Michael: Sometimes I’m the open openness that greets life more from the inside out. My habitual thoughts, feelings, actions, and words are continuing but there’s diminished mental chatter and an observance of myself. It watches my happiness, sadness, anger, anxiety, other people etc… etc… There’s also times when I’m observing myself from the outside in. Almost like I’m this great emptiness in which all appears without interference. It’s similar but different. Any thoughts on this?
Sundari: This is quite a common experience for many inquirers as Self-knowledge starts to work to reduce ignorance, i.e., we start objectifying the jiva identity and seeing with nondual vision, as the Self. But the knowledge is not firm yet, so some duality is still present, there is still the usual interference pattern of binding vasanas. And the Self is still objectified.
Who does the ‘I’ refer to in your statement above? The non-experiencing witness is the non-dual Self, but it functions in two ways, as the opaque witness or jiva (saguna brahman – with qualities) and the transparent witness (without qualities – nirguna brahman). The opaque witness is the mind/ego watching itself, and the transparent witness is the Self, pure Awareness. The Self does not experience, it makes experience possible. It does not have an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ because there is no subject/object split. Nondual means just that, there is only the Self. To experience as the Self means that the subject/object split resolves in you.
The Self is a seer that never began or ceases and is the all-seeing eye or “I” that sees only itself because there are no objects for it to see. It would be more appropriate to say that the Self, seeing only itself, is that which knows the seer with reference to the seen, only when Maya is operating. The Self-aware Self appears as a seer; but it never actually is a seer, unless seeing refers to its own Self.
Whereas, when ignorance is operating the jiva thinks that the seer is different from the seen, the subject and object are different. Isvara is also known as saguna brahman because it operates Maya (the gunas), but unlike the jiva, it is never deluded by them. When tamas and rajas arise in saguna brahman, then Awareness apparently becomes a jiva and is deluded by Maya.
Michael: There appears to be a voice that sometimes guides me from the center of my chest…in the heart area. What is that?
Sundari: The ‘voice’ you hear is the Self, or Isvara, if it could speak, which it can’t. But as we all know we are the Self at the deepest level of our being, we ‘hear’ the Self as an inner voice or guide, which most people objectify. It’s just Self-knowledge appearing in the mind, though it seems to be located ‘in the heart’ and registered by the senses. Yoga calls the heart the hrydaya, and although we like to think that it is located physically in the human heart, it is really not located anywhere. The ‘heart cave’ is ‘located’ in the Causal Body, if the Causal body was a place, which it is not. It means that the true essence of everything is Consciousness, or ‘that without which a thing is not a thing’ like sweetness is the essence of sugar. Sugar cannot be sugar without sweetness. Take it as feedback from Isvara guiding the jiva.
Much love
Sundari
