Nathaniel: Something occurred to me as I was reading through your Satsang for the second or third time and I wanted to just talk it out into this email really quickly. It’s only half formed thoughts.
After that Satsang a couple months ago when I asked you and James, if I was required to fix up my life if I was happy, and you both kind of agreed for different reasons that yeah, I better fix things up , I started the serious work on my vasanas and tendencies, etc. Instead of the psychological methods I’ve used in the past I tried just performing inquiry on them. Almost immediately I had a recognition that I think as a Jiva, my entire life I have suffered from dissociative disorder. Some of my childhood is too awful to discuss, but at some point I just disidentified with the body and mind. After all, if bad things are happening but they’re not happening to you then how bad can they be right?
I think that’s a specific risk for somebody studying Vedanta, because dissociative disorder in a psychiatric sense is like a “lower harmonic” of dissociation and dispassion in Vedanta. Sort of like the relationship between loving acceptance of things as they are versus apathetically accepting things that you don’t believe you can ever change. The acceptance seems similar, but the first is freedom and the second is torture.
Sundari: Well put!
Nathaniel: So it took me a while to get past that . Maybe I’m still working on it. Anyways, that’s not the point of this mail. It’s just laying the groundwork for what I actually wanted to say. I tend towards tamas and I lay around like I told you and I think that that sort of a character weakness is a specific risk for people studying Vedanta.
Sundari: I think you have the dissociation thing covered, and you are right. There is a similarity but also a big difference between clinical/dualistic dissociation and nondual dissociation/dispassion/detachment. So I am going to add something because many inquirers have a confusion about this. I certainly did growing up because I was born into a family of 11 people, and I didn’t fit. I would zone out to cope. Most people who are qualified for Vedanta have experienced this to some extent because they are scheduled for a radically different path than the norm and are thus misfits.
For most, dissociation is a fairly normal occurrence in the ever-changing architecture of life, thanks to its inherent but unexamined zero-sum nature. The withdrawal relates not so much to an inability to process what is coming into the mind, but as self-defense, an attempt to escape or create some space from the onslaught of life. It’s not really a problem except to those who are invested in you behaving a certain way for their benefit. My family used to call me names, ‘alternative’ was one of the kinder ones!
But as you put so well, for people who suffered what you did, ‘the relationship between loving acceptance of things as they are versus apathetically accepting things that you don’t believe you can ever change seems similar, but the first is freedom and the second is torture’. Couldn’t improve on that. The first is sattva and the second is tamas – and the first is unlikely to stick unless you have assimilated nonduality.
By comparison, those who have a pathological dissociative disorder have a big problem. They feel totally unreal, insubstantial in comparison to others. I’m not referring to zoning out or the insecurity of imposter syndrome but the fraying, febrile experience of feeling like everything you know about who you think you are, your past and present, do not cohere to real personhood. That you don’t actually exist. The experience that inscribes the small-self identity is just a jumble of unintelligible fragments.
Life is an unstable frightening landscape, racked with contradictory sensations that threaten to tear the mind apart. We had a close friend like that a while back. She/he was like an idiot savant – very clear, brilliant sattva was there, but very deep tamas too. He could recite the scripture but was incapable of assimilating or living it. The mind was broken, and he eventually tipped into psychosis.
It was a mind incapable of discrimination, overwhelmed by its own contents and its inability to relate what it feels within to what it experiences ‘without’, which was the result of extreme trauma. Knowledge did not work. The world of psychology generally accepts this kind of dissociation as a mental health issue and categorizes it as four kinds of disorders, including ‘de-personalization’. Treatment is available but the mind is unlikely to ever be qualified for the assimilation of Self-knowledge.
I don’t know you well, but from what I have seen, this definitely does not apply to you, despite the trauma of your childhood. You are a true knowledge seeker and your mind is very bright and functional. It has strong tamasic tendencies as a result of that trauma, that’s what pain does to the mind. Tamas builds on tamas, as do all the gunas build on themselves. The more any guna sticks in the mind, the more entrenched it gets. It’s not surprising that you further developed those tamasic tendencies as a way to cope with so much pain.
Life can be such a bitch. Isvara hands out our prarabdha karma good or bad. It’s just how mithya works. How we respond determines our life experience. Terrible life experiences like yours are very hard to overcome, from the jiva perspective. Almost impossible to eradicate. Self-knowledge is the answer but not a magic pill, it simply puts the jiva into perspective. It does not trivialise nor deny but gives the out-card to suffering over your suffering.
When Self-knowledge truly obtains and the identification with the ego identity is completely negated, the mind is acutely functional (sattvic),; it’s like like a laser. It cuts through everything. Disassociation with its contents and what comes into the mind from the field of experience expresses in the form of dispassion/detachment, meaning non-attachment to results/experience of whatever kind, good or bad. It is not indifference in the sense of not caring, though it may appear that way. Actually, you care much more deeply but without the usual jiva emotional hooks. Even if you do get PO as the Self, which can happen because you are free to feel, you know that there are no bad results. It’s just the gunas playing out.
Nathaniel: When Vedanta gives the instruction to regard results as equally in value to “excrement of a crow“ and also gives the instructions to stop yourself as a doer this has the same sort of unholy overlap as the dissociative disorder. Example above. You have somebody that’s not doing anything or at least not doing what they should be doing and not valuing the things they should be valuing and you put them on a spiritual path that tells them that they are not the doer and nothing has intrinsic value you can see were these two things would have a negative reinforcement of each other.
Sundari: Yeah. I see the crossover and the reinforcement, duality is very intelligent and nonduality is so counterintuitive. But the thinking here is tamasic, though it makes sense from the jiva/duality perspective. The teaching is very clear on this topic. The fundamental methodology of Vedanta is geared to take you through all these reasonable doubts and psychological pitfalls. It explains definitively what is required of you and how to cope, and gives you the tools to do so. It’s up to you to use them. There is no shortcut and no way to skip any of it if you want freedom from and for the jiva.
Motivations – values – qualifications – dedication to the methodology of the teachings – being properly taught. Assimilation rests a lot on putting karma/devotional/jnana yoga into practice. This involves cleaning up your lifestyle, assuming moksa is the aim, because moksa is only for the jiva. Once Self-realization has occurred, as it has for you, the remaining residual ignorance is usually the toughest to remove.
Nathaniel: As I was reading your email it suddenly occurred to me that the problem I have with applying integrity to my behavior can be resolved with a mind shift that would make everything easy. In the past I’ve largely looked at Vidanta as a process of subtraction. You get rid of the ignorance primarily and you also get rid of some of the bad tendencies, but mostly get rid of the ignorance.
If instead, I look at it as a process of addition or enhancement All of a sudden everything seems easy.
I could have a clean house and have freedom.
I could have a fit body and have freedom.
As opposed to,
I could have freedom, then what.
I hope this makes sense.
Sundari: This is convenient reductive thinking which sounds clever but it does not address the real issue. Vedanta is a process of subtraction. It is not a process of addition except by default. If you are not getting happier as a jiva, and your life situation is not improving, there is some ignorance obstructing Self-knowledge. Removing the ignorance seems to but doesn’t really add anything. You always were the Self and nothing touches you. You are not the doer does not mean the end of doing, which never happens. Just the end of identification with the doer, which means surrender to Isvara and appropriate action. We all ‘do’ till we die, no option. It is the opposite of tamasic resignation.
Nondual disidentification and non-doership are not psychological card tricks. It is Full House Rocking Wide Awake Firing On All Cylinders I AM OK Hard and Fast Knowledge. If this description of freedom is not a good enough ‘then what?’, you don’t understand what freedom means. There is still the idea that the world gives you something you need, which is why people seek pleasure to avoid pain (or boredom), however they do it. They are not enough unto themselves because duality, avidya, has not been fully eradicated in the mind. This is how tamas and rajas work on the mind, one suppressing, the other projecting.
The irony is that life can only give you everything you want as a jiva when you know you are not one. Then life becomes uncomplicated and all doing is an effortless response to life. It is coherent with the intelligence of Existence, AKA God. Which BTW is who you are. Clean house fit body feels damn good not only because it results in peace of mind (sattva), but because it is harmonious with the dharma of living intelligently.
It does not require discipline because you are a disciple unto your Self. Once Self knowledge is firm, you become allergic to ‘stuff sticking’ to you, whether subtle or material. It cannot stick anymore because you no longer have any hooks. So a clean house/fit body is an out picturing of your clean mind, and essential not because you have become some anal OCD pain in the ass. But because you clean up all your karma as it arises and don’t chase empty pleasure calories. And I can assure you, it is a fabulous way to live. We can tell immediately where people have psychological stuff sticking to them they have not cleaned up by looking at their body , their car or entering their homes. It is there plain as day.
Nathaniel is extremely smart and likes easy. Who doesn’t? Vedanta is the way out but it’s not the easy way out. Sadly, karma/guna yoga does not work if we are trying to fit Vedanta into our lives so as not to have to make any inconvenient changes. It has to be the other way around, which can be a real pain! Everything that does not produce peace of mind is not in keeping with the scripture, which is the boss, so it has to go. If you want moksa, that is. No fine print.
Changing hardwired patterns born of ignorance is hard, until it isn’t. Bad news, I know. If you are prepared to settle for less, being kind-of-sort-of-on again-off again-free, and that is enough for you, no problem. If you are really happy that way, that is. Thing is, once you know who you are, even a little jiva encumbrance is damn irritating, no matter how much you can trip out on God. Like a pebble in your shoe that never comes out. It just won’t go away. Especially for someone like you, who is so deeply spiritual (for want of a better word) and a brain. Either way, you are no more or less the Self. It’s just a matter of giving Nathaniel the life he deserves. I think he definitely deserves it. Why not consider living a love Nathaniel life – as he is – with a few small subtractions and adjustments….
You are the beauty that makes beauty beautiful. You are the song of your heart not what happened to Nathaniel. But nothing and no-one will convince you of that other than Self-knowledge.
Much love
Sundari
