Vemuri Ramesam, Tuesday, August 18, 2015 9:27 am

ADVAITA SIMPLIFIED – Part VI: The separate person is action

Advaita Simplified 

In progressively ascending order of Difficulty* for mind to understand

(* – Difficulty implies that some effort is needed in re-orientating the habitual pattern of the mind to a new worldview)

Step 22:  The basic reason for the misery experienced in Steps 19 – 21 is the forgetfulness of one’s own True  nature.

Suppose you are looking at the many and varied images of yourself reflected in an uneven warped mirror. You know you are only one and not many.

Suppose that in a moment of forgetfulness, you begin to think each image to be a different person. Then you consider one of the images to be yourself and the remaining images to be ‘not you’.

You transpose your reality onto that one image which you misidentified as yourself.  You begin to believe you are that image. You become your image. The real ‘you’ is forgotten.

You also forgot that you are only looking at an image in a warped mirror and that actually you had not really changed.

Consequently, the little chunk of the image (which you have taken yourself to be) thinks that it is separate from the rest. The image, therefore, tries to live as if it has an independent life of its own. It thinks it has ‘free will’ and claims ‘doership’ of the actions and feels ‘ownership’ for the qualities like its shape, size etc.

But it does not work that way. All actions in the totality of the scene anyway go on irrespective of what that specific image does. The image finds its actions to be effortful and its life a perpetual struggle. It feels miserable.

Metaphor : Ocean and wave: When we talk of an ocean we imagine a huge expansive sheet of water with waves striking on the shore. We talk of ocean and wave, the spume and foam, ebb and tide and ocean surface and mist above it.

There may be a small wave, a big one, a receding one, a transgressive one, one that ends on a rock face or one that ends before it begins. Can any wave think itself to be different from another and exist divorced from the totality of the ocean? The wave, the water drop in air, the ebb and the tide all together form the one ocean.

What happens if the wave forgets that it is within the ocean? Can the wave stand all by itself? Does the wave have beingness separate from the ocean? Can the wave have an independent life?  Can the wave act on its own autonomously without any relation to the rest of the waves and the ocean?

What a struggle would it be for the wave to act and behave as if it is a separate entity!

Thought Experiment 1:  Watching a Movie:  Imagine you are watching a movie. Say you get so involved with the action on the screen that you identify yourself with a character and what goes on with her.  The character has a chubby beautiful little child giving all joy and laughter to the family.  The character brings up the only child so lovingly that the child means the whole world to her.  After a few joyful events, in a later shot of the movie, you find that the character has to lose her child helplessly under tragic circumstances in spite of the best of her efforts to save the child. Unknown to you, your eyes well up and a drop of tear is shed by you. Your spouse sitting next to you and watching the movie may stay unaffected.

How did this happen to you? You ‘know’ that the character on the screen is unreal and bears no relation to you. But you forgot momentarily that ‘knowledge.’  You experienced the misery of the character in those moments as if it is your ‘own’ misery. Consequently you suffered. Your spouse did not forget his/her own reality. He/she did not misidentify himself/herself with the character in the movie.  So he/she did not suffer.

Thought Experiment 2:  Sun disc and Sunlight:  Sit near the open window of your room on a sunny day. You can notice the Sun up in the sky, bright sunlight in the open yard, a stretch of shaded area near the outer wall of the room and diffused sunlight inside the room.

Now try to locate the border between the diffused light in the room and the bright light outside.  Or find the edge between the bright sunlight and the actual Sun. Can you?

But for our artificial naming, you cannot, strictly speaking, put a boundary anywhere. It is all one Sun – right from the shining disc in the sky to the diffused light in your room. Can any of the various zones (we have partitioned by ascribing different names) forget their original nature of oneness and claim to have separate beingness of their own?

Step 23To forget yourself momentarily is to ignore who You Truly are because of inattention.

Say you have forgotten for a moment the real ‘You’ because you are lost in the experience of pleasure or pain obtained from observing the reflected image of yours. That means you have ignored your True nature at that moment.  Ignoring or ignorance of your True nature happens from moment to moment with every new thought of a separate ‘me’ (or any thought that has a separate ‘me’ underlining it) arising in you.

Avidya is the name given to this ignorance in the Vedanta lingo.

Ignorance of who you truly are is to imagine that you are contracted to a finite limited entity.

It happens because your attention is diverted from your true nature by the I-thought which separates ‘me’ from the rest (see Step: 18).

Step 24:  A separate contracted ‘me’ is sustained through constant perturbation, a movement, which appears as the arising and dissolution of the I-thought. 

Arising of a thought is comparable to a disturbance in a calm lake. The disturbance creates ripples. Rippling is a movement on the lake surface. Ripples are sustained by constant disturbance.

Step 25The separate person is action.

The separate ‘me’ is the person limited in shape, size, name, qualities and other descriptors. I call those as the descriptors of my ‘personality.’  My personality is sustained by constant movement, the emerging and dissolving I-consciousness.  Movement implies action and therefore, the ‘person’ is an activity.

Step 26Space and time get created along with movement.

Movement is possible only in time and space. In the absence of space nothing can relocate itself from one place to another place. Similarly, travel from say place A to place B takes time. So both space and time are co-created along with movement.

Movement creates displacement.

Step 27Displacement requires constant energy input (food).

Any displacement is work done.  So energy is expended in the movement. Therefore, a system in movement constantly needs energy from outside of itself. Energy comes from food for the biological systems.

(To Continue : Part VII: Nothing has ever happened)

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