Frank: Thank you so much for this wonderful gift. A perfect reflection deep and cutting right through, direct yet with such care. This past week I so often wanted to reply yet the I that wanted to, kept getting in the way.
Some time ago I was in a cult, at the time I didn’t think so. It promised all the usual things and I left after years of trying. Yet still today have recurring dreams that I’m back in and cannot leave, don’t want to leave, because deep down it was all “I” had. In a sense never leaving.
This week for the first time the dream changed – I could see the I that clung to it. A doubt that even this secret faith, even though I had left, might still pay off. Other than *realising* that nothing ever happened (with all the efforts the “I” did).
It is so liberating the last days but in an exhausted way. While contemplating your words there is a letting go where all the tension releases. How tired the mind and emotions have become with continual effort trying to prop up an unreal entity. It’s like a bridge collapsing that never needed to be built in the first place.
This feels it will continue for a while but has an end I can now see for the first time.
Thank you again and much love to you both.
Sundari: You capture the existential exhaustion of being a doer and the ever-hopeful ego perfectly with your bridge analogy. The jiva spends its life defending what it thinks it owns and imminent loss, endlessly building bridges in the attempt to connect to and shore up protection from the big bad unpredictable world. Only to find that in the shifting sands of Maya no foundation is strong enough to prop up an illusion.
All its efforts are in vain, sadly. Nothing lasts and there are no ultimate solutions in mithya. Yet there is something heroic in the jiva’s misguided efforts all the same, and rather poignant if only it did not cause so much suffering! I have always thought that Isvara rather went to town on making the hypnosis of duality quite so convincing. Could there not be a little more bias towards sattva in the creation, and not quite so much rajas and tamas….? What to do. It’s hard for jivas not to get cynical. Trapped in duality the best options for the world-weary soul seem to be cheery pessimism or weary idealism!
I recently experienced a shift when I thought shifts were a done deal for me. A teacher of Vedanta and friend of ours, Stan Kublicki, put it so well:
Quote: “It seems like you can fit all of Vedanta on the sharp point of a pin where discrimination runs out. But how do you get to that last bit of knowledge? It`s all well and good going through all the stages of negation, leaving intellectual knowledge far behind but just what is happening in the final shift of knowledge? It`s like the most fascinating of miracles. The point where experience and knowledge are one. ” The shiftless shift”…have you got a teaching for that?!” End quote.
To which I reply: Yes indeed, moksa distilled is as subtle as it gets, and to ‘get there’ is unchartered and unteachable territory. There is no ‘getting there” because you are there and there is no there. Thus, the end of all duality, freedom from limitation, ‘happens’ purely by the grace of Isvara once the teaching has done its job and there is no more to be had from it. There is no one left to teach.
The point is that there is nothing ‘in’ the final shift of knowledge, not even knowledge. Ignorance and knowledge are objects known to you and are both seen as such. There is no substantive change in experience when Self-knowledge is firm because you don’t stop being a jiva. But freedom means you are not identified with the jiva anymore, which is huge. Whatever the jiva feels or thinks is ok with you because you would not be unlimited and free if the jiva had to stop feeling and thinking according to its nature. But its nature is no longer binding and is known to be a mirage that no longer needs propping up. It is an entity whose dissolution is not in dispute and that’s freedom.
I can empathize with the remnants of feelings from you being involved in a cult. Though I had the good grace to never be drawn to one, I understand the human need behind it. People become involved in cults for many reasons and there are mostly downsides to them, but one of the positive reasons is the impulse to belong, to be connected. It is a fundamental and very human need, which can be healthy and conducive to growth and development when it is not thwarted by issues of neediness, control, and manipulation. Which unfortunately is often the case.
We know many inquirers who were once part of a cult, some for decades. We often see the same remnant, the feeling of longing for that heightened state of coherence, the experience of ‘ecstatic aliveness magnified and propelled beyond the ordinary into an elevated state of unity’. It’s what Vedanta calls the golden cage of sattva and a trap like any other. Perhaps that is why you had the recurring dream. The dream changing could also bring a feeling of loss for the jiva, heralding an ending, even though Self-knowledge is clearly at work observing the process. Enlightenment is sold and sought by the spiritual world as the ultimate state of rarefied being, but of course, it is not. It is not a state, and it is ordinary. Yet negating the jiva can be brutal for the ego. It takes as long as it takes.
Vedanta, being the truth that reality is non-dual, is unequivocally a renunciation of unity as a ‘collective’ as you put it previously. Nondual means just that. It can seem like a lonely path sometimes because there is no one but you. Yet, far from being lonely, the recognition of your oneness with all life, with the absolute singularity of the Eternal Jiva being the nondual Self and no other, opens the flood gates to love. One is no longer limited to receiving or giving love when or if we are fortunate to encounter it or to bestow it.
We are it and therefore never need love or part with it. Life is an embarrassment of riches. Alone means all one, and we experience that with or without the presence of so-called ‘others’. Therein alone lies our true redemption, even as the dear conceptual jiva longing to belong. It’s all good. Once you know all is you, all your thoughts and feelings will automatically and spontaneously come from the wellspring of your infinite nature, even when they seem to be very jiva-ish and mundane! It’s ok to be a jiva, even talk like a jiva when you know you are the Self. Life can truly be enjoyed and savoured then. Moksa is the only true cure for cynicism!
I am happy for you that you know that you are that which makes seeing possible, you are that looking out of your eyes and that which you are looking at. May the seer that never began or ceases, the all-seeing eye or “I” that sees only itself because there are no objects for you to see, never fail to fill your jiva heart with the wonder that is you.
With much love
Sundari
