Section 2 of my Sunday 14th Zoom Satsang
How many God moments did you have this week? By God moments I mean moments where you were living totally present as the witness of your mind as it responded to the thoughts and feelings that arose in it, and totally Ok with the way life was, in that moment. No binding likes or dislikes operative. If you have a like it’s that you like life. But even that ‘like’ is not really there. You just live life. Sure you still follow your svadharma and transact with life according to your values. There is nothing wrong with likes that are in harmony with Isvara and our values, which means we must take appropriate action to fulfill them. What matters is how tenacious we are in wanting things to be the way we want them to be, as this is contrary to karma yoga, and what causes suffering.
Eating healthy for instance, is a ‘like’ I intend to keep, because it results in a healthy body which means a peaceful mind, my main aim in life. I must take appropriate action to ensure I have healthy food available. Anything that adds to that is a value worth having. If I have a choice and would not offend anyone, I would generally rather go hungry than eat unhealthy food because I don’t enjoy the karma from feeling bad. But if I am in a situation where I cannot eat healthily and cannot avoid it or not cause offence by not doing so, I go with the flow. No big deal.
If you can live like that, no matter what, it’s just Isness observing Isness. This is true in every moment of your life whether you realize it or not. We are Existence shining as Consciousness, shining our light on the person in their little movie, who is a reflection of who we are. Only our ignorance in the form of binding likes and dislikes has the power to obscure that fact from me. So, if you don’t recall having a God moment recently, then you lived this week through your likes and dislikes and not as the witness.
There is a single basic thing we can all agree on and that is that none of us wants to suffer. Nobody enjoys suffering. We do not need to learn this, it’s natural. But the problem is that most people are not very good at not suffering. Most of the suffering we endure is self-inflicted. Sure tough, challenging, even terrible things out of our control happen, apart from the daily pin pricks of life, which can be shattering. But big things are not the norm. Most of our dissatisfaction and psychological suffering comes from the daily pin pricks of life. Which means it’s all in the mind, and so, we can do something about it. Maybe you cannot change your circumstances but you can certainly change your mind about them. If not, our likes and dislikes dictate how we respond to what is. No peace of mind there.
The truth we all need to see is that our suffering is not due to how life actually is. Most of our suffering is due to how we see what is.
Think about it like this. You are awake in the dream state trapped in a nightmare, which you know is just a dream. But you can do nothing about it; you seem stuck in it. We have all had this experience. You know that the solution is simple – just wake up from the dream, right? But we don’t wake up from our self-induced nightmares. If we did wake up and change our mind, everything could be fine, just like that, in the times it takes to open our eyes. Instead, what we tend to do is cling to what we always do: try to make life correspond to how we have decided it has to be for us to be happy. We believe our unhappiness is caused by things not being the way we want them to be, not by our thinking about the way things are.
The foundation of human suffering is that we are not OK inside. It’s not about what’s going on outside. We are insecure, afraid, worried, tense, guilty, neurotic, needy, etc. By definition if you need something you are saying you are not Ok. You feel incomplete, flawed, insufficient etc., so you think you need something to make you not feel those things. And as inquirers, we have all been down that road and we know the folly of that because the joy is not in objects. All objects are value neutral and are incapable of making us happy. Not for long, anyway.
If you want to know the real cause of your existential suffering, it is that you manipulate life and chase objects because you need life to be a certain way, other than the way it is, to feel OK. And the reason we don’t feel OK and need to feel OK is because we don’t know who we really are and don’t love who we think we are. We are identified with our flawed secondary and limited identity as an experiencing entity, instead of our primary experience as the nondual witness of the experiencing entity. So we want things to be different from the way they are.
If you break your arm, it’s painful. But that is not suffering. Needing things to be other than the way they are, worrying that you won’t get what you want or will get what you don’t want, and then complaining about how things are, fighting with reality and resisting what is, that is suffering. And we do that every moment and every day of our lives as though that is normal. We have normalized insanity because life does not care what we want. Isvara is going to give us what we need according to our karma. That’s the way it is. Lucky for us, Isvara is merciful and has given us karma yoga – our like and dislike burnout insurance card. The trick is to apply it.
None of us has real survival issues. We don’t have to worry about outrunning a lion intent on eating us, or having a roof over our heads, or where our next meal is coming from. But we still feel vulnerable, constantly anxious. We feel compelled to patrol, protect, control and manipulate people, life, situations, things. We can’t help it. We worry all the time that something will go wrong. We can’t sleep, we can’t relax, we have trouble digesting. We have trouble living. Life is a Sisyphean task, rolling a boulder uphill that never fails to fall back and flatten us. Yet nobody is forcing us to roll that rock uphill. Nothing we worry about has any basis in reality. It is a nightmare playing out only in our heads, of our own making.
Think how different your life would be if you were to wake up in the morning and instead of jumping straight back into your usual state of high anxiety about life, you greet the day this way: ‘I’m back! I wonder what God has in store for me today? Let’s go see what’s happening!” Are any of you familiar with The Tao of Pooh, the story of the bear with a very little brain? Winnie the Pooh wakes up like that every day and though he loves honey most of all, he never stresses about it. He just trundles off into the day to see what’s what. Honey always finds him because he is the honey.
We live on a beautiful planet where lots of things are always happening. Sure the changing nature of life can be anxiety inducing, but that’s only true if you insist on having things your way. It’s fun to be here when you don’t! Why not welcome not knowing or caring much about what comes next? Life is beautiful if you can greet it with openness and wonder. It will always surprise you with its sweetness if you live the God moments and not the ego moments. We can only have the experience we are having right now every moment of our lives. We are in control of none of them, except in our attitude to them. Yet we are present as the witness for almost none of them. Why? Because we do not want to have lots of experiences. We only want to have experiences that are what we want them to be, when, how and with whom we want them to be. We say no to the honey even though it’s what we want most.
So hear this again. The problem is not that life is not the way I want it to be. The problem is I want life to be other than the way it is. Instead of honoring, respecting and appreciating every moment as a sacred God moment, my mind is either totally projected towards what I don’t have or in rejection of what I do have. Rajas and tamas. Sattva is always there too, but unavailable to us. As is peace of mind.
As Vedantins, we have a leg up on worldly people who would have to twist their psyche into compliance in order to change this crazy way of living life. Some do manage to live better lives by improving their psychology with lots of effort. But unless we have the knowledge that allows us to address the actual cause of our likes and dislikes – ignorance of my true nature as the nondual Self and worship of Isvara – we are still stuck with the problem maker. The doer or egoic entity.
As inquirers we are very fortunate because we have the tools to deal with the intractable adversary, duality, that deludes the mind into believing it is incomplete and needs things to be complete and has to make them complete by its own actions. We have jnana yoga that explains the nondual nature of God and man. We know that God or the Total Mind, though not equal in abilities to me as the person, shares the same identity as me, nondual Consciousness. We can discriminate between satya and mithya, between that which is never changing and always present and that which is always changing and not always present. What a gift!
We have three guna yoga that explains the nature of the mind and the field of life, and the forces that conditions both. We can manage the mind by managing the gunas. Triguna vibhava yoga is the most sophisticated teaching there is on our personal and the whole psychology of life. We have karma yoga, which teaches us appropriate action, and the right attitude to life – one of gratitude and surrender. To God, meaning, to me. To love. We have bhakti yoga which manages the childish ego and harmonizes the mind with the intrinsic bliss that shines in the heart and mind of every being. That is the true meaning of devotional practice.
With all these advantages, the most important decision I can ever make, and the most sane way to live, is to commit to devoting my life in surrender to God. To say yes to every moment of life exactly as it is, to stop the insane tendency of trying to control life, or God. Of wanting things to be different. It is such a privilege to be here on this planet in a body, where everything we truly need (and a lot we don’t need) is given to us. God will give you what you insist you want, a lot of the time. But as we know, there are two ways to be unhappy – getting what we want and not getting what we want.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just be happy with what we have? How infinitely generous life is, my God! So much we take for granted. And though everything is always changing, life is always interesting. It’s only boring when likes and dislikes run us because that shuts off access to the witness, my primary experience. We have the audacity to insult God and be dissatisfied with everything. Would you rather be born a rabbit, or a rat, and copulate like mad but spend your days running and hiding in fear of being eaten? Or would you rather live on Mars, where nothing is happening and everything is always the same everywhere all the time, and you would have to walk around in an oxygen tent to survive? I chose this place. With all the crazy stuff, and the wonder.
Life is going to unfold the way it is anyway, so why waste your energy and your joy fighting it? Why not say: “I am just visiting this beautiful place God made, in this amazing body/mind, to experience life as the nondual witness. This earth, my apparent home, has been here for 5.5 billion years. I am Glad to See It! Thank you, God!! I will only be here in this body for 70, 80, maybe 90 or so years. What does it matter? It’s enjoyable and challenging, however long or short because I was never born and can’t die. If things are easy I say thank you God! If things are challenging I say thank you God! I can deal with this because I know I am the witness. All that is unfolding for me as this apparent changing person is a dream taking place in unchanging me. It is a good dream when I rest in you, God. It’s a nightmare when I don’t.
Sundari
