Melanie: I was very interested to hear you talk on the tendency all humans have to talk negatively about each other, and how this ties in with the shadow aspect of the mind. You mentioned your own confrontation with this some time ago, and how painful it was. Could you elaborate on why you called it the “Duryodhana factor’?
Sundari: The human program while seemingly very unique in that we all have personal stories to tell, is really very uniform. We all experience more or less the same emotions, failings, faults – and strengths. Isvara, or the gunas, dish these qualities out to us according to our karma, and we all have a dominant guna profile, which will be a combination of predominantly two of the gunas. Because there are endless permutations of how the gunas play out, and we all have a different karma load, it seems like we are all unique in all the world. But we are not. There is nothing unique about anyone unless you understand that you are the Self, and so is every else.
We all have a mixture of all the qualities that make up the ‘human condition’, from positive to negative. The teachings of Vedanta are not about psychoanalyzing ourselves, but nonetheless, there is no way to negate our personal stories and identification with our body/mind without seeing ‘what makes us tick’, as the saying goes. And as I said in my satsang last night, this is not to invest in our individuality, but to be free of it.
Here is a quote from that satsang:
Self-knowledge is not about perfecting the person because the person is only a concept – a loosely assembled network of thoughts with an underlying narrative, good or bad. So there is no blame, nobody makes themselves the way they are. But if we’re going to combat the less than fabulous parts of our ‘not’ self, we need to change how we transact with the world. The good news is that Vedanta provides a set of powerful tools to combat negative mental tendencies. The first is of course is karma yoga, which brings the gratitude and the surrender to the knowledge that everything happening to us is to our greater good. The second is guna knowledge, which allows us to understand what our seemingly personal and intractable tendencies are, and best of all, where they come from.
What is amazing about it, is that even though we may be dedicated inquirers, or even firmly Self-realized, as I was and am, when we come face to face with the deepest shadow aspect of the psyche, which I call the Durodhyana factor (more on this below), the one we cannot see, don’t want to see -and – is most resistant to being seen, it comes as a huge hit to the ego. It is extremely fragile. Which is why criticism hurts everyone, criticizer and critized. Very often, dispassion and discrimination goes out the window when inquirers come face to face with their Durodhyana factor. We have observed this over the years with several inquirers who just could not take it , and walked away. But even though the it is the hardest, most deeply buried and most knowledge averse ‘part’ of our ‘not’ Self, i.e., ego identity, there is no hiding from it.
The reason we are so afraid of this part of ourselves is that from birth on we are exhorted to be ‘good, nice, people’. This is important because if dharma is not enforced society breaks down. But the problem is that the ego believes its actual survival depends on its good opinion of itself. Anything that threatens here us hits us so hard we feel like our very life is being threatened. There is no way the ego is comfortable with being in touch with its ‘inner scoundrel’, as James refers to it. When his guru hit him hard and repeatedly, and often seemingly cruelly, exactly where it hurt most, he faired pretty well because he was OK with accepting his shadow scoundrel not-self.
His discrimination and dispassion did not go out the window when ‘he’ was ‘attacked’ by Isvara in the form of his guru, because of this. He has never hidden this part of his jiva makeup because he knew even ‘back’ then, which is 50 or so years ago, that is it not only not personal, it is not real. Sadly for most of us, even Self-realized people, are very attached to being good and nice, and we find it very hard to maintain discrimination and dispassion when this deep part of the jiva identity is exposed. We feel eviscerated, damaged, even outraged. And yet, all we need do to regain both dispassion and discrimination is a change of mind.
While we may well be nice good people, that does not mean we do not have a Durodhyana factor. We all do, it goes with the territory of being human, as stated. The point being, are you human, or are you the Self? So what if I have an inner scoundrel? I am never not the Self. There is no way to actualize Self-knowledge without not only dismissing every aspect of the jiva program, but transforming the way we transact with the world. Not to perfect the jiva, but because non-injury in thought word and deed is the most important value, we do not realize how we break dharma when we have not accepted and thus vanquished ‘the beast within’. We will hurt ourselves and ‘others’.
Lucky for me Self-knowledge was hard and fast. Even though it hurt like crazy, I was able to ‘change my mind’, and thus, alter certain behaviours. In my case, I was often too honest and spoke about my insights without compassion, which hurt me and those it was directed at. It hurt to see this because I am genuinely a kind and caring person. As I said but bears repeating, we all have something like this that is hidden from us. It can be dishonest criticism of people we use but do not respect, or we manipulate people for our own gain without realizing it, as I mentioned last night. It can be anything. Sometimes our Durodhyana factor is hidden behind kindness itself. When the time comes for it to be seen, if we are fortunate, Isvara will send us the right sledgehammer. And it will not be fun.
Embrace it because therein lies perfect dispassion and peace of mind. It is totally liberating to face the minotaur at the heart of our labyrinthian mental constructs. Especially when we have Self-knowledge to slay the demon and provide us with the Ariadne’s thread to leads us out into the transparency of liberation from the whole edifice of reality we ascribe to our personality and life story.
So, do not fear the Durodhyana factor – welcome it!
With much love
Sundari
