Dear Sundari,
I hope both you and Ramji are healthy and well!
Sundari: Great to hear from you. Thank you, we are both well – though it has been a rather interesting and challenging time for me these past few months.
Franco: I’m slowly going through Swami D’s Gita Home Study Course. As always, I would appreciate your help with this paragraph:
“Absolute sreyas, called moksa, is the complete acceptance of oneself. Self-acceptance implies a self that is already acceptable. If I am not acceptable to myself, positive thinking cannot give me self-acceptance. The self is unfolded in the Gitaas already acceptable, along with how it is acceptable and how it is free from all limitations”.
Why does self-acceptance imply a self that is already acceptable? I’m struggling to follow the logic here.
Why is it not logical to say that self-acceptance can happen in a future time, once the self “becomes” acceptable?
Thank you for your help
Sundari: This is a great question, and it pertains to so much that has come up for discussion on Shiningworld platforms of late, as well as in my life personally. As always when it comes to self-inquiry, we need to parse the question from both the dual and nondual perspective. From the dualistic perspective, we are all discrete people with an individual story, ego and personality. On that level we are all flawed and most people believe there is something wrong with them. As we say so often, moksa is not about perfecting the jiva/person because it is inherently an imperfect program originating from the Causal body/Isvara. However, if there is no self-improvement on the personal level, you probably will not like yourself or your life that much. Negative thoughts will take over without notice and positive thinking will not get you very far or be of much help. You will need to do some work on yourself to clean up your act. This is necessary as preparation for self-inquiry. too.
As jivas, most of us have a war going on in our head between the parts of our identity we accept, like, and want to be seen, and the less than fabulous parts we deny and hide from ourselves and others. Much of the latter part is unconscious. We are all benefitted by looking into that persona, good and bad, and reassessing our good or bad opinion of ourselves. This can be done with therapy, counselling or any method that allows us to see, accept and make peace with our story as a human being.
We have all been talking a lot about a ‘narrative upgrade’ of late, which on the dualistic level, translates to a person who has achieved a measure of peace and acceptance of who they are. Very often, this would be a worldly person, and even so, life is much improved if we can manage the mind and its habitual thoughts patterns – whether grandiose or denigrating. But this is far from moksa because there is an identification with the body/mind. Duality is operative – there is a person to be improved and is taken to be real.
From the nondual perspective, Vedanta tells us right off the bat that we are not the limited personal identity or ego. We are whole and complete nondual ever present unchanging, unborn and undying Existence shining as Consciousness, the knower of the personal identity. There is nothing wrong with us, and nothing we can or need to do to perfect, change or complete ourselves. We are that which is always auspicious – always good. The person/body/mind is an object appearing in me, Consciousness. An object is anything other than me, meaning anything known to me, Consciousness.
Though that is a stretch for a lot of inquirers, just hearing that is like music to our ears. But it is hard to truly believe. Its true meaning seldom assimilates right away, even if we do intellectually reason and understand that this must be true by applying any nondual prakriya that allows us to negate all non-essential variables. We can reason that the only factor we can never negate is the knower – the witness, or Consciousness. But the power of Maya does not make it easy for Self-knowledge to become the default position of the mind. There is a lot of ignorance in the way and many places it can hide out and disguise itself as knowledge. The ego is a master at this.
The means of knowledge Vedanta provides is designed to deal with this process, and assuming qualifications, it takes us through all the steps of inquiry. It slowly re-educates the ego, addressing all the doubts that will arise and gradually eliminating all the opinions and ideas we have gathered over the years that are not in keeping with nonduality. It is usually a slow process. Again, this will involve a war between our personal/egoic/dualistic identity and our impersonal/nondual identity.
The ego does not give up without a fight, and deeply ingrained thinking patterns are hard to eradicate. If we are dedicated and qualified inquirers and taught by a qualified teacher of Vedanta, this war is something we are (or become) very aware of, and committed to ending. We know this is the war behind all wars – duality vs nonduality. Yet, nonduality does not oppose duality. It simply reveals it to be not real. Real being that which is always present and unchanging. A mistaken identity.
If nonduality is to win this apparent war however, it involves both a healthy self-disgust for the limited and persistent ego with all its ways of tripping us up and blocking access to Self-knowledge, and it involves a radical self-acceptance too. That acceptance is based on the knowledge that you are perfect as the Self. It’s hard to do, but it is essential. This is what discrimination between satya and mithya essentially comes down to.
The teaching ‘brahma satyam jagan mithyum jivo bramaiva na parah’ (essentially I am the Self and the jiva is non-different from me), is the truth. If you truly get this and the jiva program has been permanently negated (and this is not a spiritual bypass), you never need to worry about the jiva again. You are ‘seated in the Self’ as your primary identity. The jiva identity will not be capable of troubling the mind with its fears and desires. That program will not have the power to trip you up or ever again or be superimposed onto you, the Self.
The problem here is that this is very seldom the case. Most inquirers who claim this or even just think they are free of the limited identity, are not really. Denial in the form of tamas can very conveniently stand in for sattva, but it’s plain old tamas in disguise. The ego learns to mimic how a free person behaves. This is usually subconscious – it’s not outright denial in that you don’t know you are denying anything. The ego has convinced itself that it is free and really believes it. If this is the case, there are aspects of your ego identity still operative that you just cannot see yet, usually in the form of deep samskaras that have been playing out all your life but you are not aware of them. Or you may have convinced yourself that as you are the Self, they have nothing to do with you. Which is true, and it isn’t.
Self-knowledge is hard and fast for me even though I knew I still had to complete nididhysana. A deep samskara I thought had been eradicated came up for me recently. I wrote about it in a recent satsang I posted. It is a kind of ‘enlightenment sickness’, though not the kind that usurps the knowledge and tries to glorify the ego. It’s just that Self-knowledge has not fully actualized.
My jiva upgrade took place a long time ago, and my life as a jiva improved immeasurably. It is hard to compute how much because I can no longer relate to ‘before’ Self-realization. Self-knowledge has been hard and fast for years, and I cannot unknow it because it is who or what I AM. But all the same, this childhood samskara, like a virus in a computer, had survived moksa. It went along for the ride, so to speak. I knew the program was there and believed I had negated it. And I had negated most of it, but there was a remnant still ‘alive’.
Moksa, complete freedom from and for the jiva, means negating all binding vasanas and the idea of doership. That entails dropping all identities. Even, or maybe especially, the idea of moksa, a teacher and a teaching, altogether. There is no teaching, no person left to teach or to free, and no identity to drop because there is no ‘dropper’ left. All teaching remnants have gone. Knowledge and ignorance are both gone. There is just I Am.
The ego is authentically porous, nothing sticks to it or gets snagged by erroneous thoughts, no more binding patterns. Which means you get to be the person you are, and there is no need for modification of your personality anymore. But because peace of mind is important, this does not mean that you can be a jerk and not care. It also does not mean you pretend to be a super nice person, either. It does not actually make any difference how you behave from the Self’s perspective and there are no rules for how a free person lives. If you are free you are free to be anything. All the same, though there is no duality in your mind, universal Maya is still operating. You know all too well how the field operates. Inasmuch as there is a person, you live respectfully and humbly, honoring that others are no less the Self, but do not have your understanding. You don’t have to work hard at treating people kindly and gently because you know how fragile egos are.
So, as with everything in nonduality, it’s a both/and. If moksa is your main aim and all your values are based on that as your main motivation, you will clean up the jiva’s act. There is no contradiction in the fact that you will have both radical self-acceptance and radical not caring with all things jiva related. The jiva is the jiva, and you never made it the way it is. Plus, it’s an object known to you, so why get upset about it? If you cannot gain this acceptance, moksa will not obtain. It does not work to impose satya onto mithya, so if the Advaita shuffle is what you are doing, there is no true freedom from limitation. You may fool your(not)self but you cannot fool Isvara.
Living the truth of ‘brahma sathyam jagan mithyum’ as spontaneous immediate and permanent knowledge that is not an ego subterfuge, is the tricky part. Very few get this right, and there is no ‘getting it right’, unless all egoic games are exposed and seen for what they are – obstructions to living the true bliss of the Self, and the perfection of the Self is accepted as your true flawless identity.
I hope this helps
Much love
Sundari
