Dear Sundari
The talk on how to live a worldly life with these teachings is so helpful. Thank you, thank you thank you for doing this and sharing your struggle at times with tendencies. No one else to my knowledge is doing this, being so honest about the personal and we all need to hear it. I need it! What you both do/teach is unique and I think so important I have said it before it has transformed everything for me
Sundari: Thank you for this feedback , Gillian. So many people wrote in after my talk with similar comments. It comes as a surprise to me because a qualified teacher of Vedanta is still human. It does not make them special or give them any special powers or attributes. Transparency and honesty goes with negating the reality of the jiva identity, but it does not remove it. Whatever characteristics you are born with are going to stay with you, though managed by Self-knowledge.
When I first met James as a teacher, it struck me straight away how much fun he made of himself. In fact, he almost over-played his less than perfect human characteristics, to the point of parodying them. This was smart because he did not only put people at ease about their faults, in being so open about his made it obvious that he was laying it on thick. To me, this was and is the greatest gift he gives as a teacher. Modelling how silly it is to be human, and how difficult it is to work against Isvara, the Causal body.
Later when we became a couple, things got harder as I had to get my head around his character, which tends to be pretty reactive. I had to investigate my ideas around how a ‘free’ person behaves, because I believed that if you were free of identification with the human identity, it would be impassive, unreactive, at all times. I thought that was what everyone had to strive for to be free. But this is not so. There are no rules of behaviour for a free person, beyond never breaking dharma, obviously. James is James, and it has nothing to do with who he is as the Self.
When there is a human reaction, it does not last for long, ever. It just dissolves in the Self, creating no lasting karma for the jiva. There is no karma for the Self. This is the point I was making by sharing my experience last Sunday. It was not so much about still wrestling with my tendencies, I explained how it was observing how they played out, as the Self. The main thing is that it is in keeping with Isvara (our inborn character) how one reacts to a situation, that is how the jiva is made. There is nothing wrong with being human. bondage comes when we identify with the feelings/jiva program. Freedom comes when the issue quickly resolves in Self-knowledge.
Talking about it made for a good teaching on how being human relates to being free – i.e., to nonduality. The bottom line is how quickly dispassion regulates the emotions. It would be good, I suppose, if Self-knowledge made everyone totally impervious to the jiva program, which never reacted to anything. But that’s not how life is. Some people have a more reactive nature, and others do not.
Much love
Sundari
