Sundari: Your email is one of the most inspiring and beautifully written I have received in a while. It conveys all the tenderness and vulnerability of the jiva identity as it hovers so impossibly between the finite and the infinite. Words cannot do that experience justice, as it is so much more than mere experience, and words are so limited. It is the inevitable reckoning of the nascent knowledge of the truth of who we are as it does battle with ignorance. Nothing short of astonishing is what that process often entails. The lengths Isvara goes to get our attention focused on the Self, wrenched away from the manic tentacles of Maya.
Nathan: I was looking for writings or pictures of Swami A and collected some ever since Ramji told the stories about the Swami visiting the wise lady tending statues in the river and him saying “take it easy” in a Satsang I attended. I just wanted to be near, nothing else. There is one where Swami C and Swami A are looking at each other – the freedom is palpable, like sparks arcing between them.
Sundari: Yes, that is one of my favourites. These two great beings were true Mahatmas, the rarest of incarnate souls. Their shakti still reverberates through the fabric of the field, as powerfully as it did when they were still alive. Swami Abhedananda in particular, for me. But though they were rare and unique beings who were powerhouses of Self embodiment, they were not more the Self than you or me. This is their gift to the world: ‘See this is who you are, Don’t admire me. Be me’.
Nathan: Feeling much better thank you – my son says I look like a zombie when we go swimming (a 15-inch scar), but I prefer “pirate”. My intestine had just twisted up and part “died” in the night – some hours later I would have been dead – but was minutes away from exactly the right hospital and so grateful to Ishvara. Just days prior I was away on an engineering trip in the boondocks and that would have been bad. The teachings helped so much. Listening and reflecting while seeing so many people in an emergency. How futile the complaints they made were, astonishingly disrespectful to nurses and doctors.
At the same time, I could see vasanas in me; old drives to “be something” with the apparent threat of “being nothing” – like a Damocles sword. But now I was immobile, unable to “do” anything. Just as futile as the complaints around me were, vasanas were flailing around as well. Worse, I really thought I had dealt with those vasanas!
Sundari: Nothing like a brush with death to shatter the hypnosis of Maya. It’s a pity Isvara does not offer the wake up call more often to more people! It’s totally ridiculous how Maya is so adept at denying or robbing humans of true self-validation, while at the same time, imbuing them with such a false sense of entitlement. A very unfortunate mix of attributes indeed. That Damocles sword is thus ever present, and will inevitably fall. Always a zero sum.
Nathan: Ishvara as my body, I believe, had a rebellion, like throttling me internally. The doctors could find no “cause”, just said it must be triggered from a previous injury, years back. Ishvara was saying it’s time to really let go and allow the Vedanta bus to do the driving. That I am already complete and not in shortfall is the truth. There is nothing to be done or to prove. There never was. Every apparent insult or deception (in an apparently large corporation or school) is just that – apparent. Directed only at this entire mirage of which this Jiva and its previous karma along with all the other Jivas and collective Karma is a precise (to Ishvara) rolling ball of enigma (to me), inexorably working its way out with me watching. “Let go. Just finally, really let go.”
Sundari: Very well put. And how hard it is for the ego to let go, even with Self-knowledge. It’s so hard for the poor limited jiva to accept its true grandness – limitless unbounded, ever present, ever full Existence. To give up on the idea of anything ‘previous’. That there is nothing to work out or is working out, only ignorance making it appear so.
Nathan: So I lay there full of drugs and tubes thinking “ok bills must be paid, duty done for family, friends” – I feel this is right. But there is a huge difference between just rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s versus identifying with it as “me”, trying to comically navigate the world, control everything as if I am captain. This is wrong – but saying so flies against every credo “I” had ever learnt. I was now being forced to let go of all of it, perhaps say bye, on Ishvara’s terms, like it or not; It’s not my ship, not my sea and I am not even the captain. Now “end” as part of a bunch of vasanas I saw so clearly.
Sundari: Negating the doer is so subtle because of the tendency for the ego to get involved. It’s always a question of who does the ‘I” REALLY refer to? The doer cannot negate the doer, this is the problem of rendering unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Who is doing the rendering? The door to freedom is shown upfront in Vedanta, tantalizingly clear and near, shining, beckoning. But it can only be ‘passed through’ when the house that ignorance built is destroyed. Then the ‘doorway’ is no longer a passage or a path. You stand alone, all one. Free of everything.
Nathan: So if I get back out alive, even under a bridge begging with a big smile, it would be fine. More than fine. But Ishvara did not let me off the hook, there were moments when I thought “yeah I’ll be out of here soon” but deep down I knew it wasn’t ok. Not the medical thing, but the reason I was there. I had not really got the message. I could feel the deception. It made me sick. Then suddenly I was back on the table, apparently bleeding out from the operation the day before; they opened me up and guess what? – found nothing. But the scar was now twice as long. It sounds crazy but there was this voice inside like “you want to go a third time or are we getting the point yet?”
Sundari: That must have been harrowing. Yet, see the compassion Isvara has. ‘OK, so let me show you this way. Or that way. Not working? Ok, well then, I will have to up my game and get more drastic. Buckle up’. If we don’t hear the whispers, they become shouts, and then – you get the real kick in the butt. Not much fun!
Nathan: There was a terrifying inevitability to it. Yet when it happened, I was trying to absorb, understand, see what I knew but did not know yet. Ishvara is terrifying and hilarious if that is possible at the same time. There is such a beauty and fabulous thing about this. Time just stops, where all is good and is always good and there is just this overwhelming feeling of wanting absolutely nothing.
Sundari: See the ignorance still operating when there is ‘a someone’ trying to absorb and understand? When ignorance is operating the jiva thinks that the seer is different from the seen, the subject and object are different. That’s why it felt terrifying. Whereas the Self is the all-seeing eye or “I” that sees only itself because there are no objects for it to see. Karma is not relevant to the Self because the whole show is an illusion set up by the trickster, Maya. Only the jiva trapped in it identifies with karma and suffers. When that is known, that’s where hilarious, fabulous and beautiful enter the picture – the feeling of absolute, infinite, fullness. Total peace.
Nathan: Ignorance truly comes like a thief in the night. Jivas appear and feel so tangible. But when knowledge disperses ignorance, they go back to being the inert whisps they really are.
Sundari: Maya makes the impossible possible – that the Self can be deluded, even apparently, is ludicrous. Yet, there is an apparently existent jiva entity that does exist, and suffers as a result. Seems like cruel and unusual punishment!
Nathan: Almost like my mum when me and my brothers were very young, had a bad dream or got trouble in school and within seconds her consolation just made it disappear. I rub my eyes and can’t even recall what I was crying about, and all was good. But as a long since adult I do need to recall and inquire. Childhood was a grace of gifted fuel, long since burnt out. I am running on fumes.
Sundari: How powerful thoughts are, either to free or enslave. I love your last statement – ‘Childhood was a grace of gifted fuel, long since burnt out. I am running on fumes’. Yet your statement implies that the fuel of life came from childhood, a finite state – and – that it can end. So, what fuel and what ‘I” are you referring to? Nothing this life has to offer is capable of sustaining our true purpose – which is to realize the Self. Any ‘fuel’ the world supplies is finite and will run out. But if that fuel is you, the Self, it will never run out. That is impossible.
This is section from a poem I wrote some time back:
Here, now. It is always here
I am the Stillness
I am the music etched in Silence
Even though serpentine fields have been my path
And some age-old thoughts
Still wander through the corridors of the mind
Like forlorn ghosts in an abandoned house
Staring with glass eyes
Fondling the past
Their power, like an electric storm
Wandering aimlessly without fuel
Is soon to be exhausted
Nathan I can’t seem to make the Jiva bindings disappear and “be” the self, it is a vain pursuit anyhow. Parts of me still identify and feel bound with the Jiva’s stuff and it just takes time. And because I know there is no time, really, anywhere, that is ok. I will keep coming back each time I wake and perhaps each life with Ishvara’s grace until [I don’t know what to say here, it’s not up to me, I don’t know where or how it ends or if it ends ever]
Sundari: See the ego talking in your first statement? You are not a doer and you don’t have any ‘parts’; you are a part-less whole. You are not in time because you do not begin or end, cannot be born nor die. You cannot wake up or ‘come back’ because you never slept, never came nor left. But I know what you mean. The final stage of inquiry, nididhysana, where all remnants or residual emotional/mental bindings fall away, takes the longest. It’s normal, everyone goes through this. It is by the grace of Isvara that this process ends and all thoughts to the contrary are burned up in Self-knowledge.
All attempts to be the Self are in vain because you are the Self. You cannot ‘become’ what you already are – and you know this. Nothing can define you except you, and you neither require nor can you be defined. You are that which defines everything, assuming there is an ‘everything’ to be defined. Which there is and there isn’t. Because there is no time for you, how can you wait? For what? An experience to ‘prove’ you are the Self, like another brush with death for the body?
The search has already ended, Nathan. Perhaps that is what Isvara is trying to show you. You are what you seek, it’s over. So there may be some restless wandering ghost thoughts left. Ignore them, they are deaf and mute, just beginningless ignorance, Isvara’s leela. Nothing to do with you.
Nathan: The Jiva was and still is like some character in Shakespeare, where we just know from Act 1 it’s just going to get worse and worse for the Jiva the more they try. The entire audience watching the inevitable. But jumping up on this stage saying, “stop the play!” never works. It’s Ishvara’s play. I am held immobile, as it plays out.
Sundari: This is true and it isn’t. Assimilation of Self-knowledge puts an end to the pathology of pain, and the play. You are not held ‘immobile’ by it. You are that which IS immobile – ISNESS, Existence. Yet without moving you make everything move, thanks to Maya.
The jiva is you. The stage is not a stage. It’s all a mirage, appearing in you. You have wings, use them, even though you don’t need wings to fly.
My new found wings took me
Beneath the deepest camouflage
Unmasking the secret measure
And unfaithful dwellings of time
They searched out
The infinite spaces
For the only one who can define me
Me
Nathan: But – Vedanta gives me the choice “dream or nightmare, sir?” The knowledge and your dissemination of the teachings enable that choice. Swami Chinmayananda’s frequent use of the word “vigilance” is so appropriate. When I look at the photos now, I can appreciate the boundless humble laughter from Swami A. Thank you both again so much,
Sundari: Yes, it’s true. Vigilance is the price of freedom as long as a doer still lurks in the wings, however subtle. Vedanta does put an end to the nightmare. But it also puts an end to the dream. All it leaves is the knower of both – ignorance and knowledge. When that occurs, what is there to be vigilant of?
If you have not watched this video, I highly recommend it. Watch from the beginning clip, they change automatically.
Much love, and thank you for sharing this beautiful experience with us
Sundari
