Frank: It is such a blessing to engage in these exchanges. I listen each day to Ramji’s Satsangs, usually staying with just one (at the moment ch7 Complete Teaching Spain) until it’s assimilated to some degree – but this can be 50 or 100 times, like 2 or 3 months, an hour a day, before moving to the next.
This isn’t like learning repetition in school. Every third or fourth day I have to mentally pinch myself – there will be a part, just a few words where it seems like I have never heard it before. While there have been gaps in the last ~15 years since first meeting Ramji this has been the way from the beginning.
Sundari: That’s the only way to moksa, sticking doggedly with the knowledge until it ‘sticks’, or assimilates. This involves memory at first, because we cannot assimilate what we don’t remember. But it has to move through the mind, (feeling centre), the doubting centre, and the intellect. That is no guarantee of assimilation though, as all knowledge must also move past our inborn filters, or subjective reality, pratibasika. It’s a lot it has to get through to be distilled into pure Self-knowledge, unaffected by the words that delivered it.
Memory, subjective reality and thinking are tricky things. I like this quote from UG Krishnamurti, as it gets to the root of the issue:
“The natural state is not a ‘thoughtless state’ — that is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated for thousands of years on poor, helpless Hindus. You will never be without thought until the body is a corpse, a very dead corpse. Being able to think is necessary to survive. But in this state thought stops choking you; it falls into its natural rhythm. There is no longer a ‘you’ who reads the thoughts and thinks that they are ‘his’.
Have you ever looked at that parallel movement of thought? The books on English grammar will tell you that ‘I’ is a first person singular pronoun, subjective case; but that is not what you want to know. Can you look at that thing you call ‘I’? It is very elusive. Look at it now, feel it, touch it, and tell me. How do you look at it? And what is the thing that is looking at what you call ‘I’? This is the crux of the whole problem: the one that is looking at what you call ‘I’ is the ‘I’. It is creating an illusory division of itself into subject and object, and through this division it is continuing. This is the divisive nature that is operating in you, in your consciousness. Continuity of its existence is all that interests it. As long as you want to understand that ‘you’ or to change that ‘you’ into something spiritual, into something holy, beautiful or marvelous, that ‘you’ will continue. If you do not want to do anything about it, it is not there, it’s gone.
How do you understand this? I have for all practical purposes made a statement: “What you are looking at is not different from the one who is looking.” What do you do with a statement like this? What instrument do you have at your disposal for understanding a meaningless, illogical, irrational statement? You begin to think. Through thinking, you cannot understand a thing. You are translating what I am saying, in terms of the knowledge you already have, just as you translate everything else, because you want to get something out of it. When you stop doing that, what is there is what I am describing. The absence of what you are doing — trying to understand, or trying to change yourself — is the state of being that I am describing.” End quote
Krishnamurthi did not have a valid means of knowledge to explain this mechanish, though what he says here is very accurate. Every word you hear in the nondual teachings is meant to deliver one central point: I am the witness or knower of the thought/feeling/experience. I am not the thinker/feeler/experiencing entity’. But what does that mean – how does the knowledge translate into your life? The problem with assimilation of the nondual teachings, is that taking a stand in Consciousness as Consciousness sometimes turns out to be more than a little tricky because it is so subtle. The split mind watching itself has a slippery tendency to claim to be Consciousness. But is it ‘unfiltered’ pure Consciousness or is it the ego identity? How to know, and how to deal with that? Taking a stand is done with the mind and can lead to a kind of self-hypnosis that makes the jiva or ego identity think it is the Self without the full understanding of what it means to be the Self. Of course, based on logic alone, (is there an essential difference between one ray of the sun and the sun itself?) the jiva can claim its identity as the Self—but only when its knowledge of satya (that which is always present and unchanging/Consciousness) and mithya i(that which is not always present and always changing/the person or jiva) s firm, meaning, direct.
The practice of taking a stand as “I am Consciousness” does not give you the experience of Consciousness or make you Consciousness because you are Consciousness. It negates the identification with the jiva or ego identity as a conceptual person (body/mind). This is an important point.. When the conceptual jiva identity is negated, the inquirer should be mindful of Consciousness that remains because negating the jiva produces a void. Nature abhors a vacuum. Many inquirers get stuck here and depression can set in if they cannot take the next step, which is understanding that the emptiness of the void is an object known by the fullness of the Self, the ever-present witness or Consciousness. Or, at that time, many inquirers ‘start’ to experience as Consciousness and make a big fuss about it even though you have only ever been experiencing as Consciousness all along!
So, the discrimination between jiva’s experience of Consciousness and the Self’s experience of Consciousness is essential. The Self’s experience of itself is qualitatively different from the jiva’s experience of the Self as an object or as objects. It is one thing to say “I am the Self as the Self and another to say it as the jiva (ego). This realization may well be a painful moment for inquirers who are very convinced that they are enlightened without knowing that they are only enlightened as a jiva, as an ego, not as the Self.
Claiming you are the Self is natural and ordinary, there is no big deal about it because it is the only fact that is absolutely true, never changes, and cannot be denied, only obscured by ignorance. Claiming you are the Self as an ego is a big deal because there is the belief that you have added something to yourself, and it makes you (the ego or conceptual jiva) special in some way.
Here is one of the greatest of all great sayings in Vedanta, because it captures the essence of the teachings:
Brahma Satyam Jagan Mithya Jivo Bramaiva Na Parah.
It means:
I, the Self, am limitless Consciousness and the Jiva is non-different from me.
Frank: What falls away now is the idea that there will be an end, a point where it can be got, or “I” get it. Inversely similar to the way some Samskaras the Jiva still believes, no longer have the de facto hold they used to. The “Unquestionable Beliefs”, previously above being inquired into, can now be questioned with the knowledge in hand and even just looking at them is enough.
Sundari: Beautifully put. Yes, nothing can withstand the unwavering undiluted eye of the “I’. Yet the whole concept of the witness and what it is witnessing is a complex thing, as described above. Who is witnessing what? As I said in my recent talk:
Talking of the ‘witness’ should not lead to the idea that there is a witness and something else apart from him that he is witnessing. The ‘witness’ really means the light that illuminates the seer, the seen and the process of seeing. Before, during and after the triads of seer, seen and seeing, the illumination exists. It alone always exists.
So, when it comes to negating the residual ignorance or binding likes and dislikes that survive Self-realization, we must keep this in mind – the neti neti aspect, and trusting that Self-knowledge will ‘do the work’, which it does, if we stick with it with unwavering self-honesty.
Frank:I had an Uncle in the police who had walked the streets for decades. He said that often just walking up to people in a friendly way could reveal and even prevent what might happen later under darkness. Once exposed, “seen”, even indirectly with just a “hello” could defuse intent. Not forever of course, but probably why he had to keep walking the streets.
Sundari: I love this description of the seer/seen function and how it works. It is always Isvara in whatever form it appears, in your example a policeman, that is the seer exposing what is seen, unseen or hidden.
Frank: Your deliveries and Ramji’s teachings appear easy going (without any policing of anyone at all, which is also a wonderful thing) – but Vedanta is dense, it takes time for the tide to come in. Thank you and much love to you both,
Sundari: The central message of Vedanta is so simple – you are not who you think you are, and you are never not the Self. Understanding what that means, assimilating and applying it is where all the teaching of Vedanta takes place, ignorance being so hardwired. For that, many words are required, and qualifications.
You are always welcome
Much love
Sundari
