Advaita Vedanta realization, enlightenment, nisarga yoga site discussing non-duality (nonduality), your original nature, and the means for dwelling in the natural state per Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
FROM A SITE VISITOR: Just “found” Advaita and just found your site. Been reading some recent entries. Have dealt with the fallacy of the body idea. All these years, looking for peace of mind—never considered there’s no such thing, as you say. Makes sense now. Problems with personality though I don’t get yet. Can you give me in a nutshell something that would help me understand that and the Nisarga yoga you mention? Thx. Frank.
F.: (Continued from yesterday) To understand how to “go back, reverse, to the source” and to “follow the path by which you came,” is it not necessary to find the first point on the return “path” where no body and mind and personality identification had been taught and learned? Would that not be the "first target" to aim for in order to be free of belief in the falsehoods regarding the body and "the mind" and the personality?
Is it not obvious that the first point after the manifestation of consciousness but prior to being taught (and having learned) body identification and "mind content" and false identities (along with the development of personality) would be the child stage?
Take the “Child Ignorance” stage to be the stage where the child knows “I Am”…but nothing else. As with the deer abiding in the forest, an elemental brain has formed and the consciousness is manifest. That is all. Do you understand, therefore, why many Advaitin teachers advise beginners to focus on the "I Am" only as they begin a "journey" of following "in reverse" the "path by which they came" to body-mind-personality identification?
In that "Child Ignorance" stage which precedes the “learned ignorance” stage among humans, there are no ideas, no concepts, no learned ignorance, and no taught or adopted roles being accepted as false identities. No personality has developed so no personas are accepted as identities.
At that point, since no personality has developed, there is neither Multiple Personality Disorder nor any of the other many personality disorders that will manifest by early adulthood.
Over the next few years, an opportunity would be available (as children grow and mature) for them to be made aware of Self, but personality begins to form as children are exposed to more and more of the dysfunction that now typifies the relative existence and which triggers a belief in the false self...and, eventually, in many false selves.
The first false self that will be adopted as a persona develops in reaction to exposure to various abnormal circumstances. That earliest persona will be one of the nine most basic personality types, such as “The Helper,” “The Performer,” “The Boss” or “The Peacemaker.” Later, so many roles will be assumed as identities that most persons of adult age cannot even begin to make a complete list of all the personas they have adopted.
Thus, even though the potential to understand Self might be present among youth of a certain maturity level, the formation of personality—and the assumption of false identities and the playing of false roles—will obscure clear seeing.
There, though not in a nutshell, is the relative problem with personality about which you inquired: it not only blocks the seeing of truth but also (when personas function in conjunction with the false content of “the mind”) all thoughts and words and deeds become controlled by personality, even as persons mistakenly believe that they are choosing their thoughts and deciding what they say and controlling what they do.
If that were the case, then 99% of the planet’s population would never do anything that is self-destructive or self-defeating or detrimental to that form-cum-consciousness. The historical record shows, however, that such damaging conduct, relatively speaking, has become the abnormal norm.
If an awareness of all non-truths were to explode into consciousness one day, the light given off by that explosion would be so intense that it would burn away all personality, but that is a rare occurrence indeed on this planet. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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