Vemuri Ramesam, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 6:03 am

On Method, Mind, Sense of ‘separate self’ and Meditation

Dr. Vidyasankar Sundaresan is born and brought up in a family associated with Vedanta for generations and knows the scriptures like the back of his hand. Vedic mantras flow from his pen easier than water at the Niagara Falls.  He is also highly qualified in Science and Engineering and comes with rich experience in a variety of technical fields. All these traits bring a refreshing breath of clarity to his writings on advaita. In a protracted debate often leading to meaningless and misleading alleys, bylanes and dead-ends at another forum on the role of yogAbhyAsa in the attainment of Brhama jnAna, Dr. Vidyasankar asks interesting questions to correct the trajectory of the discussions. 

The questions are quite thought provoking and the response a seeker gives to himself/herself can bring about much clarity by unwinding the self-wrought knots in the simple message of advaita. The questions are:

“1.  advaita jnAna is beyond words (yato vAco nivartante). Therefore, should one never speak/write anything ?

2.  advaita jnAna lies beyond the mind (aprApya manasA saha). Therefore, should one never apply one’s mind to vedAnta?

3.   advaita jnAna is beyond all action (na karmaNA na prajayA …). So should one never perform any action, especially vaidika karma?

4.   jnAna is beyond the bounds of logic (naishA tarkeNa matir Apaneya). Therefore, should one never resort to the norms of nyAya reasoning or any other kind of logical process?

5.   advaita jnAna is beyond the three avasthAs (jagrit, swapna and sushupti). Therefore, should one never sleep, never dream and never wake up?”

***

Problems for a seeker arise quite often because the inquiry commences at the wrong end.  (S)he begins with a hunt for the quickest and the best “method” for the attainment of Self-Knowledge.  He likes to search and sift through various practices recommended by this teacher or that and find one that is comfortable to latch on to.  A lot of time goes towards this effort in honing on to an appropriate path – is it yoga or Samadhi, karma or dhyana, meditation or pilgrimage and so on and on. Entire energy is expended exploring ‘the path’ rather than taking up an incisive inquiry into whether there is at all a physical entity whose improvement one has to seek.

In the preoccupation of finding a ‘method’, the very simplicity of advaitic message is lost sight of. Advaita tells us that the innate nature of Brahman is “nitya shuddha buddha mukta svabhAva” as explained by Sankara and “thou art That” as revealed in Chandogya.

I am eternal (nitya), pure (shuddha), knowing (buddha) and free (muktah). If I am already That, how is it I seem to have forgotten that fact?

It is because a ‘thought’ that ‘I am contracted (limited) and a separate individual’ veils the Truth.

But talking in these terms of a ‘thought’ veiling the Truth and causing us to forget who “I” really am begins to sound dense and ambiguous. So let us give a break here. We shall come to it again at the end.

And let us go back to the search of a ‘method’ we were discussing.

There is an important caution here. Maybe you may blame me on my limited knowledge, but it looks to me that the danger of getting addicted to the ‘method’ does not appear to be made that much obvious as it should be at least by quite some teachers in our country. On the other hand I find that the seekers are tacitly encouraged in deifying the ‘method’. Some other teachers having vested interests create for themselves a larger than life image as the supreme redeemers. Therefore, I consider that the teaching of Scott Kiloby, the North American Non-dual teacher who applies his teaching for de-addiction is an apt reminder of the dangers of glorifying the ‘method’ or the ‘teacher.’

Scott recently observed on FaceBook:

“Whenever you begin listening to a teaching that resonates, no matter who the teacher is, there is often the tendency to falsely believe the teacher, himself, somehow houses a special gem of awakening, as if that gem is located somewhere in his mind, heart, body, or being and that if you just get close enough, listen enough, and follow enough, the gem will somehow get passed down to you.”

Scott continues: “Don’t be fooled by claims from anyone that you must follow him or her in order to truly awaken. … If you look at all this from the view of addiction, the line between a mature view of a teaching and an immature one becomes clearer. If you pick up a drug or other substance and become addicted, it appears that this object, the drug, is the source of your relief, happiness, pleasure, and well-being. You seem to get good feelings from it. It seems to free you in some way. And so the tendency to get hooked is there. The very prospect of living without the drug is scary. And so you keep coming back, again and again, falsely buying into the notion that the drug contains the gem of your own freedom. But recovery has always been about seeing that this is completely an illusion. In the moment one truly lets go of this false belief that the drug holds the key to his well-being, an even deeper and greater freedom begins to show up. The chains of the addiction are broken and life begins to look brighter in every moment no matter what is happening. One starts to feel freedom based not on continuing to be chained to the drug, but just the opposite–to be free of it.

“Picking up a teacher can be like picking up a drug. You can start to associate your well-being with the words and energy of the teacher, continuing to go back, time and again, to get your fix. And just as with the drug, the same sort of unconscious belief is operating: this teacher is the source of my well-being or contains the gem of my freedom.”

***

Any inquiry we take up is done with the only tool we are endowed with. And that is our mind. But mind is a bunch of thoughts.  A thought cannot know or understand anything. To say that the thought or mind knows is like saying that the chair knows or the wall knows! A mind is just another ‘object’ — something that is known or perceived. It cannot know a thing.

Rupert Spira is a highly popular Non-dual teacher who spent over a couple of decades studying advaita and then had his experiential realization of the Truth under the tutelage of Francis Lucille. Rupert explains in simple and very clear terms about Mind, Separate self and Meditation. He shows how a mind is incapable of knowing anything, how our sense of separate self is a false belief and how meditation is without an end. He often says: “Meditation is not what you do; Meditation is what you are.”

Rupert very graciously makes the audio recordings of his talks on the above subjects freely available at the following links and I trust you will find them as educative and inspiring as I do.

The links are:

1. The Mind does not know anything (about 10 mins):

http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/listen/the-mind-does-not-know-anything

2. The separate self hiding in spiritual search (about 13 mins):

http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/listen/the-separate-self-hiding-in-the-spiritual-search

3. True Meditation never ends (about 48 mins):

http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/listen/true-meditation-never-ends-meditation

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