Hi James, Sundari,
I just can’t express how fond I am of both of you!
Thank you so much for today’s satsang, it lit up a blind spot that I have had.
Sundari: We were touched by your openness and vulnerability in opening up about the jiva and its painful past. I feel for you because I have been there too. I too had to face the less than fabulous aspects of my jiva program that I had rationalized away and did not fully want to see or change. Most people have, in some way or another. That’s normal, duality being as brutal as it can be, and as persuasive as it is.
Jonathan: There is a lot of text below, so here is a summary in advance:
1. Improving character after self-realization is an eye-opening idea for me. It sounds so absolutely and obviously right.
2. I learned how to discriminate experience as an entirety, rather than negating one thought at a time.
Sundari: Remember that character improvement is not the aim of self-inquiry but the side-effect of Self-knowledge assimilating, if we are doing inquiry right. The jiva will improve when it gets with the program because peace of mind is the main aim, and it likes liking itself all the time, not sometimes. Life becomes peaceful, joyful and smooth, ALL the time. Why would anyone not want that? While it is not a requirement for moksa, it is a sure fire indication that assimilation and Self-actualization has taken place.
Discrimination with a big ‘D’ is the ultimate goal, but if we do so without first negating the whole jiva/mithya program, it’s not effective for long. You will ‘slide back’ into ignorance and suffering. This is what the Neo-Advaitin’s do – they jump over mithya by projecting satya onto it, claiming that mithya is not real, which is true. However, the jiva and its world may not be real, but they do exist, and therein lies the problem.
Jonathan: I think I’ve been asking you both the same question over and over in different forms for about a year now and the question is basically “how do I continue after self-realization knowing that I am still fairly messed up as a person?“ And always, I’ve qualified that question with the statement that “I’m happy now and I don’t really feel like working very hard, but I’m also disappointed in myself and I feel like I really ought to be working hard to improve this person and its life.”
The problem has been difficult for me, because when I’m not identified as a person and simply exist as awareness, then I’m happy, dispassionate, and unconcerned with the jiva and its problems; but when I identify as the jiva and I find myself disappointed with “myself“, I am nevertheless pretty happy in general and often a little bit blissed out, and also lazy; so in either case nothing gets done about the jiva or its foolish problems.
When you mentioned on the call today that after self-realization, a person should continue to develop their character that was such a revelation to me. Even though it’s just different ways of phrasing the idea, “working on my character” seems interesting and valuable while “try to improve my bad behavior” seems judgmental, tedious, oppressive, and annoying.
In at least one of your videos James, you talked about self-realized people in India not necessarily becoming saintly or Mahatmas, but that there were plenty of these guys sitting around being enlightened crabby old men and that cleaning up the personality was not required for an enlightened person. Then you would add “but why wouldn’t you do that work? What else are you going to do? It’s valuable.” Somehow that never quite sank in for me like it did today.
I think the difference is that today I expressed it to myself for the first time as a joyful positive change to my character rather than as a moralistic scolding to myself to clean up the negative aspects of my behavior. Thank you!
Sundari: We say this so often but it is heard when the time is right: Self-realization is where the ‘work’ of self-inquiry begins, not ends. I am so glad to hear that the last satsangs got through to you and ‘landed’, and that James’ videos and chats with you helped so much. You are blessed to have him as your teacher. It is part of the process of self-inquiry that the ego will try to wall off certain aspects of the jiva which it refuses to investigate. The ego/doer is not invested in moksa because there is nothing to gain from it other than its own demise.
While this is fine if you are a sadhu living in India happy to live on the street and be taken care of by a society that does not have any requirements for how you ‘should’ behave, it’s not a recipe for a great life. The thinking is if none of it is real, why bother at all with the problematic jiva program? I am the Self, nothing else. This is true, but that does not make it go away, as I said above. We call this the Advaita shuffle for that reason. The price you pay for this is partial and temporary access to Self-knowledge because the pesky jiva gets in the way, and so does suffering. Why not aim for full access, complete freedom from and for the jiva, seeing as it’s on offer and within reach, as you are the Self? Then you don’t need to bliss out to experience the Self because you are always experiencing it, no matter how ordinary or quotidian the experience.
As we said last Sunday, the fact that the aim of self-inquiry is not to perfect the jiva, does not mean you cannot clean up its act – for your benefit, and the benefit of the world, which is one and the same. There is nobody looking over your shoulder or telling you what to do, except dharma with a big ‘D’. As James said to you: you are what you are rebelling against. It feels really good to objectify and disarm that stubborn ego/adaptive child so that it can finally relax and get to enjoy life as the Self – all the time. Blissing out is all very well, but that can become just another ego cop-out. Like all experiences, it ends and you are the same messed up resentful person you were before. With even more judgements and shame for not being ‘better’. That is so tedious, and unnecessary, given that you have the tools to unravel and negate it: karma yoga and jnana/guna yoga.
Jonathan: Update 2
To flesh out a little bit more about the other topic I brought up on the call today:
Since the first time we emailed I have always done my very best to follow all the advice you’ve given, but the things that I really wanted to do was 1) read and think about your books and videos 2) practice discrimination by maintaining awareness of my stream of consciousness throughout the day. As thoughts and perceptions occurred I would say to myself “that’s not me, that’s not real“. I loved doing that because it was so obviously true and I never had to do it for very long before “the big silence“ would occur, and I would simply be standing as awareness for a brief moment.
What I didn’t understand about the practice at that time was that the negation was only half of it, I also needed to assert my identity as awareness. I hadn’t been doing that at all until you called me out for it on a zoom call. I remember you saying “I just can’t allow you to continue like this“ as I was talking about my awareness as if it was a separate thing, and a couple moments after that my sense of a separate identity shut down pretty much continuously for about a year. So the second update is that I have just learned this week how to discriminate existence as an entirety rather than one thought at a time as I have done before. That’s pretty cool.
Sundari: I think this is common and most dedicated inquirers like yourself don’t realize at first that they are trying to gain ‘enlightenment’ as a jiva. Nothing gets added to you as the Self or as the jiva, who is the Self. The only thing that falls away is the confusing factor between the two: ignorance/Maya, the delusion of insufficiency, lack and of doership. As stated, Big D discrimination is great with the proviso that it’s not a way to avoid cleaning up the jiva’s conditioning. If it is, and it must have been for you, you paid the price of doing so, ignorance returns. Maya is a bitch. There are no shortcuts to moksa, it’s all or nothing.
Much love to you, too
Sundari
