My talk today will focus on binding tendencies, or likes and dislikes. Especially the ones we have normalized under the authority of privilege and entitlement, and what the cost of this is to us. There was a discussion at the seminar in Spain with one inquirer who challenged James about the idea he had from some other teaching that it is necessary and essential to destroy the ego completely. He got extremely upset and left when James told him that is not correct, explained why, and warned him not to go down that path. Well firstly, you can’t destroy the ego because it’s not real. It’s just an idea, a thought, appearing in me that has usurped my identity. It has co-opted the I of the Self and given it to my body mind, or personal identity. The ego is another name for the doer.
Secondly the ego in its proper place is a function of the Subtle Body and is required to transact with the world. But it’s supposed to be nothing more than a messenger between my mind or inner subjective world, and the field of life, the seemingly outer world, to help me transact with and navigate the information coming in from the field, and take appropriate action. The problem comes when the ego is put in charge of the mind and intellect. It is not qualified do the job, and it is afraid because of this, just like promoting the office messenger to CEO would be disastrous. Can you imagine if you were put in this situation? You would be fully aware of your incompetence yet you would have to try to manipulate and fool everyone into thinking you are the boss. This is how the negative ego functions.
This needy, defensive small fear thought interprets life according to your privilege and entitlement, which are behind binding likes and dislikes. In which case the mind and intellect are a prisoner of its interpretations, projections and denials. James explains the Subtle body in HTAE as a triangle, which optimally should have the intellect at the top, mind or emotions on one side and ego on the other. This is a balanced well-functioning mind. We need all three functions working properly. You cannot do away with the ego. But if either the ego or the emotions are at the top of the triangle, we are in trouble.
Emotions cannot be denied as they are a function of thinking, but they must be subjugated to the intellect. The ego must be subjugated to both. It can never be put in charge. Furthermore, it is impossible and unnecessary to remove all likes and dislikes, vasanas and even samskaras. Not all desires are opposed to dharma, such as a love of scripture, love of your family or your duty in life, or living dharmically. It’s when that love and desire become bondage that it’s a big problem. Our privilege and negative tendencies do need to be negated, which means turned into burned ropes that no longer bind. They become preferences we hold very lightly and can let go in a heartbeat. Just as easy as blowing a leaf off your hand. Negate does not mean destroy, please note. It means cancel – as James pointed out yesterday. When we cancel something or someone we no longer need it, or them. We simply remove the bondage.
You Cannot Impose Satya Onto Mithya
Remember it’s not necessary to become a perfect person for moksa to obtain. The person is a concept, it is not real. And we all know the definition of real is that which is always present and never changes. But the person does exist, and identification with it is where all our ignorance lies. To be free of limitation, it is only necessary to understand what the jiva is, why it is conditioned the way it is, and how to re-educate the mind under the management of Self-knowledge, nonduality. But while all you need for moksa essential is the ability to discriminate between satya and mithya, it does not work to impose satya onto mithya.
It is really quite simple to understand Vedanta’s central message – that there is nothing wrong with you other than ignorance of your true nature. Once you know you are the Self, that should be it, right? But unfortunately, due to the tenacious nature of ignorance, it usually is not. The ego survives the initial ‘Self-realization’, and the reason for that is that nonduality is extremely subtle, and the mind is entrained by duality, which makes it very hard to objectify the mind/ego. Often even advanced inquirers who think they are discriminating between satya and mithya do not realize that they are doing so as an ego, not as the Self.
You Are A Perfect Child of God
Vedanta tells you upfront that you are a perfect child of God, and your true nature is nondual, unlimited, ever-full Consciousness. For most people, this is such a powerful realization, and depending on how qualified and dedicated you are, Self-realization tends to happen at the beginning of self-inquiry. But what most inquirers miss is that Self-realization is where inquiry begins, not ends. Self-realization is 5 – 25% of the process of freeing the mind of limitation, moksa. Self-actualization, which is what any true inquirer is aiming for, is the last part of self-inquiry, and that is the same 5 – 25% of the process of moksa, just more advanced.
(Please note- these percentages are just indicators to illustrate the point I am making. They are not set in stone as every inquirer has their unique avidya and different levels of qualifications for moksa).
So what is the other 75% of inquiry? It is where all the ‘work’ of inquiry takes place. And what is that work? For moksa to obtain, Self-knowledge must negate our binding vasanas, which boils down to neutralizing likes and dislikes – i.e., the ego or doer. Therefore, most of the process and our biggest obstacle to freedom from the egoic doer, are our likes and dislikes. They are the lens through which we transact with the field of life, and because we are not separate from the field, our likes and dislikes determine how it responds to us. If we are committed to moksa, it is karma yoga that does the heavy lifting in our psychological emancipation from them. There is no way to proceed to freedom from limitation without it. And for Karma yoga to be effective, it must be understood and applied properly, not just given lip service to.`
Vedanta is the perfect teaching. Its logic is methodical, not subject to interpretation, and impossible to argue with providing you are qualified, taught by a qualified teacher, and assimilate what it is saying. Self-realization is the understanding that Consciousness must be your true nature because it is the only factor that cannot be negated. We can remove all other variable factors you could possibly come up with, but you cannot remove Consciousness. Even if you are identified with reflected consciousness as your identity, meaning your personal awareness, you still cannot remove Consciousness because you would have to be conscious to do so. We must all agree with this as it is the fundamental logic of existence.
However, the next step, understanding what it means to BE Consciousness, living Self-knowledge as your true identity, is much harder because it requires the hard and fast assimilation of that logic. There are many factors in the way of this taking place, all of them relating to your identity as a person, how qualified and dedicated you are to freedom from limitation, if you are properly taught, and of course, the grace of Isvara.
Nonduality Never Bends
If you do not understand what Vedanta is saying, you will more than likely interpret and argue with it. But nonduality is implacable, and it will not bend to anything. If some qualifications are missing and you do not agree with it, the fault is in you, never in the teachings. At the beginning of the teaching here this week, James spoke about self-inquiry with reference to nonduality boils down to the examination of experience. If the nondual teachings assimilated, you will know that you are always only ever experiencing the nondual Self because there is no other option. What does this mean if the Self is not an experiencer? It means that Consciousness makes all experience possible, and all experience points to one thing only: that you are the witness of all experience, and of course, the experiencer. Therefore, the examination of experience must take us to both recognizing that all experience is Consciousness, and that I am not the experiencer. This is the essence of discrimination, and if Self-knowledge is firm, it will transform your life experience.
I Know Who I Am But I Am Still Not that Happy
What if you don’t find fault with the teachings, and you think you understand what nonduality means, you think you are discriminating between satya and mithya, but your life experience is not transformed? Where most inquirers come unstuck, or just plain stuck, is that they discount or do not understand what karma yoga entails, how important it is, and that it is inextricably linked to dharma. What stands in the way, especially for Westerners, is the invisible prison of privilege and entitlement most of us are born into, and the likes and dislikes it gives rise to. In other words, the egoic jiva program, ala Western values.
Karma Yoga Means Breaking Through the Invisible Prison of Privilege and The Entitlement it Breeds
Karma yoga sounds easy. But if it is applied properly, it is far from easy, at first. In a nutshell, karma yoga is taking appropriate action (or inaction as the case may be), 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. But it entails much more than that because it is possible to fool yourself into thinking that you are practicing karma yoga, without actually doing so.
Karma yoga is an attitude to life of complete surrender and accommodation to God. Only in this way will we always follow dharma. Not just when it suits you, or where your sense of entitlement and privilege has allowed you to rationalize and excuse your likes and dislikes. IT IS ALL OF THE TIME, in all situations, no fine print. Karma yoga is perfectly designed to negate likes and dislikes, which is to say, the doer, but the human program or ego with its inbuilt ignorance is extremely adept at side-stepping this fact.
How often do we react to what Isvara brings us with our trumped up importance, insistence on being right and our manufactured justifications based on a cast-iron righteous sense of privilege, expectations and entitlement? We see this play out all the time, we saw it play out here this week, and how unconscious many inquirers are of it. When push comes to shove, even some of those who can recite the nondual teachings are much more invested in their comfort than following dharma in the karma yoga spirit.
Take It As Prasad and Give Up Being Right and Entitled
The hardest, most inconvenient and most important part of karma yoga is taking everything that comes to you as prasad – a gift. This means giving up being right AND entitled, about everything. Think about it. You are entitled to nothing. Everything is given to us by Isvara. And though we don’t always get what we want, we always get what we need, whether we like it or not is irrelevant. Isvara does not make mistakes. Whatever you get dished up by life is not a mistake, unless you refuse it. Then you become the mistake. Be honest about how much this plays out in your life. Take a long hard look at the hardwired ignorance, even if it is uncomfortable. Know that it is not personal, and it is very human.
When we see inquirers who are bound to their likes and dislikes, oblivious to the manipulation of their unconscious privilege and entitlement, as well as the passive aggression that comes with it, we see a small child who never got what they wanted. That is the dissatisfaction always at the root of the adaptive child program. I never got the love, attention, or validation every child needs to grow into a mature and self-confident adult, so I want the world to give it to me. I demand it! I impose this on all my interactions with the field, and I am usually extremely good at covering my tracks by being ‘nice’ to everyone, so I feel self-righteous and justified. Sound familiar, anyone?
Stuck in the Prison of Your Privilege and Expectation – An Ignorance Set Point
But life will not always give you what you want. It will hollow you out and break you when you refuse to grow and accept what you need to do so. Eventually, Isvara will flatten you. Nobody is here to resolve your karma, only their own. You pay a very high price for hanging onto your privilege and the likes and dislikes it manufactures. When this tendency is playing out in your life, no matter how dedicated an inquirer you think you are, it will create what I term an ‘ignorance set point’.
It’s like an invisible, transparent and impermeable ceiling that prevents the assimilation of non-dual knowledge. You may be able to parrot the teachings, even think you are applying them. You may think you are a considerate, kind or thoughtful person, but you are still stuck in the prison of your privilege. Most westerners are oblivious to this overlay that comes with the culture of expectation we live in. The only thing that will free you is radical honesty, and it will hurt. A lot. What price freedom? Do you really want to drag that needy dissatisfied child around with you, like an albatross around your neck, for the rest of your life? Surely not. So, get with the program and do a reality reset.
We Are Born to Control
A reality reset is a huge step for almost all of us, Often described as intuition or “gut feelings” my responses (read likes and dislikes) are determined by a long history of heredity in combination with adjustments influenced by environment and culture – namely, Isvara/Causal body or Macrocosmic Unconscious, what we also call ‘system 1’. Poor ‘system 2’, the Jiva, is like David going up against System 1, Goliath/Isvara’. Yet, despite this, we are born to control. One of the most disturbing feelings for most people is the perception of lack of control. That’s another reason we hang on for dear life to our precious likes and dislikes. They make us feel like we have agency. When we feel helpless, or believe we have the inability to change things, we feel afraid and insecure. And we tend to surrender our will to outside forces, consciously or unconsciously. Which of course, makes us feel even worse. For some, this external emphasis is devastating because we believe we have control of our choices and the reasons we make them. Insisting on having things our way is fundamentally a fear based response to life.
The drive to follow our likes and dislikes is so instinctive and powerful that the mind is primed to do so and to go against this urge feels unsafe, unnatural, like swimming against the tide. And it is, looking at things from the dualistic perspective. We are all made the way we are made when we are born, and we are further conditioned by our life karma. We are all swimming in the same fish bowl of duality unless we find Vedanta. Until then, are we merely slaves to Isvara, seduced by the illusion that we do have agency? Can we even make meaningful adjustments within the limits of our motivational destiny?
Changing our Motivational Destiny
If we are tired of living with a mind in bondage to chasing our likes and avoiding our dislikes, Vedanta throws us a life vest and shows us where the lifeboats are. Likes and dislikes relate only to the mind under the spell of ignorance, not to a mind that knows it is the Self and lives it. However, though the nondual Self does not ‘get’ actualized because it is what is actual, there is no doubt that actualizing Self-knowledge is the hard part. Training the dualistic mind to function on a completely different operating system – nonduality – is the hardest thing anyone will ever do. A good friend of James once told him that there must be only about 20 people in the world that really know what he is talking about! And it is true. Though many people talk about nonduality, few are those who know what it is and what it means to live it.
The Glory of Man is Not What He Thinks It Is
Swami Dayananda remarks, “It is the glory of man that he is conscious of himself. However, the self he is aware of is not a complete, adequate self. It is, unfortunately, a wanting, inadequate self.” Meaning, we confuse the egoic self with Consciousness, the Self. The problem with self-consciousness is that the ‘self’ we become aware of may not be acceptable to us, which is why most people are driven by a sense of lack and inadequacy. Reeling against this sense of self-limitation, the mind is driven to fulfill various desires and avoid fears. “I want or I don’t want’ becomes the mantra of the mind because we want more than anything to overcome the sense of limitation we feel at the core of our being. Keep this in mind whenever you find yourself stuck in wanting life to give you what you deem it should.
The main reason we suffer so much fear is that duality makes us feel separate, inadequate and incomplete. A person can only want something they think they don’t already have. If you want to be happy it’s because you don’t feel happy. If you want to be whole it’s because you don’t feel whole. Therefore, the more acutely you feel yourself to be lacking, the stronger your desires, wants and fears (likes and dislikes) will be.
The mind is extroverted by its inborn nature and social conditioning only reinforces this. Therefore, we tend to fixate upon the objects of our environment. We determine from an early age that if we could just get the world to match up to how we want it to be—according to our unexamined likes and dislikes, if we can control and master the transactional world to get what we want—we’ll be happy and complete. But this never works, not for long. Life doesn’t care what we want, it will give us what we need. And the problem with that is the ego does not want to hear it.
The Duryodhana Factor
The coining of the Duryodhana Factor is a play on the name of the primary antagonist of the Bhagavad Gita, Duryodhana, who was hard, cruel and ruthless. It came to me when I identified the remaining unconscious, hard, resistant and defended part of the ego. It’s also what I call the adaptive child persona, and others call the wounded child persona. We all have this protective mechanism that develops as we learn to cope with whatever karma life hands us when we come into this world, where injury is inevitable, and we don’t get what we want. Whether that is not enough love and attention or other factors, the DF develops because we did not feel safe as children, for whatever reason.
It is the control centre or headquarters if you like, of the fearful, negative ego. That’s why it’s so defended. Even people who have had seemingly perfect childhoods develop the DF because of the nature of duality, Maya. Nothing in life is certain, which from the ego’s point of view, makes life inherently dangerous and filled with anxiety. Which it is if we are identified with the body mind. Loss and suffering are part and parcel of the deal if you think you are a ‘someone’.
Though our subjective reality seems very personal, we all have more or less the same cognitive biases and psychological protective mechanisms because injury is inevitable for all humans. Nobody gets everything they want until the one who wants is negated. Only then are we satisfied because we are what we want. To even consider this as an option, we must accept the zero sum nature of life.
The Zero Sum Nature of Life
The scripture says that the only sane way to live is to accept the zero sum nature of reality. What does this mean? It means that while we are free to act or to want a particular result, there is no point in being attached to the outcome because you will lose as much as you gain. The field is set up that way, and it knows what the Total and the individual need to grow. There are so many factors at play for anything to happen, and nobody is in control of them other than the creator of the field: Isvara. So, while we all act for results of course (otherwise, why act at all?), to do so in the spirit of consecration AND surrender to Isvara means giving up the fallacy that you have the right to your likes and dislikes being met. God forbid! You may have to accept being out of your comfort zone, once in a while. Imagine that.
Many inquirers miss this fine print when they sign onto karma yoga. But if you cannot take this step, your ‘surrender’ is just lip service, and your karma yoga is not karma yoga. It simply will not work. In the garden of your mind, if you want a beautiful garden, you cannot reserve a spot for weeds. And by weeds I mean your likes and dislikes. If you want freedom from bondage, they all have to be inquired into and negated, even the positive ones. Yes, even those. Freedom means freedom from bondage to objects, remember? That means any object.
If you commit to this, you have found the secret to living a sane, satisfied life. You have stopped manipulating everyone and everything in your field of experience to get what you want. You live in gratitude, accommodation, humility and dispassion, accepting life as it appears before you, taking appropriate stress free action when necessary, trusting that the field of life is always looking after you, giving you what you need. It does not mean that you never act on a like or dislike. You just do so in line with Isvara. Meaning, you take your instructions first and foremost from Isvara, not from your likes and dislikes.
It is such hard work to insist on getting what you want or never got. So you let God do your life because it is so much easier than believing you must ‘do’ your way to anything. This is when life really starts to work for you. As Lucua pointed out in her talk, when we see people with unconscious cast iron likes and dislikes, and how hard they work at manipulating life, we see people who will be lonely and alone. No matter how much you sugar coat them, eventually everyone tires of your manipulations. Life closes its back on you, and your world shrinks to the size of your smallness.
The Triangle of Karma and Dharma
To live well and practice karma yoga properly, we need to understand the three types of dharma, because karma yoga and dharma are inextricably linked. Dharma in simple terms means the natural laws that govern the nature of the field, and our nature, based on the law of non-injury. But the application of these laws needs to be understood. To simplify the field to a triangle, where Isvara (universal or samanya dharma) is at the top, the field of existence (situational or visesa dharma) is in one corner, and you, the person (personal or svadharma) are in the other corner. In the middle you have the three gunas generating the constituents of action – all the many factors at play at all times, never static, always in a state of flux. We cannot separate the person from the field or from Isvara, because it is one field, and its true essence is Consciousness. This is the garden of life metaphor, and the sun, Consciousness, shines on all of it.
But though Isvara is the intelligent creative principle, it is not conscious in the way the person is. Isvara is not a person. It is simply the intelligence in and behind the field of action, in which the person lives and acts. There is nothing like premeditation in Isvara’s creation because though Isvara is conscious and knows everything happening in the Field of Existence, it does not ‘think’ or act. It is not hiding behind a veil taking score of everything we do, meting out good or bad karma. Isvara keeps the mithya show going to facilitate our karma with the endless and automatic working out of the gunas. The presence of Consciousness makes thinking and doing possible.
The Garden of the Mind
The field of existence, which is another way to describe Isvara, is intelligent but not conscious either – it does not think but simply acts according to the natural laws that govern it. Sentient life, whether plant or animal, are just programs run by Isvara and they never have a problem with their svadharma because they cannot step out of their program. It is only people who can. Consciously or not, we can make choices which are not in harmony with our inborn nature, and with the nature of the field, and we suffer the consequences. Only we need karma yoga. Because of Maya, the person identifies with its thoughts and believes it is a doer/thinker, separate from the objects/Field of Existence, blind to its true nature as Consciousness, believing it must be the doer acting to get what it wants. This brings us to our personal garden to use Lucua’s metaphor. What governs, sustains or disturbs the garden of our mind?
If your mind is under the management of Self-knowledge, your garden will flourish because though the sun does not always seem to shine on it, you know that in truth, the sun is always shining behind the clouds. And that sun is you, Consciousness. Karma yoga is your natural response to the ever-changing field, and life continues pretty much as ‘before’ moksa, but your orientation will have done a 180% change because you no longer identify with your small identity as a person, bound to your tyrannical likes and dislikes. The person is not necessarily improved or different, though your character will improve, and you will like yourself a whole lot more. So will others, and your life will work beautifully, no matter what.
Doing continues but the idea of doership has been permanently negated by Self-knowledge, as are binding vasanas, likes and dislikes. You know that as Consciousness you are not the doer, and nor are you the doer as the person. The only ‘doer’ is Isvara, the gunas, but not in the sense we think of doing because as stated, Isvara is not a person. Isvara is the ruler/sustainer and destroyer of the world of objects, the dharmafield. When you truly know this and live it, you have become a mature, sane person, whether or not Self-knowledge is firm.
Get This: Wanting Thing to Be Different the Source of Suffering
So why am I unhappy even though I know I am the Self? The problem is not that life is not the way I want it to be. The problem is privilege: I feel entitled and I want life to be other than the way it is to suit me. I want it to bend to me. Instead of honoring, respecting and appreciating every moment as a sacred God moment, whether or not that leaves me in my comfort zone, my mind is either totally projected towards what I don’t have or in rejection of what I do have.
It is hard at work manufacturing all the justifications for my unmet expectations and dissatisfaction with what is in front of me. Rajas (desire) and tamas (denial) are in control. Sattva (clarity) is always there too, but unavailable to me, as is peace of mind. This does not mean I have to accept adharmic situations and never change anything. There are times that we are required to act to make changes, and we do so by taking appropriate action with karma yoga, in surrender to Isvara. We are talking here about gratuitous adharmic likes and dislikes that I as the egoic doer impose on life. How do I know if a like or dislike is adharmic or dharmic?
What Does Dharma Have to Do with Likes and Dislikes?
Positive and negative values (likes and dislikes) become obstacles to the natural unfolding of the eternal desire for freedom. Actualizing the innate desire for freedom whether we recognize it or not is the goal of evolution, it is why we are here, the only true purpose of life. Which is not going forward to some utopian state, but returning to our natural essential ‘state’ before we were born, and after the body dies. It is reversing the reversal that Maya, duality, imposes on the mind, and restoring normality.
Our likes and dislikes hinder the natural movement of life toward its source – ever-free, unborn Existence shining as Consciousness – which is likened to the flow of water in an irrigation ditch. If the waters of Consciousness are going to irrigate life, which is a karma-dharma field, and produce food, which is to say satisfaction, our attractions and aversions need to be removed or the water will be diverted and not arrive at its intended destination. Our likes and dislikes are like building a dam in the middle of a free flowing river. They stop the flow, and nothing gets passed them.
Therefore, if you HAVE to act on a like or dislike no matter what, it’s likely a gratuitous adharmic like or dislike. Personal dharma is hard to determine as it is different for everyone. Universal dharma is the same for everyone – as stated, it basically comes down to non-injury in thought, word and deed. But again, situational ethics means how that plays out is determined by my karma. Sometimes I must take action that could hurt someone, but is dharmic for me. This can be tricky because the ego knows how to justify getting what it wants, so honesty is crucial for non-injury. If I am always trying to please others at my expense, or afraid to rock the boat, or try to take on other people’s problems, I am breaking dharma. And I will face the karma that comes with that. So investigate the need to be seen as a ‘good’ person as that is its own kind of prison.
Om Tat Sat
