A quote from the beautiful book on soul friendship, Anam Cara, by one of my favorite poets and philosophers, John O’Donoghue:
“We are lonely and lost in our hungry transparency.”
This may sound a bit dramatic, but it is such a poignant and accurate description of our naked humanity, stripped of all subterfuges and coping mechanisms. The truth is, when we don’t know who we are, whatever object we chase, no matter who or what it is, or what substance or experience we are hooked on, the insatiable hunger of loneliness is at its root. Without Self-knowledge, of which God-knowledge is central, we often feel isolated in this world. It can feel like everyone else has some special formula for getting along, for fitting in, a secret of success that no one ever let us in on. But nobody does, and they are most likely, in the same boat. That existential loneliness and hunger resides deep inside us, at our core, and no matter how many people try to help us, no matter how many friends reach out, support us, show up for us, it never entirely goes away.
We become what James and I call ‘hungry ghosts’. We feel insubstantial, untethered, unmoored from ourselves, from life. We forge ahead but feel lost, alone, and we don’t know why. You see this theme a lot in art, especially contemporary art. I recently visited a wonderful exhibition of contemporary art in Arles, Provence. Much of it was highly skilled, and some quite beautiful and touching. But most of it, probably unintentionally and unconsciously, portrayed this theme of the hunger of loneliness, like a cry of longing, and rage.
It is what I call the wound of humanity – to be shut off from our true source, the soul of our being. It’s vast and shadowy and seems to be part of who we are. But it’s not. It is ignorance of who we are. If we chase objects or experience, whether material (a new car or dress) or subtle (relationship), we get a temporary reprieve from this loneliness when we get what we want, while it lasts. But we still have a hungry ghost we are feeding and trying to escape. For those of us who try to expunge this loneliness and hunger through substances like food, drugs, alcohol, or experiences like shopping, gaming, social media, sports, you name it, even sex or pornography, something happens.
We become addicted because suddenly, we have a companion, a friend, holding our hand, propping us up, making us feel like we fit in, telling us we can be part of the club. This friend is there for us in the empty hours when it seems no one else is. It eases the pain and takes the edge of the loneliness away, or seems to. That’s the real reason addiction to anything is such a problem, and the habit is so hard to kick. It’s not the substance or the means itself, even though it may eventually kill you, if not physically, psychologically. Most depression is really caused by this ‘hungry ghost’ loneliness.
There has been a lot in the news lately about the death of the famous actor, Matthew Perry. “Nobody wanted to be famous more than me,” he said. But, he added, “fame does not do what you think it’s going to do.” Of course it doesn’t. Nothing penetrates that loneliness or takes away that hunger. Not a relationship, even a good one, not fame, money or power. Nothing but Self-knowledge can heal us of this existential loneliness.
Perry spoke about being lonely and wrote about it in his book, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing’. He talked about ‘the big terrible thing’ in the context of longing for a relationship. But he found that not even the joy and fulfilment of a relationship fills up that insecure place deep inside of us. That ‘big terrible thing’, the hungry ghost that cannot be satisfied, remains. We cannot escape it, it’s like our shadow. Nothing and nobody can ‘fix’ us or give us what we really crave: to end the pain of the separation, the split within us. That is just a fact, and we all suffer until we end this search, one way or another. For Perry, it ended in death.
Our soul, which is the term we use for the heart of who we are in the depths of our being, cannot be denied or hidden. It is always transparent. The soul is really the Self, which can never be hidden because it is Existence itself. But when we do not know this, it seems like the soul is hidden. And then, we are always ‘hungry and lonely in our transparency’. Our soul longs to be seen and known. To love and to be loved. We long for God whether we know it or not.
What do we mean by that last statement, our soul longs for God? We must first define what we mean by God, and at the end of this satsang, I unfold the three stages of God-knowledge. Because the idea of God is so inextricably tied up with religious ideas about God, and all that comes with that, many of us who are attracted to Vedanta hope to get away from God. But we have bad news; you can neither get away from nor run towards God. God is life, synonymous with Consciousness, your very Existence. It’s like trying to get away from or run towards space, or electricity. You cannot because space and electricity are all-pervasive.
We all know what space is, and it is a good metaphor for the Self, except that space is an object known to the Self. We did not always know what electricity is – but we did not invent it, we discovered it. Like Space, electricity does not care whether you believe in it or not. It has always been there, supporting life. We do not think about electricity in the electrical impulses that run the body, the light bulb that gives us light, the fan that moves the air, the stove that cooks our food, or all the myriad devices our lives now depend on. But without space or electricity, our body could not function and would die, and the world as we know it would come to a standstill. God is like that.
The Bible says that no one can see God and live. In a transferred sense, no person can see himself and live. What does this mean? It means if you truly see God, you see who you are. You see that you are not the person you thought you were. In this way, seeing God in everything is true renunciation. What do we renounce? Ignorance of our true nature, identification with the body. We then access the still and silent world of the eternal Self that has always been there, the soul of our being. We feel the power of Love that is the nature of the soul. It is not human love, because it does not move or change. The love that is our nature is unlimited, so it does not condition to anything. But it is this love that allows us to love and be loved. As Self-realization occurs, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal Self. In all our interactions with the world, fear changes into courage, loneliness becomes all-oneness, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy. We are satisfied.
If we still believe that the answer to our loneliness and emptiness lies in the world, no matter what we are seeking in life, we are seeking love. We are seeking God. If you have everything the world has to offer you, fame, fortune, power, etc., but you do not have love, then you are the poorest of the poorest of the poor. No matter who we are or how far we are from the truth of our being, we know in the very fibre of our being that this is true.
Without Self-knowledge, we suffer from a desperate loneliness and hunger to be loved. We can search long futile years in lonely places, far outside ourselves, and we will not find it. Yet the whole time, this love is not even a few inches away from us. It is at the heart of your soul. It is your soul. But you have been blind to its presence. Duality has hypnotised you to believe there is something you lack, something wrong with you. That you are inadequate. Or through some hurt, a door has slammed shut within the heart, and you are powerless to unlock it to give and receive the love.
For some of us, and this was true for me, we give love in spades. But to give and give and give and yet remain ungenerous to yourself equally keeps that door of love only partially open. You must learn to take care of yourself, to include yourself among those you love. There is no way to avoid this and be happy. To be the love we are, to give and receive the bounteous love that is us and always surrounds us, we must remove the dam wall that keeps love trapped. We must have the courage to allow love to flow both ways. To be as generous to ourselves as we are to others. This is what true devotional practice requires. Love of God includes love of me as a person.
How Do We Become the Love We Are?
We probably all know the saying: ‘we think we are human beings in search of a spiritual experience, when in fact, we are spiritual beings having a human experience’. Never a truer statement was made. The part we all struggle with, is if our true identity is not human and material, but spiritual and immaterial, why are we not born knowing this? And even knowing this, why do we still struggle being happy with our human experience?
Most of us here tonight know the answer to that question, if not entirely, at least in theory. We know that Maya, the power present in Consciousness to delude us about the true nature of reality being a duality instead of nonduality, is the cause of ignorance of our true nature. But if our true nature is all powerful Consciousness and not the human/body mind, why does the human and the world exist at all? Maya is indeed a wonder.
It is very hard to talk about what is beyond our human comprehension, and though Vedanta provides us with a means of knowledge that unfolds with exquisite infallible logic so that Self-knowledge can assimilate, the process of assimilation is nonetheless, not easy. We are constrained by the limits of words no matter how clear the language and its use, and by our qualification to assimilate their true meaning. To be unqualified for Self-knowledge basically means that you are still in bondage to your addictions, or likes and dislikes, whatever they may be. You still chase the solution to your suffering in the world of objects, be they things, substances, or people.
At the heart of this quest to find reprieve from our suffering is that we want to be happy. Somehow, we all know that it is our birthright, and being unhappy is not natural. So we seek love. Even though human love is always subject to change and thus impermanence, any kind of love brings happiness, at least for a while. We know that. But if we want unchanging love that is always present, this love is only found in the love of God, in Self-knowledge. This love is never separate from who we are as a person, but it is not identified with the person. It is not the religious love of God, though a religious attitude of devotion is required to know it.
In Sanskrit, this is called bhakti. The word “bhaj” means to worship, which includes paramanandum, love of God, and upadhadestanum, love of the teacher. In Vedanta, the teacher is always God, or Isvara. This God is not the parental religious God, but synonymous with Consciousness. If Vedanta has come to us we are very blessed, because Vedanta is the teaching of the Isvara and the grace of Isvara, the highest grace there is.
The answer to the question, ‘if God is love, where is this God?’ is ‘where is God not?’ God is all pervading, like space or electricity in the metaphor I used above. There is nowhere God is not. God is present as the unchanging causeless cause, and as the spiritual (subtle) and material (gross) substances. God is both the cause and the effects, yet God never enters the creation. The creation is made up of God/Consciousness and would not exist without it, but God/Consciousness exists whether or not a creation exists. Like the wave is dependent on the ocean, but the ocean never depends on the wave.
So why do we need devotion to God if we share the same identity as nondual Consciousness/the Self?
Here is the central point of this teaching, so take it in:
Bhakti yoga, while it sounds like a devotional practice, bowing down to God is not an act of devotion. It is an act of jnanum, of knowledge. When I bow down to God, the ego identity is dismantled. My ‘human consciousness’ or reflected consciousness, is surrendered to nondual God, Consciousness. My existence becomes one with that of the God I bow down to because we share the same identity as Consciousness. Therefore, I have a much better life as a human and stop worrying about everything. Why? Because I have the knowledge that ends the limitation of being identified as a finite, limited human, and I take my identity to be whole and complete, unborn, undying, unchanging, ever-present Consciousness. I am the fullness that cannot be increased or diminished.
Inasmuch as there is a person, and we know that they do exist even if they are not real, without Self-knowledge, we are indeed bound by Maya and the creation, and suffer. We will struggle to understand or know God. To understand God, to be free of bondage to both the personal identity and the creation, requires understanding what both are, where and how they originate, and how the field of creation functions. This requires understanding Isvara as the impersonal nondual intelligence and principle behind creation (synonymous with Consciousness,) wielding Maya – the forces that make creation manifest, the three gunas. This is what the understanding of the nondual God is all about, seeing as we cannot separate the creation from the creator or the person.
The tricky part is differentiating and discriminating between the person-like God of duality and the impersonal nondual God of Vedanta. The former is the religious dualistic God who keeps the creation going with the scales of justice imposed on life and the person, reward and punishment. Whereas the nondual God, however one names it, does not enter the creation, is not affected by it, and is never in judgement of anything. It simply delivers karma to the jiva in accordance with the natural laws that run the creation.
As stated, this God and the Jiva share the same identity as Consciousness (nondual Love). But when Maya manifests, and ignorance stands in the way, it seems like they are separate because they have such vastly different powers. Isvara is omniscient and in charge of the Total creation, whereas the personal jiva knows only its subjective reality, and is in control of nothing, really. Once Self-knowledge removes personal ignorance of our true identity, we know there is no difference between us and Isvara, in essence. But we are nonetheless devoted to Isvara because as the jiva, we owe everything to Isvara. So we live in surrender and gratitude.
And indeed, without surrender to, worship and an understanding of, not only the difference between the two, but especially the importance of having a personal/impersonal relationship with the nondual God as our primary relationship, the jnani is not a jnani, and moksa is not possible.
When I know this, I am no longer a hungry ghost. I am joyous in the transparency of my true Self, one with the unchanging bliss of Consciousness and I live in harmony with God, with life. Amor fati is my creed because I understand that life in human form is a gift, and Isvara takes care of all my needs. Sounds simple, right?
Sundari
