Month: July 2023

Check, confirm, and re-confirm until the below is clear:

1. All experiences change.

Test that this is true of, e.g., (a) thoughts, (b) physical sensations, (c) hearing, (d) seeing, and (e) emotions. Have fun with this. Look at thoughts one day, at emotions another, etc.

2. Awareness is changeless.

Test:

• Is awareness really changeless while thought A is coming into being, while thought A is going out of being, while thought B is coming into being, while thought B is going out of being? Etc. (Yes, awareness really is changeless.)
• Is awareness really changeless while sensation A is coming into and out of being and while hearing B is coming into and out of being? Etc. (Again, yes, awareness really is changeless.)

3. Experiences are in the foreground while awareness is in the background.

Test:

• Can experiences occupy the background? For instance, can thought A get behind awareness? (No, since awareness, still “behind,” is that which makes possible the movement of thought A.)
• Can awareness occupy the foreground? For instance, can awareness go in front of a sensation? (No, awareness is always in back while also always “surrounding” every, e.g., sensation.)

4. Awareness is the “unseen seer.” Test:

• If you try to step back, can you find awareness out in front? (No, awareness is, as it were stepping back, and only (a) a blank object or (b) another thought is out in front.)

• If you try to turn your attention around in order to “spot” awareness, can you find awareness out in front? (No, awareness, in the mode of attention, is doing the turning.)

Nisargadatta’s Jnana Approach

What I teach is the ancient and simple way of liberation through understanding. Understand your own mind and its hold on you will snap. The mind misunderstands, misunderstanding is its very nature. Right understanding is the only remedy, whatever name you give it. It is the earliest and also the latest, for it deals with the mind as it is. (I Am That, p. 453)

Nisargadatta’s way of jnana yoga is nisarga yoga, the natural yoga of the negative way. What does this mean?

Understanding the Misunderstandings

To begin with, liberation, by his lights, comes “through understanding,” not through love, rituals, or selfless action. Yet understanding may make it seem as if he’s claiming that you should know what you are. This is precisely what he’s not claiming.

Rather, understanding, for Nisargadatta, refers to grasping the deep-seeded, repetitive misunderstandings. I don’t know who I am because there is no knower here to know this; but I can know “the false as false,” the “unreal as unreal.” And so, to study closely and thus to understand these great, grievous misunderstandings, we need do no more than (a) be keenly attentive and (b) systematic in our undertaking.

Three Mistakes

To be systematic, we would do well to investigate the following common, basic mistakes:

• I am the senses
• I am the body
• I am the mind

But how are we to investigate these three, especially the last, if the mind is undertaking the investigation? Two replies are in order here. The first is that buddhi (intellect) is involved in Higher Reason: the questions systematically posed could be said to be posed by buddhi, and buddhi‘s object is chiefly ahankara, the ego- or I-thought that seems to be bound to senses, body, and mind. Therefore, there is no contradiction here.

The second is a Vedantic principle that must be applied assiduously, rigorously: the perceiver is not the perceived. And the perceiver, of course, is the witness, which is even “higher up” than buddhi. Therefore, there is no second contradiction either.

One Exemplary Investigation

Now, a question about the mind, for instance, may be put by buddhi: “Am I [aham] the mind”? Buddhi may show, through Higher Reason (that is, through introspective inquiry), that the mind is nothing apart from thought. Meanwhile, the witness is always seeing that the object being perceived is precisely what I am not.

Consequently, what is understood (and this understanding, though put in words for the purposes of this demonstration, is beyond words) is the misunderstanding, which goes like this: I am not the mind, nor have I ever been the mind, nor could I possibly ever be the mind.

But am I buddhi? No, buddhi, actually is “a thorn [a concept] to remove a thorn [I-am-mind].” In actuality, buddhi too is just a type of higher thought, and every thought is indeed witnessed by Me, the witness. As a result, I am not buddhi either.

But then am I the witness? No. For I am “I am,” which is even prior to all witnessing.

I Amness

Nisargadatta points us to something that is self-evident: I am. What this means–directly, immediately–is that (a) I am conscious, (b) I am present (or presence), and (c) consciousness is none other than presence. The last–that is, (c)–is important because it’s not that consciousness is conscious of presence nor is it that presence is the existence of consciousness. Instead, there is nothing but a direct identity: to be conscious is to be present. 

The teaching now says, “Abide as I am.” And what does that mean? It can’t mean that I must go somewhere else, for where can conscious presence go, to what place can it move? It can’t be that I reach out, scan, or search. To be “I am” is to stay put, to “be quiet.” Hence, the teaching says, “Just be still.”

Yet herein also lies a potential misunderstanding: there is also the intuition, or conviction, that I am not “I am” insofar as what I truly am (Awareness, or the Supreme State, or Parabrahman) is prior to “I am.” 

Therefore, there is an inchoate sense of incompleteness, a kind of “honesty check.” While I am abiding as “I am,” a whisper of an intuition knows that the inquiry is not complete. To abide as “I am” is also, then, to hover, to be in awe, to open, to concentrate, to repose fully, to ache slightly, to quiver gently, to be in limbo. All that was just mentioned–awe, openness, concentration, repose, and so forth–are, of course, merely metaphors and, as such, are not to be taken literally. They’re soft pointers that function like a koan and therefore go something like this: “What is my Original Face even before ‘I amness’ emerged?”

“I am” too must die so that Awareness unto Itself may shine only of Itself.

Question: I realized today that I often feel an intense ache in my sacral region. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I know that I am frequently trying to escape from it, and I end up distracting myself via social media. It doesn’t feel exactly like shame, but it does feel somewhat similar. What I do know is that I’m somewhat afraid of just being with it.

Be courageous. There’s nothing to fear. Let go of all desires, of all attempts to escape.

Wherever and whenever there’s a tendency to turn away, gently open here.

When you gently open right here, you don’t actually “burrow in” or “use an X-ray.” Burrowing in or using X-ray vision is probably just an expression of hatred or fear. That is, it’s another, subtler escape route.

Gently opening to it, you explore what it is. After all, you admit that you don’t know what it is exactly. Isn’t this, then, an invitation to meet it, to see whatever it discloses?

Simply, you only need to shine a gentle light on this, open to it, and stay right here. Just set up camp.

So, go ahead and set up camp–methodically, quietly, nonchalantly.

Since all meditation is improvisation, it’s foolhardy to pin Self-inquiry down such that it seems like “a recipe.” It’s not; it’s a spontaneous art.

That said, we can look at this “blackbird” in myriad ways. Here’s one:

1. A thought has arisen. Recognize that this is the case, regardless of the content of the thought.
2. Every thought points back to a localized center. This is a “sense of me” that appears to be “in here” and “existing at this moment in time.” Call this I-sense-ST. In other words, there’s a matrix consisting of an apparently localized center, which appears to be situated at a particular place in time. Specifically, this localized center often appears to be “in the head” or “in the heart.”
3. Inquire: “What is the real center?”
   • Am I localized? Am I limited?
   • I am only right here, not there?
   • Am I right now, not then?
4. In S3, we open up to being, or at least to the possibility of being, Absolute Presence. Be silent and just open.

1. The first thing you may not have fully grokked is that you need to see whatever negative emotion or thought that arises as an instance of dukkha. Otherwise, you’ll continue to think: “Oh, I’m just nervous. What do I do about this instance of nervousness?” Or: “So and so and I are disagreeing. How do we resolve this?” Or: “I feel sad today. Why is that?” You need to see that nervousness, disagreeableness, sadness, and on and on are all none other than dukkha.

Once you get this, it’ll “click.”

2. The next step is to see dukkha as samsara. That is, it’s not just that dukkha has arisen on occasion X. It’s more potently the case that there is a pattern working out across time. That pattern of dukkha IS samsara. In other words, there’s a “method to the madness”: dukkha perpetuating itself in such a way as to be highly patterned. This patterning, again, is samsara, and it’s just, we might say, how “life works.”

3. The next step is to see that samsara is samskara. Or rather: samskara is that which is “behind” samsara. Samskara, here, refers to the fact that behind all samsara is at least one ego-self. You must keenly see, then, the way in which samskara is activated is such as to perpetuate samsara (to keep “the wheel of samsara” turning) and, of course, samsara “touches down” as dukkha. The face of dukkha is, e.g., disappointment, sourness, resentment, etc., etc., etc., etc.

4. To see how, e.g., disappointment is actually an instantiation of dukkha is the start. To see dukkha as patterning itself out is samsara. To see that samsara can’t “lift off” without any samskara is the third step. And, now, to see the full picture–samskara –> samsara –> dukkha–is maya. That is, this is just how the “magician’s” illusion works. Now the game is clear to you.

5. Thus, thanks to the above, you’re “teed up” for the longing for Liberation (moksha). 1-4 are like a “full court press”: the question is how are you going to go beyond the seeming impenetrability of maya, that is, of samskara-activated samsara. That is, if you now have a keen understanding of how bondage works, what is going to be the leap beyond? For those on the path of jnana, the answer is: Self-inquiry.