As we discussed on last Sunday’s Zoom satsang, freedom from and for the personal identity (small ‘s’) requires inquiry into the non-dual Self, which is satya/mithya discrimination, or jnana yoga (Self-knowledge). Without it, you will never be free of duality, the cause of all suffering. And without devotion to Isvara (or God) you will never negate the egoic doer; it will not surrender to the teachings or the teacher. Purely with therapy you may be able to upgrade your life story and find some release from your mind, but it is unlikely that you will find permanent satisfaction without self-inquiry because the ego is alive and well.
As we know, to qualify for self-inquiry requires qualifications or the nondual teachings will not stick. But even qualified inquirers often do not realize that Self-realization, which tends to happen at the beginning of self-inquiry for those qualified, is 5 – 25% of the process of freeing the mind of limitation. Nididhysana, which is the last part of self-inquiry for dedicated inquirers, is the same 5 – 25% of the process of moksa, just more advanced. This is the most important part of self-inquiry. But for moksa to obtain, Self-knowledge must negate our binding vasanas, which boils down to neutralizing likes and dislikes – i.e., the ego. 75% of the process and our biggest obstacle to freedom from the egoic doer are our likes and dislikes. And it is karma yoga that does the heavy lifting in our psychological emancipation.
In a nutshell, karma yoga is an attitude of consecrating each thought word and deed in a spirit of gratitude to the field of experience, Isvara or God by whatever name, knowing that we are not in control of the results. Devotion to Isvara is key because it manages the childish egoic doer – the adaptive child program we are all endowed with. If we faithfully put karma yoga into practice, live a dharmic life with good values honoring the law of noninjury to ourselves and everyone else, we will be happy whether we realize the Self or not, let alone actualize Self-knowledge.
Self-actualization basically comes down to complete negation of the conceptual identity or doer as your primary identity. Meaning your personal identity is as good as non-existent, not non-existent, please note. The essence of the jiva or person is known to be you, Consciousness. It’s the conceptual identity that is the problem because it puts the ego in charge with its likes and dislikes. Our likes and dislikes are the window dressing to our deeper blockages. The essence of the jiva is problem free. If we get this, it is the culmination of the process of moksa. But it won’t happen unless we have worked through the 75%. Many inquirers fall short once they have realized the Self, and believe they can skip this part. But there are no shortcuts to freedom. It all seems like very hard work, but the good news here is that you don’t need to worry about moksa obtaining or wait to be happy.. All you need is to latch onto the fact that you must be the witness and not the doer, concentrate on catching those likes and dislikes, and leave the rest to God. You will be happy.
The doer cannot free the doer; only Self-knowledge does that. Freedom from limitation is not about getting anything. It is about losing something: ignorance of our true nature. There is never anything to get. If we don’t have enough love in our lives, it’s not because we don’t have someone to love or were never loved. The same applies to anything else we desire – be it fun, inspiration, joy, respect – you name it. Vedanta points us to the truth of the fact that all objects, i.e., anything outside of me, Consciousness, cannot give me what I really want because the joy is not in objects. I and I alone am whole and complete, the source of everything I seek. I need nothing to experience this. Yet something is blocking me from doing so. I better find out what that is, or just keep suffering.
What we all really want is to experience the love we are, 24/7. So we have a problem here because if I am what I am looking for but don’t experience joy or satisfaction, what is standing in the way? Vedanta reveals that standing in the way is the idea that I am either superior, or I must fix myself because there is something wrong with me, or I must gain or remove something outside of me that will make me happy. I am never not the Self, and if I could just get that, it’s all I need to know. But if there is some blockage in the way of me experiencing my true nature, then I need to neutralize both the doer and its likes and dislikes to get to the perfect satisfaction that is my true nature. Easier said than done.
Sacrificing Doership and our Likes and Dislikes the Secret To Happiness
It is tempting to believe that moksa means we will never have another bad day, another bad mood or bad thought. It doesn’t mean that. It means that we are never identified with a bad day, bad mood or bad thought. We do not have to be perfect as people. Just dispassionate and discriminating about the egoic doer. Many spiritual paths promote renunciation of desire as the secret to happiness. But that does not remove the doer. Renunciation requires a renouncer. A renouncer is still a doer, even if it is a more refined doer. In fact it may be a more problematic doer because renouncers are prone to spiritual vanity about how spiritual they are.
Yet the paradox is that to renounce the renouncer requires sacrificing the idea of doership, ergo the ego, completely. It doesn’t mean we stop doing. To renounce doership, we need to be willing to sacrifice our bedrock likes and dislikes for karma yoga to work. Sacrificing is hard for most of us. After all, aren’t our likes and dislikes what makes life interesting, that defines us as individuals? Who would I be without my likes and dislikes? Heck, I work hard on enhancing them! For most people this is true, or seems to be. Our entire world economy would come to an abrupt end if nobody had any more likes or dislikes. We would all be entirely happy with what we have.
If we are dedicated inquirers, we hear this and think, Ok, I get it. I can act but I just have to surrender the results. I can do that. Karma yoga sounds easy, right? Just give up the idea of doership. So why are we not so great at it? Because we are not actually doing it right though we think we are. Sacrificing our likes and dislikes is not just a matter of managing them by accommodating to life, accepting what comes our way, and not creating blowback karma for ourselves. While that is a big improvement on being totally at the mercy of what happens to us, it does not go deep enough to truly free of us of the limitations of our personal program, i.e., our unconscious psychological blockages and egoic identity. Sacrificing our likes and dislikes means that we realize that likes and dislikes run our lives because they are symptoms of something much deeper – bedrock ignorance.
Newsflash: Every Thought/Feeling is a Like or a Dislike
There are billions of experiences we could be having in every moment of our existence. Life never stops delivering them. Experiences never end until the body dies. You can only ever experience the one that is right in front of you, right now. I can choose to go to India to live in an ashram when it’s as hot as Hades. Or I can go to a nightclub and drink until dawn. I can stay home and listen to a satsang. But am I in control of the experience in front of me, right now, whether in India, a nightclub, or at home? No. We have control over none of them, other than our attitude to them. To get what we want we can take appropriate action, but there are countless factors involved in every experience we have that are utterly beyond our control.
The primary experience we are having every moment of our existence is that of Existence shining as Consciousness, the witness. It is prior to all experience, always there, without fail, shining gloriously. This fact may not be obvious to you but if it were not so, you would not be around to have any experience. But we are not aware of it because our primary experience is covered up by Maya in the form of our likes and dislikes. The vastness of who we are is reduced to a miniscule aperture of awareness, our fears and desires behind every thought and emotion, and we are quite literally blind to everything else. We are in bondage to this limited persona. Is it any wonder I suffer, identified as I am with the smallest idea of who I am, when I Am actually that which shines and the world shines after me? Maya is a wonder indeed.
To make things worse, instead of accepting each moment as it is, the doer in us tends to do everything in its power to manipulate each exprience to get what we want or avoid what we don’t want. This requires a lot of effort, and it wears us out because life just keeps coming at us. We cannot do anything about macrocosmic Maya, it’s not going away when we know what it is. But in allowing the experience of each like and dislike as it arises, thought by thought, to be seen and to pass through the mind unobstructed, this eventually takes care of the deeper fears and desires from which that like or dislike arises. When we sacrifice each like or dislike on the altar of karma yoga the instant it arises, it chips away at the deeper samskara, one thought at a time. Attend to the small ones and the big ones take care of themselves. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes.
If we can greet every experience generated thought/feeling, good or bad, as God visiting us, showing us something we need to see, without judging it, every moment of our lives is a sacred moment. One that has never happened before and will never happen again. Whether we choose to act on the like or dislike or not, if we acknowledge it, honor it, and let it go, it will not stick to us. We remain a tabula rasa because we are the witness, standing as Awareness. Love rules as I identify with my primary experience, not the secondary interpretation of my subjective human reality.
This is probably the most important realization we can all have, if we want a happy life.
Living like this has a name
Amor fati
Love your fate, which means, love God
Every moment of Every Day
How to do it?
It Takes Learning the True Meaning of Humility, which means:
1. Take a stand as the impersonal witness – my PRIMARY EXPERIENCE.
2. Surrender to God EVERY experience (thought or feeling), i.e. like or dislike, instantly, as it arises. Every single one. DON’T GIVE IT TO THE EGO!
If we can do this, we are living a spiritual life. Then and only then do we allow God to enter our lives, and become our life. Then everything moves through us unobstructed, no matter what shows up at the ego’s dualistic perception door. It is checked at the door. This is the meaning of true devotional practice, and of true humility. We never fail to say yes to God. From this viewpoint, which is the nondual viewpoint whether we know it or not, we can see that whatever experience life presents us is just WHAT IS. Humility is not about being right or wrong. It’s not about something being good or bad. It has nothing to do with who we are as the witness. It’s a movie playing out, just the field delivering karma. This is how the field functions.
Though it seems personal for me as a person, AN EGO, it isn’t. In this gap, we have the power to make a choice. Freedom is in sacrificing our SECONDARY reactions, whether it’s a mild or extreme like or a dislike, in true surrender to the field, or God, MY PRIMARY EXPERIENCE. We don’t deny secondary experiences. Even if we act on a like or dislike, we still do so as the witness, and let it pass through. That’s where karma yoga comes in.
We take appropriate action in the spirit of gratitude and surrender to God. The renunciation is not a giving up but an impartial recognition of what is. It is an attitude to life that instantly produces a state of grace, that of the witness. From this we access the bliss that is our true nature. This is easier to do with the mild reactions we have to what life presents to us. But it is very hard to do when life hits us hard where it hurts most: the ego identity. And that is where we develop humility, and when it matters most. While an injured ego is hard to let go of, it involves far more suffering to hang on to it.
Total Surrender of Likes and Dislikes
Every like and dislike involves karma, and often, a lot of it. Just think back to a time you had a huge reaction to Isvara when life delivered a tough experience. The emotions that took over your mind, the loss of discrimination and dispassion. The terribly hurt feelings. Now remember this. Karma only applies to the egoic jiva. There is no karma for the Self. To be free of karma requires us not just accepting what is happening, suppressing, rationalizing, or sucking it up. When we do that, we do have a better life, but what we are actually doing without realizing it is maintaining the right to keep our likes and dislikes. We are choosing not to act on them, but we are not neutralizing them and we are not letting them pass through. We are banking them. Ergo, the ego is alive and well, just muted and in abeyance. Total surrender is something much deeper, and thus, harder.
If we want an end to suffering, we must take the next step, total surrender – humility. This means we don’t accept or deny whatever life has presented to us. We simply notice it and don’t take it on, so we don’t have to give it up. We are like Teflon, nothing sticks. That is the surrender that does not involve the ego because it simply negates the ego’s likes and dislikes, instantly. Just like a bug zapper kills mosquitoes. Because every thought and feeling houses a like or a dislike, to be effective, this practice requires vigilance of every thought and feeling, before it morphs into unwanted karma. Which unchecked, it will. And very quickly.
If we can do this, it is tantamount to freedom. It is not anything mystical or exclusive, available only to the rarified few who have reached a special status or reached a certain ‘level’ of knowledge. Nobody is special because there is only one Self. Though our ego identity seems unique to us, there is only one ego and we all share it. Why care what the field delivers to us? Ignorance is not personal and nor is the field of life. It is entirely possible for everyone to practice this kind of mind management by taking the stand of the witness. You do not have to wait twenty or thirty years to actualize Self-knowledge to do so. You can actualize it one thought at a time, right now, in every moment of your life.
Get that standing in the way of experiencing who you are, are your likes and dislikes. They are your blockages. Think of how many you are unaware of and submit to reactively, or cater to because you have normalized them as ‘oh that’s just how I am, it’s no big deal’? Or, you give them a pass because you are the Self and free to act any way you wish? Even when we catch them, what we tend to do is to manipulate our reactions instead of allowing the likes and dislikes to pass through without denying or acting on them. Or we try to fix the situation in the world instead of what caused it – the egoic doer who wants what it wants.
Go For the Low Hanging Fruit
If you want to know where to start practicing being free of the egoic doer and disarming our secondary reactions, it’s easy. Our instinctive likes and dislikes are the low hanging fruit that reveal to us what is unacknowledged or denied in the unconscious, or our childhood conditioning, the adaptive child program. They are the road signs to your blockages which have been there a long time, most of your life, and you have been normalizing the suffering that comes from them. They are there for us to see every moment of every day, in every transaction with the world.
Start identifying them and see them as a gift, your gateway to freedom. Negating them allows us to access and return to our natural state of peace, our primary experience as the witness.
Isvara built a powerful healing drive into the psyche. The stuff we have buried in the unconscious wants to come out because it is contrary to who we really are. To be free of this unconscious pattern requires us to make a sankalpa, which is a firm decision to sacrifice the reaction to the likes and dislikes in true karma yoga spirit, to not take things on, and practice letting go. It seems hard but it’s actually much harder to live ruled by them. Just try it and see for yourself. I guarantee you it works.
To be able to totally surrender to God, Isvara or life, and live as the undefended or untethered Self, means you have made the hard and fast commitment that you do not want to live in pain anymore. You just refuse. But your refusal is not denial. It’s like you finally realize that you are sick because you have been eating bad food all your life, and to cope you turned to doctors for magic pills to keep you going, feeding the monster, keeping it alive. But you are not and never have been really sick, not intrinsically so. You just need to stop eating bad food to feel better. What is bad food? Your likes and dislikes. You have been stuffing yourself with them your whole life, adding more and more layers to your blockages, getting sicker by the day.
You may wrongly be convinced that your likes and dislikes are innocuous, that they make up your individuality, that they are the source of your pleasure and your sense of agency. But look again. We are never satisfied for long when we get what we want or avoid what we don’t want if we have not addressed the real issue: the one who wants, wants, wants. That voracious mouth can never be satisfied, that stomach can never find nutrition by getting or avoiding anything. Face the fact that getting what you want or avoiding what you don’t want is totally OVERRATED! In fact your likes and dislikes are responsible for every bit of suffering you have ever experienced.
You have been doing what you have been doing trying to be happy your entire life. Essentially by insisting on getting what you wanted or never got in childhood, and it NEVER works, for long. Yet you keep right on doing it. And because life inevitably fails us when we approach it this way, instead of changing our thinking, we build a dam around our likes and dislikes to protect ourselves. We live holding on to and stewing at all the wrongs that happened to us, blaming others, you did this, you did that, HOW DARE YOU TREAT ME THIS WAY!! You betrayed me, you let me down, blah blah blah. Why this why that. Drip by drip, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, we poison our mind and turn the lock in the key to the prison of limitation we keep it in. It’s fine to acknowledge feelings, i.e.,. likes and dislikes, but never allow them to lead. This was good advice given by John. We should all take it on and live this way. If we don’t, all our true bliss is inaccessible to us. We are the ones that suffer when we hang on to our likes and dislikes. Nobody else does.
The love that is our nature is our primary experience in every situation, and can be our lived experience 24/7, is not allowed to flow by our own ignorance. It’s blocked. Instead of removing the dam wall, if righteous indignation does not work, we try so many things to find our bliss. A different teacher or teaching, religion, philosophy, science, deep spiritual or mystical experiences, meditation, relationships, things, you name it. Almost any distraction will do temporarily. Even Vedanta can be used as a spiritual bypass. But we don’t remove the dam wall and just keep adding more defenses to it because though we want to end suffering, we want to do so and keep our likes and dislikes. It will never work because we are keeping the ego alive. They all have to go, if we want to end suffering, that is.
This is not easy, but lucky for us, Vedanta gives us many tools to deal with intractable likes and dislikes which both form deep samskaras and are the result of them. As I said, we have guna yoga that explains what they are, where and how they originate. We have karma yoga which neutralizes them and gets us 75% free of them, if we understand what it is and apply it to every like and dislike. And we have bhakti yoga, or devotional practice, which really does help to manage and negate the childish ego, and relieve the pain of the remaining or residual ignorance.
Bhakti Yoga and Healing the Inner Child Program
The problem with bhakti yoga is that if our worship of God does not include loving ourselves with all our seeming flaws, it will not work to remove the real issue because God is inseparable from who we are. Dualistic worship is a form of gratitude and humility, one that gives homage to a force greater, better and outside of ourselves. I am not knocking religious bhakti, this works for a lot of people. A life with dualistic bhakti is better than a life with no bhakti for God. But for an inquirer, it only puts a band aid on the problem. It’s like giving a baby a pacifier. It will keep the noise of the inner critic silent up to a point. It will relieve the pressure of the ego’s likes and dislikes up to a point. It will keep the doer in check somewhat.
But there is no way to wave a magic wand and make our wounded inner child go away. That thought pattern only affects the jiva who thinks it is a person. Even though our conditioning comes from Isvara, to be free of it, we have to see it and acknowledge how and why it formed. Mostly, we have to love ourselves. We must love and be loved unconditionally to know that love is our true nature, and it is the true nature of God, which we share. If you refuse to love your(not)self and be loved, you will never be free of yourself. No pass on this one.
A few Sundays ago we had Matthew share his experience with us in such a beautiful and vulnerable way. He told us that he is so tired of that critical inner entity and he just wants to be done with it. He has tried everything to get rid of it, and it keeps coming back. He feels that bhakti yoga is the answer. While bhakti yoga is very helpful, it is only really impactful with the intractable samskara of the wounded inner child if it is not a cop out or a way to avoid healing them. Matthew was given two very good bits of advice in dealing with the source of our voices of diminishment. First by Susan who told him that he needs to acknowledge three things:
1. The one who is getting beaten up;
2. The one who is doing the beating up;
3. The witness of both.
Matthew did not feel he wanted or needed to go there. He felt he had done that and just wanted to get rid of it, because it is so painful. As understandable as this is, it is the tamasic approach: denial. It won’t work, which is what Susan pointed out. John Baxter told Matthew that to release the pain of the inner critic requires radical acceptance of ourselves on the jiva level. Both Susan and John are correct. It’s not an either/or, because both are important. But what appealed most to Matthew was John’s advice because it seemed to dispatch more easily with that critical inner entity by immersing the mind in devotional practice.
This can work for some inquirers if true surrender of the ego is part of it. But as is usually the case in life when disarming the defended ego, it’s the harder option we need to tackle most. Why? Because as I said, to heal our wounded inner adaptive child, we must have the courage to meet it and love it. It’s that simple. We cannot jump over this one straight to radical acceptance. If we have never loved or cannot love ourselves as people with all our perceived flaws, we will never be free of our likes and dislikes. They will dog us like a huge shadow hanging over us for the rest of our lives. Karma yoga will not work as it is designed to because the ego that is behind our likes and dislikes is left intact, though we believe we want to be free. Love is the only way in and out. That is in the fine print.
The most insidious kind of enlightenment sickness is the belief that you have done the work or don’t need to do the work. That you can skip straight to moksa or freedom from pain with some magic practice you call ‘self-inquiry’. You can’t. Matthew wanting to negate the jiva without loving it first is a form of enlightenment sickness. Not the inflated egoic kind, but the deflated kind. And it is nonetheless ES. If the ego does not succeed with inflating itself, it will do the next best thing, which is beat itself up – deflation. The ego works the same way when we want anything to be different, or dressing up likes and dislikes to look like legitimate needs or grievances, when they are a front for a samskara. There are many places for ignorance to hide.
We are all perfect children of God and we deserve to love and be love. I think a lot of people turn to spirituality as way of coping with wounds that could just not be healed any other way. Often everything has failed, even therapy. Spirituality will not do the trick either. There is no shortcut to freedom, denial does not work. And the worst kind of denial is the denial we do not know we have. But we cannot impose satya onto mithya, so denial or spiritual bypass will not work. There will be a price to pay, for sure. Certainly there will not be freedom from and for the person.
If we can win through to loving ourselves unconditionally, the next step to fully negate the egoic identity requires taking a stand as the witness, which acknowledges the source of the problem – ignorance of our true nature. Devotional practice is like plugging into God’s electrical current. It keeps us high as long as its effects last. But if our love for God does not include ourselves it will not last. We must have the courage to visit the defended part of ourselves and love it. We will never escape it any other way. Isvara is very strict about this because our nature is love. Happiness is our birthright. We are meant to experience this 24/7 not just sometimes when devotional or spiritual practice or whatever else gets us high enough. What the ego me thinks or feels is not about me, the witness. We have a choice in every moment to allow life to express the way it does and not react according to our likes and dislikes. We can drop our story with all its grievances in an instant and live undefended, free of the limited ego by loving ourselves unconditionally and taking a stand as the witness.
My Experience
If any of you have been following my recent satsangs, you will know that I had a similar experience lately. I was tested by Isvara in a very harsh way, on ES. Initially, I failed the test and my ego got very hurt. Not because I am not seated in the Self, have ever claimed I am enlightened, or felt inflated or glorified by being a ‘teacher of Vedanta’. Quite the opposite, actually. Though Self-knowledge kicked in quickly, I initially failed the test because of what was going on in my personal life. I had a lesson to learn in humility, and it was attached to a remaining childhood samskara which was keeping likes and dislikes alive that I had rationalized as ‘known to me’ and therefore, not a problem.
And they were known to me, but the problem is the adaptive child persona had a deep wound that had not been healed or loved. It had become active in my relationship with James, and had been stealing my bliss for quite a while. I had become focused on what wasn’t there instead of what was there, which is a sure way to welcome suffering. And what I thought wasn’t there wasn’t what actually wasn’t there. It was more a case of what was there – the dissatisfaction caused by wanting things to be different. In other words, likes and dislikes. Maya got me again. As soon as likes and dislikes get a hold, they drag you away from your primary experience as the witness. To get out of this pickle required negating the wounded ego by taking the stand as the witness, and understanding the true meaning of humility. I will explain this more further on.
The wounded child causes so much trouble in our lives because it won’t be denied, and it almost always wants things to be different because it did not get what it wanted. Actually, as Susan points out, it can only tell the truth but usually does so in destructive ways when we can’t or won’t pay it attention. We suffer because we won’t hear it or deny it. I was attributing the unhappiness to what I put down to being misunderstood, to our differences as jivas, to James’ meds. But none of those things matter. What was really happening was that the inner child had made a long ago decision not to be loved fully because it was afraid of loss. So it built a nice strong dam wall around its ability to fully receive love. And when we know who we are, this will not do.
Lucky for me, Isvara also sent a few amazing teachers, Ben, Rory and Lucua, who modeled for me what it means to live truly porous, unaffected by whatever experience appears in front of me. I learned that there are three types of porous. There is the kind where the ego is born quite happy and has a built in ability to be unreactive to life. It has what we often refer to as a ‘sunny personality’, which is a fortunate disposition to have as it makes life much easier. It can become a form of denial but does not need to be, necessarily.
Then we have the kind of porous which is an ego that has learned to adopt non-confrontation as both a coping mechanism and a front. The PC conscious or ‘roll-over-eager-to-please-I-am-so-chilled’ phony kind of porous, often masked as being super nice, or ‘helpful’, is actually the deep need for validation. Passive aggression leaks out revealing the tip of the iceberg of what is hidden from view and denied. There is no faking the real thing.
And then there is the rarest kind, the genuine kind of porous – which is like the wind blowing through an open room, finding no obstruction, leaving no trace. The person that seems to be there may be inconstant, but their essence, the love that is the Self, is unchanging and constant. It never falters. That is the kind of porous James has also always modelled for me, and it is this kind of porous I aspire to. We can all cultivate this. Vedanta gives us the knowledge and the tools to do so.
While nothing can remove the knowledge of my true identity, and Self-knowledge is the lens through which I view all things jiva related, it does not mean that you can ignore a samskara that is still ‘live’. It may not be real in that it does not belong to me, the Self. But to negate it for the sake of the jiva’s peace of mind, we first need to identify it. Self-knowledge did the healing, which came with loving that part of my ‘not’ self, and rewriting its script according to nonduality. Please note that both going there and rewriting the script are important. Again, an important point John raised, and one we need all to take on.
Now, when each experience of every moment of every day presents itself to me, it can pass right through me because the dam wall is not there obstructing the love that is me from flowing ‘in and out’. This is the real purpose and meaning of bhakti yoga. You are the love that makes everything possible. Though devotion comes naturally in true humility and gratitude for all life gives us, you do not need a devotional practice to receive or give love to you because you are love, it is your nature.
Does this mean I will never have another preference for anything? No, of course not. life requires us to transact with it. There is nothing wrong with having preferences – it’s the need for them to be fulfilled that causes binding likes and dislikes, which are the blockages to the bliss that is me. Does it mean I never stand up to anything or experience anger, joy, irritation, excitement, etc.? No, it does not. To be free as the Self means I am free to feel anything. But it does mean that all experiences will not leave a trace, and just pass through, almost as fast as they arise, if they arise.
I am not saying this means I am home free and will never have any likes or dislikes ever again. I am quite sure that those will reappear as thoughts and feelings because that is how mithya works. The hardest part of any experience to let go of is the dislike part – things that hurt or upset us. But as I know that having likes and dislikes is like eating bad food, and I want peace of mind more than anything else, I have made the choice to be happy. This means sacrificing ALL likes and dislikes on the altar of karma yoga. No exceptions, no matter what. Note that karma yoga does not mean I cannot act on a like or dislike. It is total surrender to the field if I do or do not. I give up all results so nothing sticks to me. Eternal vigilance is the price to pay for freedom.
Sundari
