The thrust of self-inquiry is to remove the ignorance that stands in the way of appreciating our true and unlimited nature, which is not something we gain because we are it. It would be great if we could ‘just get it’, but it’s not so simple. Many spend years and years trying to ‘actualize the Self’ when it’s impossible to do so. You cannot actualize the Self because you are what is actual. Self-inquiry is useful and necessary only until this fact is assimilated. What a conundrum, right? As long as you are doing self-inquiry to actualize Self-knowledge, you are stuck in duality, thinking nonduality/Self-knowledge is something to gain – the end goal. So if self-inquiry will not ‘get you there’, and in fact, can be an impediment, what does work?
Well, Vedanta has given us a means of knowledge to meet us where we are, provisionally accepting duality so as to understand and negate it. To succeed, we need certain qualifications and the right values or the mind just won’t be ready. Beyond that, first and foremost, we need karma yoga as we will make no progress without it. Karma yoga sounds easy because we all have an instinctive knowledge that we are not in control of results. But it is not easy to put into practice, because we also have a built in need for control.
The Myth of Free Will
There is and always has been much discussion on what is behind free will and motivation, with philosophers and thinkers weighing in for and against. Science tells us that the source of our motivation for doing anything is almost as biological as the colour of our eyes – it comes with the program we get handed at birth, or as we would call it, our vasana load. The idea that we do not have free will over our actions, while sometimes hard to believe, is supported and backed up by extensive neuroscientific research.
Benjamin Libet’s famous brain activity experiments showed that a decision occurs neurologically several hundred milliseconds before a person becomes consciously aware of making that decision. This finding has been consistently replicated using many different types of decision making-tasks. In other words, given specific choices, neuroimaging shows and can predict which choice you will make up to 10 seconds before you make the decision. What seems like an ability to make personal decisions really is an illusion. Often described as intuition or “gut feelings”” responses are determined by a long history of heredity in combination with adjustments influenced by environment and culture – namely, Isvara/Causal body. Poor ‘System 2 Jiva’ is like David going up against ‘System 1 Goliath/Isvara’.
Yet, even though we are programmed this way, the bizarre thing is that one of the most disturbing feelings for most people is the perception of lack of control. When we feel helpless, or believe we have the inability to change things, we tend to surrender our will to outside forces, consciously or unconsciously, which makes us feel even worse. For some, this external emphasis is devastating because we are so conditioned to believe we have control of our choices and the reasons we make them. Such is the power of Maya, the ultimate sadist, we could call it! This is why karma yoga is so difficult for most people. Who wants to surrender the results of action, no way! All doers act only for results, and that’s ok. But to be identified as the doer makes life so difficult.
Yet the truth is, whether we are looking at how our brain works from the scientific, feeling or rational perspective, we have minimal influence over how thoughts and beliefs turn into action. We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely cannot comprehend, and dance to its tune like puppets on a string. The forces that create the hypnosis of duality are the three gunas, sattva (peace/clarity), rajas (action/desire) and tamas (dullness/denial). As a result, negative emotions (tamas) take hold, and we could argue that this is understandable, even justified. You can see this in faces of many people as they age. Most of us are all too familiar with the awful voices of diminishment that are so hard to shut off. This is the plight of being ‘human’, and the signature of ignorance. So, are we merely slaves to Isvara, seduced by the illusion that we do have agency? Can we even make meaningful adjustments within the limits of our motivational destiny?
There is a way out, this we know, as Vedantins. But while we are all the Self, not everyone has access to Self-knowledge in a meaningful way, meaning, qualified for self-inquiry. To ‘beat the system’ we need to understand the forces that makeup and condition the mind and the world it lives in – the three gunas. This is what self-inquiry is about. As much as many spiritual paths push the idea that to obtain enlightenment all you have to do is ‘lose’ the mind, there is no way to do so. The mind is not the problem, only the identification with it. But to be free of duality, we need to understand the complex, confusing and confounding world of the mind, run by mostly non-volitional thoughts and emotions.
Why Likes and Dislikes are So Binding
Guess what – likes and dislikes are built in! It’s not that the thoughts and feelings in the form of likes or dislikes are bad. Isvara produced a predictable range of them with the three gunas, and they are never much of a mystery once you understand how the gunas operate and bind. What makes our likes and dislikes so hard to render non-binding is that reward is what drives them. Everyone is after the reward, no matter what they like or dislike. The brain is wired that way – it has distinct neural pathways which drive and motivate behaviour that automatically seeks and evaluates reward.
See how Isvara seemingly stacks the decks against peace of mind, let alone moksa? The predetermined nature of the actions behind our likes and dislikes stem from how our brain processes rewards and motivates behaviour. Your brain doesn’t care what you find rewarding—as long as it thinks the reward is potentially satisfying and within your grasp. You just have to take a very short look at the insanity and banality of social media as well as the entertainment industry, to see this drive hard at work.
When presented with a potential reward, such as something we desire/like, the neurotransmitter dopamine (rajas) is released involuntarily and automatically, enhancing the urge to act. When you make progress toward the reward, whether it is to gain something (rajas) or avoid something (tamas), your brain wants more of whatever you crave. Which of course, in turn releases more rajas-fuelled feel-good dopamine, in an endless cycle.
The pattern of what we desire and what our brain wants/needs is based on evolutionary adaptations and past experiences, read inborn and developed binding vasanas. All the gunas and their offspring, the vasanas/samskaras, are cyclical. It’s impossible to determine which came first – chicken or egg? And as we all know only too well, craving anything is detrimental, even something deemed ‘good’. This is called bondage – repeated satisfaction of the reward urge inevitably leads to addiction – and, DISSATISFACTION!. Without Self-knowledge, we are all addicted to something. On the rare occasions my grandson is allowed to watch YouTube, even for an hour, he becomes a different, unhappy kid from his usual happy go lucky little self. It’s all about priming the reward system, but it never delivers. Nothing can, for long, other than Self-knowledge. So are we stuck with a motivational destiny beyond our control?
Studies that investigate cognition below the level of awareness show that rationality is bounded by emotion, which in turn, is bounded by this reward system. Because our unconscious frame of reference subliminally creates the context for all experience, it profoundly influences how we relate to what happens in us and to us. We cannot help but perceive the world in biased ways. Our view of reality is thus entirely subjective, which means we are programmed to discount anything outside of our own emotional filters. This is a problem because duality rules, and from this perspective, nonduality does not sound like much fun for the ego.
We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes. But, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires and how we want to view ourselves, than with reality. Hence, without karma yoga and guna knowledge, we struggle to exercise control and suffer.
The Three Controlling Forces in Creation
A few weeks back we had a good discussion about the gunas, and whether sattva is better than rajas and tamas. While sattva is the guna springboard for moksa as self-inquiry will not work in a mind overrun by rajas and tamas, all three gunas are necessary, and always present because they give rise to everything in creation. We cannot escape them and we cannot discount any of them as they all have upsides and downsides. They are also always changing and manifest in the mind in ever-changing proportions. Pure sattva, intelligence, knowledge, is straight forward. We all know we are intelligent (well, maybe not all of us!) and we all know what we know and what we do not know. We also all know we are conscious, and that peace of mind is what everyone wants.
Pure tamas is total ignorance, also not difficult to grasp because we all know that matter is inert—it has no knowing function and is neither intelligent nor conscious. We know what it feels like when the mind is dark, heavy, negative and dull. Though we may deny it, most of us know when we are in denial, most of the time. But we also need enough tamas to rest and sleep. Rajas is also obvious because it is the energy of extroversion – action, desire, and passion. It causes projection, stress, anxiety. Rajas and tamas always act together – too much rajas inevitably produces heavy tamas. Both are only a problem when their relative proportions are out of balance with sattva. So, though we need all three gunas, we could say that sattva is the ‘best’ guna in that we need it to dominate rajas and tamas for peace of mind.
In the creation story, or cause and effect teaching, what is not simple to understand (and most do not) is that pure sattva, prior to tamas and rajas appearing, is the pure mirror of Consciousness, called prakriti, or Maya. Sattva provides the knowing function—it is Consciousness appearing as the Knower, Isvara, or God. For the individual, this makes it sound like sattva can be experienced on its own. Spiritual types love this idea and mistake sattva for moksa.
But it is not possible because for the creation to manifest, it requires all three gunas present. Even though the nature of the mind is sattva, when the mind is extremely sattvic, rajas and tamas are also there, but in balance with sattva, so they don’t cause mental/emotional disturbance. Additionally, even though sattva is the subtlest manifestation of Sat, Consciousness, like the other two gunas, it is an object known to Consciousness. It is not in and of itself, conscious, although by virtue of Consciousness, sattva makes conscious awareness and self-reflectivity possible for sentient beings.
It also sounds like there is a progression to the manifestation to the gunas. This is true, and it is not true, depending on which perspective we take. Nondual or dual? From Consciousness’s point of view (satya), there is no time and no (real) creation, therefore, no gunas. From the creation and creature point of view (mithya), it seems like sattva appears first, then tamas and rajas. But in truth, they all appear together. The gunas are just principles and only apparently real, but for teaching purposes, we must separate the gunas to explain what they are and how they function.
Which is what makes teaching the gunas tricky because they cannot be separated. They only ever work together and if they didn’t, the whole creation would fall apart. On its own, pure sattva cannot create, although it is the blueprint for all forms. It cannot think or feel, although it is responsible for thinking and feeling in sentient beings. And tamas, the existence aspect of the creation, cannot think or feel and has no power to create or cause anything to happen, at all. Something else is needed to bring these two energies together for creation to appear. That something else is rajas, the power of projection. The problem with rajas and tamas is that when they are out of balance with sattva, this opens up the mind to be run by emotions. Sattva dominating keeps this in check.
Are Feelings Your Way of Thinking?
What most of us don’t realize is that feelings are created by our thoughts. A guna-generated thought always precedes a feeling, but it is so fleeting that it’s usually covered up immediately by a predictable guna-generated feeling. Unfortunately, without knowledge of the gunas, we are not in control of our feelings because we don’t understand them or where they come from. Thoughts/feelings recycle automatically and endlessly according to the gunas and the law of karma.
There is nothing we can do to change this. We can only learn to manage our thoughts/feelings through understanding what the gunas are and how to manage their relative proportions with a view to peace of mind as our main goal. Unfortunately, in the attempt to change our state of mind, many of us repeat doing what didn’t work before, acting on changing circumstances instead of changing our thinking, believing erroneously that this will produce a different result. Which means we get more of the same, every time. Yet this is how most people live their lives, unless they learn from their mistakes, or begin to realize that it is their thinking producing their experience, not the circumstances in their lives. Eventually, if we suffer enough, it starts to dawn on us that life is a zero sum, that happiness does not come from anywhere outside of us, and all objects (experience) are value neutral. This is when we are ready to start the inner exploration, though we may have to first navigate the ‘void’.
Nobody Makes Themselves Feel Anything
If a negative state of mind plagues you, it may seem as if it is not your own doing. And that is true because nobody makes themselves feel anything. But it is your doing if you are guna-educated and understand how karma works. In the spiritual world, some people try to wiggle off the hook by tailoring the guna teaching to suit their egos, claiming that if you are not responsible for the gunas, what you feel doesn’t matter. But in this case, it is always the ego that says it is not the doer/ego. Bad feelings definitely matter to the ego, as much as it likes to deny culpability. Uttering the statement “I am not the doer” without a complete understanding of the nature of the guna field is simply denial. It is not guna-management or even guna knowledge.
Understanding the Gunas is Managing Them
It is true that we are not in control of the gunas and cannot change them. But if we understand how to manage them, we can take the appropriate actions at the appropriate time so that we maximize their positive aspects and minimize their negative aspects for peace of mind. In this way, assuming the Field of life is receptive (which it generally is when we understand we are not in charge of it), we can mostly get what we want and be mostly happy most of the time. But not all the time. Guna knowledge allows us to dis-identify with our egoic needs, desires, and fears (read likes and dislikes), making it possible to accept things as they are, even when life is not playing along and giving us what we want but the opposite. The key to freedom is managing our feelings and the repetitive thought patterns that give rise to them through guna management. From this perspective, even if the mind is not peaceful (sattvic), it does not interfere with our baseline experience as the Self, satya.
Isvara and the Gunas
Isvara is a name for the creative principle, not a deity. Guna management is tantamount to managing Isvara because, in some ways, the gunas are synonymous with Isvara, even though Isvara is untouched by them. The principle that creates the creation cannot enter it or it would cease to be the creative principle. Therefore, it is unaffected by it. It is interesting because guna management requires knowledge in action, even if purely in deliberate thinking, so in this way, we are managing Isvara because all thoughts are objects known to the Self and originate from the gunas. Yet on the jiva level, karma yoga is the surrender of action and results to Isvara, or the field of existence, including thought. It is a both-and, not either-or.
Moksa is not about improving the jiva but freedom from and for it – by now, this has hopefully sunken in. However, if we want our jiva lives to change for peace of mind, the teachings must be applied to them in our day-to-day transaction with what Isvara/the gunas bring our way. To have lasting change on the Subtle body level, i.e., to negate the doer and render binding vasanas/likes and dislikes non-binding, we first need to make a cognitive change on the Causal level, or else the guna induced jiva-programs run as they always do, by default. (The reason we can make a change in the Causal is that Isvara and jiva share the same identity as the Self).
All actions, even managing the gunas, must be done with the karma yoga attitude, which takes care of the existential doer and its anxiety for particular results, i.e., to have its likes and dislikes catered to. As the scripture says, a jnani has no problem with whatever guna is manifesting because the gunas are mithya and they are never identified with the jiva. That said, it may benefit the jiva (enlightened or not) to go with the flow but also, to manage the flow, at times. When we live this way, we are in a wonderful dance with Isvara, where we tell Isvara what we want not as a doer but as the Self, yet everything that unfolds is perfectly aligned with our higher purpose, which is to live as the Self, free of the doer and jiva’s binding programs.
The Perfect Guna Management
Here is the perfect explanation by a good friend of ours in managing the gunas on a moment to moment, day by day basis. This is made much more difficult for her because she has to cope with the karma of Parkinson’s disease:
Quote: I am a student of guna management which is definitely required to gracefully navigate life’s ever changing horizon. Knowing one’s own guna structure helps to organize the day to accommodate the uppermost guna and allow oneself to “go with the flow” rather than resisting what cannot be changed. I observe the normal pattern of my mind which starts out in the early mornings with predominant sattva – the most glorious time of day to contemplate, write and just be! I am always so grateful for these times of sweet joy and clarity of mind! This sattva, gradually, with or without coffee, morphs into a rajasic mode which is when I exercise, work and do the active tasks of the day – there is always a lot to “do”!
There is a certain intensity I observe because I know that by the time early afternoon arrives there will be a tsunami of tamas which is due to the physical condition of this body, and will require attention, choices about how to manage it. This is a guna management challenge that I am always working with, and is always changing. The key of course is to never lose sight of the fact that I am always and only ever Awareness, completely unaffected by whichever guna is expressing at the time.
Naturally this is more challenging when tamas hits because tamas is the veiling guna. I seem to have a basic personality that is fairly evenly distributed with the three gunas, however the disease syndrome that I am dealing with brings its own overlay of rajasic/tamasic symptoms that require something different. I am fascinated by how disease states in human beings change the balance of the gunas. Guna management is a useful tool for managing illness.
In the afternoons when I experience a predominance of tamas, I have strategies to choose from (none of which appeal to a tamasic mind) – walking, reading, cooking, gardening or routine tasks -or something different like a trip somewhere else. Sometimes this brings a return of sattva as the afternoon unfolds which is an added bonus!
Anyway I am sharing a glimpse of my strategies for managing Parkinsons using the gunas which is a topic I have been working on recently. When I was walking the Camino, because it was a form of meditation I was more able to continuously observe these passing states of mind. After Self-realization, the observation of, and inquiry into mithya and all of its kaleidoscopic glory is fascinating. End quote
Sundari
