Statement: One’s spiritual name is Videha, which is like Sanskrit for David. One was thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if God’s name was Dave? Like you sit down to pray, and you’re like, um, what’s up Dave? Yeah, everything’s great down here. Well, actually…
Sundari: As ‘cute’ as it is to refer to yourself in the third person, what purpose does it serve, exactly? Do you think that if you say ‘I” or ‘me’ it means you are somehow less ‘enlightened’? Only if by “I’ you mean your ego or personal identity. If Self-knowledge is firm and you know that your primary identity is the unborn Self, you have no problem with the limited finite personal identity, or their name. You do not have any difficulty discriminating between the two orders of reality, satya/Consciousness, that which is always present and unchanging, and mithya, that which is known to Consciousness, not always present and always changing – i.e., everything else.
What does it matter what name you use – all names refer to the nondual Self because that is the only option. Vedanta uses different names to refer to the creative principle, or God – the most common being Brahman, or Isvara. But by whatever name, God is the Self and does not have a name. And any name will do since God is all that is in existence, in form or formless.
Statement: Videha-mukti is a specific form of mukti, or liberation, which implies, one has seen it from the other side, meaning death, which is still a mystery for the ordinary muktas (mukta as one having attained mukti). Thus properly one is merely a muni, or the Videha-mukta muni. VMM. The third. We/they/them.
Sundari: Who has ‘seen it from the other side’? After death of the body/mind, ‘you’ as a person no longer exist. And as the Self, you are never born and never die, so what difference does it make to you if the body/mind/subtle body is alive or dead? There is no ‘other side’ for Consciousness because the body/mind/ world is not real. You cannot die. Knowing this is moksa.
There is only one moksa, and it is the removal of all ignorance of your true identity by Self-knowledge. That said, the process of liberation (moksa sadhana) is presented in Vedanta as consisting of three stages, (1) liberation while alive (jivan mukti), (2) liberation at death (videha mukti) and (2) the end of samsara (samsara niviritti), i.e. no future births.
The seeker starts the path as a doer with sanchita karma, tendencies toward good and bad actions accumulated from previous births. Prārabdha karma is that portion of the sanchita which is actively fructifying in the present birth and agāmi karma is karma the doer accumulates during the current birth.
When the Jīva gains Self-knowledge through Vedānta sādhanā, the knowledge destroys sanchita and agāmi karma leaving the jnani with prārabdha karma only. This is called jīvan mukti, liberated while living. And when this jñāni exhausts all the prārabdha, the current birth and body caused by the prārabdha is destroyed, which is called videha mukti, liberation at death, so there is no reason to come back. This is called cessation of transmigration (samsara), moving from one body to another.
Statement: Identity. Where does it begin and where does it end?
Sundari: You, the Self, do not begin or end. The body/mind and its personal ignorance or avidya begins at birth and ends with the death of the body/mind.
Statement: God told one long ago that he was going to make me the angel of death. We didn’t know what that meant back then. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds. If it all works out, it’s merely the death of the ego. And what is the basic instruction Krishna gives to Arjuna on the battlefield? Fight. For there was never a time when you did not exist, and never shall there be a time when you do not exist. Such is true even for Bhishma, the grandsire of the Kauravas. Who dies upon a bed of arrows, who Krishna comes to grieve.
Sundari: You need to drop the affectation of referring to yourself in the third person – it is phony and only serves to highlight that the ego is alive and well. It is correct that there is never a time when you as the Self did or will not exist. Freedom comes with living this as Jivatman. As the Self, you were never bound so you do not need moksa. There is only one primary identity that matters and that is as the unchanging Self/Awareness, one without another. All other identities are subservient to that and of no real importance because they are not real – meaning, they are always changing and not always present. Only you as the Self are real, unborn and cannot die.
Statement: Many great fighters were on the opposing side on the day of Kurukshetra. But this battle was not to secure Krishna’s position, but to restore Yudhisthira to the throne, the rightful heir, the most noble of the five Pandavas, their leader. You must understand that Krishna became furious with Bhishma, who oversaw the humiliation of Draupadi, as the evil Duryodhana order her disrobing before the court. Bhishma’s fate was sealed at that moment, for he should have stood up and chastised his student, the pretender to the thrown, Duryodhana. Everyone knew.
Sundari: The Bhagavad Gita with all its characters is a perfect metaphor for how duality plays out, and how the ego functions. Though the characters are many and seemingly either on the side of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, in fact, all jivas have egos that contain all possibilities. All egos – which is another way of saying anyone under the spell of Maya – function in the same predictable way, conditioned by the three gunas. There is in actual fact, only one ego and all samsaris share it.
Statement: Therefore even great personalities can have flaws. This is why the Divine is sent to settle all scores, from time to time, directly dealing blows. But in the battle at Kurukshetra, Krishna was merely a chariot driver. It was the bow of Arjuna which did the slaying.
Sundari: Isvara, God or the ‘Divine’ does not settle scores because it is not a person or a deity. It is an eternal principle in Consciousness, wielding Maya, the three gunas. These three forces are impersonal and are programmed by Maya to function according to natural inbuilt laws, which ‘‘settle’ scores in that as you sow so shall you reap.
Of course all ‘personalities’ great or small are flawed. Where’s the problem with that if you are not identified with ‘your’ limited personal identity because you know you are the knower/witness of that entity, unborn Consciousness/Self?
Sundari
