Nathaniel: There was a mistake in one of my emails you posted that made it through that could be confusing to readers. Where it says: “Some of my childhood is too awful to discuss, but at some point I just identified” should have read just dis-identified. That was an error in my original due to me using voice dictation in a rush and not proofreading.
Sundari: Yes, I corrected it. It does make a big difference.
Nathaniel: I did promise I would be better about giving status reports and I haven’t sent one in a while so here goes. As I said before, please share all of this with James if he is up for it and interested. I have begun sincerely working on my samskaras/vasanas/limiting tendencies. I have a daily accountability partner that I work with and we are both making progress. I am trying to prepare to retire before the end of the year. I don’t know if that will work out or not but it’s okay with me either way.
Sundari: I share everything you write and my replies to you with James. It’s really good that you and your partner are doing the tamas bust together. It is hard and takes a lot of vigilance to break such deeply ingrained tamasic patterns which resulted from the compound trauma of your life. Given what you must have endured, it is by God’s grace that you are where you are today. Just to survive that kind of karma and be reasonably functional is a victory in itself.
It left its mark though. When the rules of life, respect, safety and love have been so violated by the people who were supposed to care for us as children, abused children will invariably have predominantly and deeply engrained tamasic habits as adults. Shame, tamas at its worst, plays such a disproportionate part in that process. Shame and guilt are behind the voices of diminishment in our head. They usually manifest together, but there is a big difference between them. Shame is a focus on the small egoic self, and says, ‘I Am Bad’. Guilt is a focus on behaviour, and says, ‘I did something bad’. Guilt says ‘sorry, I made a mistake’. Shame says: ‘Sorry, I AM a mistake.’ Shame is directly and highly correlated with self-punishing behaviour, such as unhealthy relationships, addiction, violence, depression, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders, social isolation, etc.
You name it, if it’s self-punishing in some way, even mildly, shame is probably behind it, or part of it. It is so hard to shake. It manifests in any number of self-destructive tendencies and lifestyle habits, or unhealthy addictions, in an attempt to self-medicate because the pain behind the shame runs very deep. If we have internalized shame, it may even be behind what we consider ‘normal’ behavior. Such as lying in bed all day watching TV eating junk food. Where’s the problem?
I know this is even held up as part of the American dream as the perfect idea of ‘leisure’. I did not watch the Superbowl recently, but James told me all about those larger than life advertisements of the people lying on their beds watching their flat screens, eating junk. Living the high life. When actually, in all likelihood, these habits are a form of self-medicating. Weapons of mass distraction, as I call them.
It’s so sad, but what to do. If there is no recovery from that damaged child conditioning, the destructive underlying psychology tends to manifest creating exactly the kind of life that resembles what the person most hates about themselves, and life in general. Such deep tamas destroys joy – maybe not as fast as extreme rajas – but it will get there. And it destroys relationships, too, even if, or maybe more so, if you are both afflicted. Tamas can take you to very dark places, and attracts more of the same like iron filings to a magnet. All the gunas work like that.
Nathaniel: I realize how much I skated past the injunctions about renouncing, relinquishing, control of the mind and senses and also not avoiding obligatory actions. For me in the past relinquishment et cetera mostly meant inquiry in the form of the neti-neti exercise. Other than that I only gave these injunctions lip service while I focused on inquiry. I tried to do everything that James recommended but my heart was only interested in inquiry, not Karma or Bhakti yoga or any other kind of mithya-world discipline. I wanted freedom from mithya not the discipline and practices in the world that would get me there. I wanted the direct path.
Sundari: Yep. Very common. I understand this. As I said above, the fact that you are where you are today is a miracle. A great tribute to the power of redemption and to your strength of your character. Can’t keep a good man down. If we were just talking living a normal samsaric life, you could get a pass and shrug your shoulders. So you have a less than fabulous habits. So what? But if moksa is your aim, and you will not settle for less, that’s a different ball game. Here, there is no way to get a pass to freedom. Everything has to be seen, love, cleaned up. Not to make more of a story out of your story. Identify to disidentify.
There is no fast track to freedom, no way to avoid this process. You can rationalize that if the jiva is not real, its problems are not your problem. But the price you pay is that freedom is not that free; you are still stuck with duality, and suffering. The scripture, Isvara, is the boss. You either sign on and get with the program, or you sign off and keep suffering.
Nathaniel: I now frequently find that the entire universe, including myself, is nothing other than the radiant presence of the Lord and I am enveloped by joy.
Sundari: This is so beautiful. You are the bliss.
Nathaniel: I have recently begun to experience all of my negative tendencies, like excessive laziness and procrastination, as simply the manifestation of residual pleasure-seeking habits after self-realization. It’s all just the same thing and it’s not really pleasurable, it’s just vestiges of an old way of being. Nothing complex about it.
Sundari: True, nothing complex about it. Except it’s not about pleasure but avoiding pain (or boredom) – which is related to shame. You are self-medicating, and have been doing it all your life. It’s a coping mechanism. You are not alone in this. Most people are doing this in one way or another because duality is so cruel, when you don’t know what it is. Life will never give you what you are really after. So much suffering. You have the only out card.
Nathaniel: I have been reading the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, and I have begun to see the Nathaniel personality as little more than a collection of dopamine-chasing or dopamine-dosing behaviors and subsequent addictions. For example, I will decide to clean my house (which is a rejection of my dopamine-dosing laying around), just as soon as I finish going out for a lot of junk food (which is a different method of dopamine-dosing). Or I will decide to quit eating junk food just as soon as I binge watch several hours of television. I will scold myself for watching all that television, and pick up a book or take a nap instead of getting to work. When one is denied the next one is immediately substituted in and indulged.
Sundari: I know the book you mention (though not read it) as I have done quite a bit of research on the topic. In the endocrine system, Isvara has endowed humans with the endogenous equivalents of the most destructively addictive drugs. Dopamine and serotonin being the two most involved in the reward/pleasure neurological pathways. Of course the field of experience is set up to excite these tamasic/rajasic pathways, and provide more fuel (rajas) to fan the fire of desire and dullness (tamas) to stunt the pain. We are wired that way, and not to blame. Nobody does anything. Those who injured you were just products of the same injury.
It’s no wonder it is so hard to break such deeply ingrained habits. We are so accustomed to normalizing the abnormal. You need to be really sick and tired of living with that kind of a mind, and life, which clearly, you are. Everyone wants to be happy. People who are trying to avoid the pain of their lives, or who think they are people, chase the empty calories of pleasure, be it sloth, sex, food, danger sports, shopping, whatever. But as you know all too well, rather than being satisfied, it always leaves you hungrier than ever. A cavernous emptiness, like cotton candy.
The damaged adaptive child ego is a rebel and thinks it’s bucking the system though it never does. Keep in mind that entity does not want freedom, love or intimacy. What it is programmed for and wants more than anything else, is to be safe. And it will do what it is used to doing to achieve that. It’s what it knows – the habituated patterns it developed to survive. That’s a tough house to burn down.
Sounds to me like you are ready for to put a match to it. Those ‘fetus in the womb’ samskaras are now up on the screen. Can’t escape them anymore. The Advaita shuffle only works for so long, and everyone goes through it. If your destiny is moksa, Isvara will keep turning up the heat. Rather than the frog in the pot who did not realize how hot the water was getting until it got boiled alive, you have an eject button. Thank your lucky stars that Isvara deployed some healthy self-disgust and sent James to fish you out of the pot.
Nathaniel: After I first realized my identity as self on a zoom call with James I used to report to him that the “Nathaniel person“ now seemed like a rerun of an old, familiar and boring television show that was forever replaying quietly on an old television in another room. It was happening, but it was far away and meaningless and quiet and didn’t bother me.
Sundari: Good analogy – that’s exactly how the iiva program plays out for everyone. You need a narrative upgrade. As we have said so often, it’s nauseating, Vedanta is not about perfecting the jiva. You are never not the Self no matter how you are living as a jiva. But as moksa is for the jiva alone, if the flawless teachings of Vedanta are not improving the quality of your mind and thus your relationships and your life as a jiva, what’s the point? Intellectual posturing? Spiritual interior decorating? More empty calories, no substance. Still chasing rainbows or dodging tornadoes.
Nathaniel: Now the “Nathaniel identity” has begun to collapse. I “look for myself” and it’s not there. There is a feeling of loss and loneliness and displacement about this. This hasn’t resulted in peace and happiness like when I just stand as Awareness or in the presence of God. I anticipate that the dismal feelings will continue as this burns out.
Sundari: Who is the ‘I’ looking for itself? Before it was the shame-based ego looking at the ego, either ignoring or beating up on and hating itself for all its perceived character flaws. Now, it is the Self looking at the ego. That is a whole new ball game. Training the mind to think and see past its conditioning is the hardest thing anyone can do. It should come as a relief but it’s is scary for the ego when you start seeing that the identity you took to be so real is really a ghost. Totally insubstantial. Pity is doesn’t just go away once you know what it is. Cleaning up the remaining duality after Self-realization, and especially renouncing the experiencing entity who has been unconsciously using Self-knowledge to avoid pain and the ‘hard work’ of self-inquiry, is the hardest part. This often results in what we call the ‘void’.
The feeling of loss and loneliness you describe often accompanies it. Let it. The ego is saying goodbye to its previous identity, and this comes with the ‘all is emptiness’ stage. This too is created by tamas, which presents another Self-actualization problem that usually, but not always, affects older self-realized people. Whatever we have put our energy into up until this point, the identity and story the ego has clothed itself in all its life, is dissolving. You will feel naked and vulnerable, even though you are the invincible Self, emerging from the darkness of earth-bound tamas like a nymph after decades of slumber.
Previously, because you are so deeply and naturally spiritual, you could dodge this by tripping on God without too much trouble, by the sounds of things, to the exclusion of whatever mithya static surrounds. That’s awesome. If you could bottle and sell that, you would be an instant millionaire and retire tomorrow! While it may be true that we are never not experiencing God (Self) because that’s all there is, not everyone experiences it so consciously and acutely as you do.
The tendency to act or rely on experiential bliss has no place to go when you realize the zero-sum nature of life. The risk here is that the doer slips into a depression because you cannot in good faith distract it with the mindless samsaric pursuits that previously occupied it, as you have discovered. Lying in bed all day eating junk food just does not do the trick for you anymore. And hating yourself just gets so damn boring.
If you are hooked on it as an experience – well, you know what happens. All experiences end. Sooner or later we must face the fact that the jiva is a pain in the ass if that’s all we are, and being the Self is ordinary. No gold stars for being what you always were and will always be. No bells and whistles. Perfect satisfaction is not a feeling, though it manifests as such. It’s just knowledge that provides the total confidence that all is well, you are all you need, no matter what winds are blowing over the waters of mithya ruffling jivas feathers.
What all serious inquirers dedicated to the last stage of self-inquiry, nididhysana, are aiming for is to transition directly to perfect satisfaction – tripti. Unfortunately, this can only take place if you are totally qualified when Self-realization takes place, which is almost never the case. All the jiva’s binding conditioning (mental and emotional patterns) must be transformed into devotion to the Self, meaning rendered non-binding. It entails putting the teachings into practice. That’s where the rubber hits the road as our beloved teacher likes to say.
You may think that Nathaniel has not changed much, but I don’t get that. I think you have come a very long way, and you can pat your ‘not’ self on the back for your honesty and dedication. Anyway, when you are as high on God as you are, you will not slip off the hook. God wants God and won’t let you. God is a jealous God who is coming for you. You know this. I am happy for you that the zero sum of ignoring this and acting on cleaning up those samskaras is shaping up.
Go for it!
Love,
Sundari
