Brandon: I just wanted to make this message an extension of the last. In a satsang with you and Isaiah:
Isaiah: If love were a feeling then I am it, although I am also apathy, fear, hate, etc.
Sundari: You may be your feelings but they are not you; their existence is dependent on you but you are always free of them. Freedom is freedom from identification with “your” feelings and believing that Isaiah and his story are real and happening “to” him.
In a satsang with you and me, you say that the reflection of awareness is me but that I am not it, similar to how the moon shines with the borrowed light of the sun.
Is this just an apparent contradiction?
Sundari: Where is the contradiction? Everything is awareness, but you are not it. Simple.
Brandon: It was my understanding that at first discrimination was for the purpose of distinguishing objects from the self and accepted the appearance of duality as true (superimposition). And then when you further understand the teaching and the mind matures you begin to see that the objects are actually just you too.
I can see how the self can apparently be perceived as an emotion through the body-mind-intellect, but don’t see how the self could actually be an emotion/object and also be free from its limitations, that is, if it were really an object.
Critique me, if you wouldn’t mind.
Sundari: Then you have missed the main point of the satya-mithya teaching. Yes, the first step is to understand the nature of objects (anything I know cannot be me) and to discriminate satya (me, always present, never changing, real) from the objects that appear in me, mithya (not always present, always changing, apparently real), 24/7. The next step is to see that if everything arises from me and dissolves into me, the objects are all made of me, awareness, and exists because of me, but I need nothing to exist or know myself. The objects are me, awareness, but I am not them. The reflection of your face is the mirror is known to you, is known to arise from you and to represent you, but do you take it literally to BE you? No.
No contradiction. There seem to be contradictions in Vedanta, but they are always only apparent contradictions.
~ Love, Sundari
