Nathaniel: Thank you so much for your response, it is so helpful to me. Here is a really long letter, no urgency about it at all. I hope it is coherent. My brain was tired before the writing was completed. I’d like to first write an anecdote from my earlier life, after removing all of the longer story that precedes it. I promise it will relate to a more pertinent reply that comes afterwards.
Sundari: Your reply is completely coherent, more than. It has the potent co-inherence of the pivotal things in your life that exist in essential relationships to each other. Everyone has this. You know, like when you watch a really good movie and you can quickly identify the central idea? If we can see the big picture of our lives objectively without the obscuring filters of shame or blame, we recognize (see again) the thread that Isvara weaves through it all. Your light shines through whatever life experiences you had, good or bad, through what was given or withheld, through what was destroyed and taken from you. Sounds like you had a pretty raw deal.
Nathaniel: For a few months in my early 20s, after some really dramatic events, I became able to feel other people’s bodily sensations as if I were occupying their body, and get visual impressions and feeling sensations of illnesses within their body. The most obvious thing for me was that I could tell when a person had a headache, but I also was able to experience other illnesses like liver, kidney or bladder damage, and cancer. I became the guy in the family who had this power. It seemed like I was never wrong about it and my mystically-inclined family began to attribute supernatural abilities to me; which was kind of creepy. They were really into all of that occult stuff.
I seemed to have some small amount of ability to push pain out of people’s bodies. Frequently I would sit in restaurants, and I would see somebody giving off a sort of a distressed vibe, and when I looked at them with unfocused eyes, they would appear as if an image of steel wool superimposed over some part of their head with some electrical activity going on, and I knew that they had a headache. I could gauge the intensity of the headache. I could, or imagined that I could “see” and “feel” masses in their bodies. Eventually in an attempt to determine if I was just fooling myself, I began approaching people and asking them if they had a headache, where it was in their head, and how bad it was. I was trying to validate my perceptions. I became able to imagine something like “blowing a wind“ through their body and blowing the steel wool away. I would do this to strangers in public, and they would stop in mid-step and look around with a confused look on their face as if they had just walked into a room and forgotten what they went there to get. I began to be able to do this with almost any kind of pain.
This kind of thing went on for some months and I began to obsess over it, constantly congratulating myself, and embellishing the stories that I would tell myself and a few others about how wonderful and powerful I was. After some months I sat with myself in a dark room and just really looked for a long time at this thing that was happening. I realized that I was absolutely desperate to feel special. I thought if I could just somehow become special enough then somebody would love me and not leave me.
When this recognition became clear to me, I was just horrified and ashamed. It seemed so disgusting and pathetic that I was so desperate to get approval and love from anybody. So weak. I was intensely ashamed of the neediness and realized that I had just made up a lot of the stories about this so I could feel better about myself and embellished the rest of them.
I immediately swore to never experience anything like this ever again, and never have anything to do with anything that had the smell of occult or supernatural nonsense around it, and never allow this disgusting, emotionally masturbatory self-aggrandizement. I was angry and disgusted with myself and I realized that I was susceptible to this kind of desperate posturing, both to myself and others. So I also promised myself not to tell these stories.
I think I succeeded. I don’t remember having another experience like it, or telling people about it in the last 40 years. I really cut it out of my life. I never had an experience like it again until last Monday when I woke up with the intuition that something had happened to James’s body. I thought James had had another heart attack and you might be suffering, as much as the temporary part of you ever suffers after enlightenment. I’m glad to hear about James’s health getting better and I am happy to hear about your relationship to one another, it is really helpful to me.
Sundari: I can understand that the healing powers freaked out Nathaniel, and those they affected. They were probably associated with the very deep need to be seen, heard, loved. Not surprising, considering your life. Quite astonishing how much damage the lack of those things does to people. Isvara has embedded these needs into the hard drive of what makes us ‘human’. Without them, even if we do find someone to love us, it probably won’t be enough. The scourge of smallness that duality imposes on everyone is impossible to completely eradicate other than with Self-knowledge. Anything that boosts the poor damaged ego and makes it in any way special is very hard to resist.
But I don’t believe that was all it was, far from it. I think you did and do have a deeply spiritual conduit – a live-wire to Isvara if you like – that manifests as healing power, and it is rare gift from God to God. The problem with those kinds of powers is that if there is an ego involved, people identify with and claim them. You may have done so in the past but I am sure you don’t, anymore. You can’t, because now you know who you are. You are not the doer. If Isvara wants to heal someone’s pain through Nathaniel, why not? It’s no different from what we do with teaching Vedanta, in that sense. We are just the vectors for the scripture and never have a shadow of a doubt that it has nothing to do with us as people.
Nathaniel: I lived with more-or-less stable self-realization for about a year. The endless ego-chatter had stopped, the experience of a separate self was gone, isness was just isness, life was good, and I had no idea what to do with myself. No strong desires. The Nathaniel personality is generally overrun with tamoguna. It lays in bed or in front of the television or a book. It slacks off and overeats junk food. If I won the lottery I might never leave the house again. I would probably not get out of bed and get dressed most days. After about a year, the identification with the limited person resumed because I hadn’t done any of the work of assimilation.
Before the ego-self identity re-asserted I didn’t do the work because I was just happy regardless of the circumstances. After the ego-self identity re-asserted at first I didn’t do any of the work, because it seemed hard I just didn’t want to put in the effort. Then I talked to both you and James about it during a satsang a couple months ago and I committed to buckle down and do the work of cleaning up my life and my samskaras. I was applying self-inquiry to vasanas and samskaras. I sometimes spontaneously felt as if I was simply standing in the presence of God and there wasn’t anything else I wanted. I finally understand the Harikrishna folks. I didn’t care about enlightenment or dharma, or karma or anything else. I only wanted to continue to stand in the presence of God. I also held the belief during these experiences that just staying in that presence of God will resolve all problems, that there’s nothing that I need to do, it is utterly up to the Lord.
All that is nice, but it doesn’t get the house cleaned or the taxes filed. You know what I mean. So hearing from you about how your relationship works and hearing from James in the past about cleaning the pool and walking amongst the cactuses is so helpful to me. Thank you.
Sundari: Yes, I know what you mean. It’s funny how persistent the myth is that as the Self you are somehow ‘special’ or exempt from the ordinariness and exigencies of life as the jiva. Believing that fallacy kind of lets the ego off the hook, you know? After all, if moksa is so special and only for the rarified chosen few, how can it really be for you? That’s why qualifications for moksa are so important, and surrendering to a qualified teacher. Anyone serious about moksa goes through the process you describe above, in some way or another. Most inquirers do not realize what they are signing up for when committing to do real sadhana with a valid means of knowledge, meaning Vedanta. Isvara will demand no less than everything. If you are not qualified, you will not make it.
Everyone knows they are the Self, they just don’t know they know. If anyone entombed in flesh and bone and cloaked by Maya wants to give flight to the exquisite and excruciating longing for raw truth, to seize it like medicine in the sleepless fevered hope of healing, there is no option but to endure the shame and self-disgust of a fearless moral inventory. Some more than others but few escape this. It’s the right of passage to win through to grace. We need to look at our(not)selves. Really look and not look away. Not many do or can because it’s the ego looking at the ego, and that guy is a lying MF. It’s just too loaded, too hard. But you did because you are scheduled for moksa. You are a marked man…
Now you can look at Nathaniel as the Self, despite his ‘flaws’ and see that he’s a pretty cool guy. Sure, it sounds like he still needs some work to deal with that much tamas…. Oh boy. Blame it on nature, which is inherently lazy. But here’s the thing. If you are happy the way you are – a perambulating unmade messy bed poisoning your body with junk food – there’s no problem. Heck, dude, why bother cleaning up the jiva’s act if it’s not real….! Just enjoy.
Well, maybe because it’s not much fun or enjoyable to live that way? You realized this when Isvara woke you up to the fact that though you had realized the Self, you had not assimilated the teachings and were not applying them to Nathaniel. There is no escaping the fact that a messy lazy life isn’t conducive to happiness. It’s just a coping mechanism you developed to avoid pain. It’s not even about pleasure.
No matter what sublime gifts the jiva has, if you really want freedom from the limiting ego identity more than anything else, there is no escaping ‘doing the work’.
Love,
Sundari
