ANNAPURNA SARADA, Wednesday, March 25, 2015 9:06 am

Many Paths, One Way – Part 1

As we move along in spiritual life the utter necessity for renunciation becomes increasingly clear.  There may be many paths to realization, but renunciation is the only way.  The first time I heard this from my teacher, Babaji, it sounded very stark, even narrow.  But I had not given it enough thought yet.

In earlier posts this year, we examined renunciation and its true meaning in the light of Vedanta, which reveals, as revered Swami Aseshanandaji would say, speaking to Western audiences, that it is not condemnation, but deification.  In brief, when one realizes Brahman as the only Reality, the world ceases to be a “world,” but instead is seem as that singular divine Reality manifesting through Cosmic Mind, Cosmic “I-sense,” Intelligence/Intellect, mind, senses, and elements.  As Sri Ramakrishna has stated, “Whatever we see or think about is the manifestation of the glory of the Primordial Energy, the primal Consciousness.  Creation, preservation, and destruction, living beings and the universe; meditation, meditator, bhakti, prema – all are manifestations of that Power.”  This is a Shakta-Advaita realization, that Brahman and Mahashakti are one, like “the snake that is sometimes at rest and sometimes wriggling,” as he would also say.  In Vedanta, Shankara has stated in the Vivekachudamani, “The conclusion of the Vedanta is that all is Brahman, living beings, the world, and time.”

For householders, the practice of renunciation is primarily inward.  There are external things to renounce, like objects and actions that are outside dharma, outside the kind of guidelines that the yamas and niyamas of Yoga provide.  With these as a foundation, and while engaging  with the world, the Vedantic householder detaches/renounces in the mind via giving up the sense of ownership, agency, and separation from Reality.  Learning to do this in a mature fashion enables him or her to raise children in dharma, fulfill family duties, and work in the world in an unselfish, conscious manner that is free from attachment, fear, and binding karmas.   Let us examine some reasoning tools for giving up the sense of ownership, agency, and separation.

Giving up the sense of ownership:

One tact is to examine objects themselves.  Objects are anything that can be perceived – gross objects, one’s body, children, other people and creatures, experiences, and thoughts.  Can they even be owned? All objects eventually decay, get lost, stolen, or we get bored with them.  They have a beginning and an end.  They are products of Nature, but the Self, the true “I,” is not in Nature.  Only their Essence, the Atman-Brahman reality, is unchanging, and being unchanging, is identical with one’s Self.

Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi, encouraged her devotees thusly, “Learn to make the world your own.  No one is a stranger; the whole world is your own.”  This statement is far from sentimental, but goes directly to the nondual perspective.  Names, forms, beings, and objects, all appear different from us, partaking of the duality of “mine” and “not mine,” “me and not me.” But to be “one’s own” as she stated, implies an eternal connection based in oneness.  Children, spouses, friends, parents, bosses, colleagues – ultimately, they are all our “own” in their essence as indivisible Atman.  They are our own in a cosmological sense too: every “thing” comes out of the Self via the matrix of Mind at cosmic, collective, and individual levels.  Thus, as Swami Vivekananda stated in one of his Jnana Yoga lectures, “What are you hoping for? You have everything, nay, you are everything!”  Thus, entertaining the sense of ownership of things as separate from ourselves enforces a false view of Reality.  It is like saying, “The moon is half full tonight,” while in reality, it is always full.

Another tact: The idea of ownership resides in the mind that mistakes the psycho-physical being as the Self.  In terms of the Vedantic teaching of the five Koshas – the sheaths that seemingly enclose indivisible Awareness – the sense of ownership is a property of the unrefined Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of intellect.  The Vedic seers perceived the most subtle sheath of the psycho-physical being to be the Anandamaya Kosha, responsible for our sense of a separate “I.”  Being the most subtle of the five, it pervades them all, from the Vijnanamaya down to the Annamaya, or physical body sheath.  The unrefined intellect receives input from the mind-body-senses, and with the sense of “I” flowing through it, it then identifies objects, sensations, and thoughts as “mine” or “not mine.”  But the true Self, Atman, has no such divisions.  All the sheaths are products of Nature and therefore insentient.  Thus, ownership is an error of perception arising from the false identification of the Self with insentient matter.

To be continued…..

 

 

 

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