the fan’s blades, you are free, no longer an ignorant jivatman but a jivanmukti, which is to say, Maya is converted or transformed into Leela (Lila).
Sundari: When personal avidya is permanently and completely negated by Self-knowledge, it’s not that you do not believe in karma. Belief has nothing to do with knowledge. If Self-knowledge is firm, you know there is no karma for you, that nothing ever happens, for you. Mithya is just a dream, an object known to you. A brief and strange simulacrum of ‘reality’, just a brilliant shiny superimposition by that master filmmaker, Isvara. You cannot lose touch with the Self because you are the Self. It can seem quite logical that the jiva is ‘converted’ into a new identity, that of a ‘jivanmukta’, but that is not the case. Jivatman is the Self. Satya and mithya never meet because they were never apart. There is no separation and no confusion, ever, between which is which. That is freedom.
Adam: No longer a puppet of your Vasana/Karma, a puppet of Maya/Ishwara, you are an actor playing a role, free to enjoy (a Bhoga, an enjoyer) it all — good and bad, highs and lows, ups and downs, suffering and pleasure, failure and success; these contraries provide the richness of the fabric of experience we call life: you are free to live a life.
Sundari: Yes. If there is still a jiva there though, however subtle, freedom is not that free, yet.
Adam: Moreover when/if this knowledge becomes firm, Ishwara/Maya is no longer the boss — you are! You can tell it what to do! You can shape your life and the world around you, is how James put it in his Panchadasi talks in Tiruvanamalai years ago, though perhaps before we go tilting at windmills like Don Quixote we might temper this enthusiastic language as when you quoted my words about overdetermination and influence — or else accept the more mystical notion of becoming one with dharma in the best of all possible worlds since our little brains can never comprehend the ‘needs’ of the whole, the totality of this projected universe and its complex, overdetermined causality.
Nevertheless, as a jivanmukti, you are free to go for the gold, as it were — which is to say, fulfill your Swadharma with gusto … and you are free not to do so since for you it is all mithya anyway. Well, The Jivanmukti (limitless, blissful, completely free Jiva), the Self-actualized Jnani, transforms what appeared to be heretofore a cloud of ignorance called Avidya, into a Dharma Mega: a great rain cloud of Dharma — and the Self-actualized Jivanmukti’s actions are a rainfall of Dharma.
Sundari: The Self-actualized Jnani is not a doer or a ‘transformer’. The transformation is an apparent one because you were never not the Self. Personal avidya (the superimposed, conceptual jiva), is gone thanks to Isvara, and there is no one left to be anything, not even a ‘jivanmukta’. Yes, a free person is Dharma with a big ‘D’, but Freedom is simply the return to normality. When the Self is ‘ON’ and the mind is in full subjugation to you, the Self, everything that you ‘do’ and everything that ‘happens’ to you is perfect, a veritable rainfall of Dharma, as you put it. There are no bad results, ever.
Adam: When you identify with your vasanas, Awareness apparently goes out the window [and more complicating thoughts:]
…; but when you take a stand in Awareness you doubtlessly know these vasanas are, unlike you, merely apparent (in mithya) in the form of (Ishwara’s) vasanas and you are free from the ignorance. That led you to identify with them (also however only apparent freedom for an apparent jiva, on whom compassion has descended like a cloud — and the karma field seems to have become a dharma field, also only apparently because still mithya — still actually appearing to be in the world of representation, hence, duality.
Just thinking aloud!! Thinking through Vedanta is simply a pleasure for this old jiva (a friend recently wrote me that ‘thinking’ is the go-to hobby of … I’d say of ‘my retirement’, but it would be hard to say what ‘I’ might have retired from!
Sundari: Yes, it is true. The jiva free of the jiva wholly surrendered to Isvara is a whole new creature, for whom life is truly wonderful, even though it is known to be a dream. The bliss is never not present because you are always present. But, ask who is it that is thinking through Vedanta? What is there to think about? Your friend must have the wrong idea of what Vedantic thinking entails, or that it eliminates the thinker, leaving ‘only’ the effulgent brilliance of the Self! I guess that may even sound boring to some, which is why mithya seems so sexy, attractive, and interesting. Who wants to be that which never conditions to experience, as in EVER? Mmmm. I just learned the deeper meaning of this recently, how insidious the remnants of ignorance can be in the nididhsyana stage. Eternal vigilance really is the price of freedom.
Once you know you are the Self, nothing can remove that knowledge, except…if there are still binding vasanas, however subtle. They can and inevitably do, block access to standing as the Self and the appreciation of who you are as the Self when triggered. When that happens (and it recently happened to me taking ‘me’ so by surprise. I wrote about it in a satang I posted called the Durodhyanan Factor) karma yoga does not work. Maya has ‘you’ in the bag, even if it is only temporarily. And of course, there is suffering.
More importantly, even if there is no big bad dramatic event, there is a constant subtle and steady loss of joy, an almost imperceptible thief stealing your bliss moment to moment. It is truly amazing, how intelligent and tenacious Maya is, how good it is at posturing, hiding, how hard it is to truly and permanently be free of the jiva. To embrace its humanity without judgment and without conditioning to it in any way. Those who do, and they are few, are true Mahatamas. Ramji is one. It is not a special status because we are all the Self, but to be truly Self-actualized is rare. I am ‘there’ as the Self, but ‘getting there’ too!! 
And, yes indeed, to be free means the jiva is free to fulfill its dharma with gusto, to act naturally and normally. You control Isvara, you are the boss. Or are you? That mechanism is explained in the email that I sent you on Isvara 1 and 2. To make a change in the Causal body, there must first be a permanent change in the Subtle body, which is possible because both the jiva and Isvara share the same identity as the Self. But, for the jiva, it requires applied knowledge, deliberate thinking, and vigilance.
As you point out, being ‘the boss’ depends on whether you really are free of the jiva, or ‘tilting at windmills’, like the enigmatic Don Quixote. The Million-dollar question. If you really have assimilated the scripture and you know that the game of karma is over for you, you are home free. You relate to everyone and everything (apparent self included) primarily and always, as the Self. Discrimination is permanent and automatic, the ‘discriminator’ is now defunct, unnecessary.
If you know this but are nonetheless somewhat lacking in perfect satisfaction or further from home than you think you should be, well. There is still some mischief-making ignorance at play. The Self is realized but not fully actualized because there are still remnants of a jiva, however minor. One could stop there. So what if there are still some residual issues? It’s all mithya and not you.
You are still the Self no matter what is the message of nididhysana. The steps to get there are the qualities of being there, and you are the ‘there’! All the same, that jiva can and does still cause suffering, so best to keep at it. I am not saying this applies in your case, it is quite possible that it does not, and well done to you, in this case. But it is amazing how prevalent this stage is for advanced inquirers. The scripture has nothing more to teach at this stage, there is no more map, really, because you know you are the map.
A teacher of Vedanta and a friend of ours (Stan Kublicki), put it so well:
Quote: “It seems like you can fit all of Vedanta on the sharp point of a pin where discrimination runs out. But how do you get to that last bit of knowledge? It`s all well and good going through all the stages of negation, leaving intellectual knowledge far behind but just what is happening in the final shift of knowledge? It`s like the most fascinating of miracles. The point where experience and knowledge are one. ” The shiftless shift”…have you got a teaching for that?!” End quote.
To which I reply: Yes indeed, moksa distilled is as subtle as it gets, and to ‘get there’ is unchartered and unteachable territory. There is no ‘getting there” because you are there and there is no ‘there’. You are the destination. Thus, the end of all duality, freedom from limitation, ‘happens’ purely by the grace of Isvara once the teaching has done its job and there is no more to be had from it. There is no one left to teach. Vedanta is a means to an end, not the destination.
The point is that there is nothing ‘in’ the final shift of knowledge, not even knowledge. Ignorance and knowledge are objects known to you and are both seen as such. There is no substantive change in experience when Self-knowledge is firm because you don’t stop being a jiva. But freedom means you are not identified with the jiva anymore, which is huge. Whatever the jiva feels or thinks is ok with you because you would not be unlimited and free if the jiva had to stop feeling and thinking according to its nature. But its nature is no longer binding and is known to be a mirage that no longer needs propping up. It is an entity whose dissolution is not in dispute and that’s freedom.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it is always a pleasure to hear from you. I am not sure if this fits with your ruminations, let me know if I missed something.
Much love
Sundari
