What does nonduality mean to the jiva, the person with a body, mind and story? Those of us committed to moksa, freedom from and for that limited identity, face this question constantly. It means the freedom to be an open door to love – to both giving and receiving it, without fear. It means to be porous like the wind, to allow life in, like an open room the wind can blow through without obstruction, leaving it unchanged. It means we have cleaned up our lifestyle so we enjoy life and like ourselves a whole lot. We have built in shock absorbers for all the bumps in the road, navigating all that life brings our way with grace and good humour. It means that we see and accept the limited personal identity for what it is, with its flaws. But we are never again confused about our real identity as the Self, thus those flaws are not binding and never able to block access to our true identity. The fine print is that though true freedom does not entail perfecting the person, if there are binding tendencies, however faint, they will have the power to disturb the mind.
If the impeccable logic of Vedanta has cracked open the door of ignorance, and Self-knowledge has begun the work of removing ignorance, shafts of light will be available to us. First they will come and go, the ‘fire-fly’ stage. And then if Self-realization obtains, the lights stay on longer. But does this mean that all ignorance is gone, for good? Almost never. It is not so easy to divest the mind entirely of its duality filters. And so, the remaining work to be done in recognizing, understanding and negating the residual ignorance is the most subtle and most difficult. It takes as long as it takes, and very few ‘achieve’ it. It is easy to fool oneself into thinking you are there, when you are not. Ignorance is very intelligent.
Because the dominant lens through which I see all things jiva related is Self-knowledge, when upheaval and agitation arises in the mind, I see it like dirty water in a sink. The sink being the mind, the dirty water, ignorance. It doesn’t make much difference what guna prevails, though it’s usually a combination of rajas and tamas with one or the other dominating. This is the plug and what prevents the dirty water from going down the drain. When Self-knowledge is active, the plug is removed and Self-knowledge is like the drain that sucks all the dirty water/ignorance and eliminates it. It is so powerful, everything dissolves in it. The only problem is that deep samskaras one does not consciously have access to always return. These are the fetus in the womb samskaras, and they come out for busting when the time is right. Isvara makes sure they do.
I recently had a breakthrough which revealed to me the dark heart of a samskara I was well aware of and thought I had busted, but its core was not seen, and still active. Like a volcano one thinks is extinct but isn’t. It was a decision to protect myself from loss I made when I was very young, based on my parent’s relationship to each other, life circumstances as a child, and compounded by later events. Not only loss of loved ones, but loss of autonomy – personal freedom, invalidation. We all make contracts with life during the formation of our adaptive child program, which are very hard to break, and this one was mine.
I only realized this contract was there recently, though it has been active most of my life. What was unknown to me was the price I paid for this unconscious decision was that it that prevented love from flowing to me. I excelled at giving it, but not receiving it. It played out dramatically in my life over the last year or so, basically since I thought James was going to die. This program reared its head in the nonsensical idea of ‘ending the marriage archetype’. I wanted to wall myself off emotionally but keep the relationship. It did not work, of course!
In the fall out from that exposure, I discovered the truth was that though my love was true and deep, it was not unconditional or that nondual, though I believed it was both. I could write a book about nondual love, and yet, I was not capable of fully living it. Such is the tenacity of duality. Always there remained that part of me locked away. Resistant, defended, and insecure. It was the active player in our conflicts because love was not allowed to flow fully. And in a ‘relationship’ with the Self, or with a man such as James, this just does not fly. It has to be all in, if moksa is the aim. This resistance was like a big pebble in the shoe, always grating.
James is my guru, and it was hard for me to reconcile him as man/husband and teacher/Isvara. Though I never surrendered to him as a man, I did surrender to him as Isvara. In this capacity, he tried so many times to break down the fear. And he did, in stages. Much of this samskara had already been seen and negated. I have spoken about it quite often over the last few years. Yet the kernel of resistance was not seen and thus never permanently gave way. Even as Self-knowledge obtained, the jiva narrative upgrade (Self-realization) took place with the virus of that samskara transported into the upgraded identity. And so nididhysana goes for everyone, until all identities drop away completely.
The both/and of this is that the person exists, it has a voice, and the right to use it. But the real question here is what rights are we talking about? My main aim is freedom from and for the person. So as tempting as it is to make a big story of my story, when the discrimination between satya mithya is operative, it is just that. A story. What does it all mean? If there is conflict it means that there is still ignorance in the way of accessing Self-knowledge 24/7. All the same, this does not mean denying the person. To be free of it, it’s essential to see the programs that run it for what they are, and negate them for what they are not. The jiva is the Self, but I am not the jiva, is the bottom line. Self-actualization is the hard part, and there is no fine print to it.
Isvara sure does not make it easy! I have seen the part I played on the personal level without making excuses for myself – with both a healthy self-disgust for the ego, and a radical self-acceptance too. I did not make the jiva that way, and it is an object known to me, the Self. To live that, I deeply examined my reaction to how James as Isvara delivered the blow to the ego. I saw the loss of dispassion and failure in karma yoga that ensued on my part, and how differently I could have handled things, if they were operative. I got to see how non-porous that jiva identity still was, after it got torn to shreds. All the same, my reaction was part of the teaching itself. I take the lesson and the result as a great gift from God.
This hold out had to go, or my relationship with James would have ended, and I would have remained stuck with that block to receiving love intact. But fortunately for me, the dirty water went down the sink, it was no match for Self-knowledge. As people, we are still the same people. But there is goodwill now, where there was once an element of mistrust, however slight. Love as myself is and is flowing unimpeded, to and from me. No more hidden defended places secreted away. God is great!
And so it goes on the way to moksa, for all of us. We can take heart in the knowledge that regardless of what is or is not giving way in the jiva identity, we are never not the Self. We can remind ourselves that the ‘steps to get there are the qualities of being there’, and soldier on with a smile and a laugh at how silly we are. And mostly, to remind ourselves of never being too sure of what we think we know.
Mark Twain put it very well:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Sundari
