FROM A SITE VISITOR: [Please see the 9 March 2008 posting for the e-mail which is being responded to in this series]
An Advaita Vedanta realization, enlightenment, nisarga yoga site discussing non-duality (nonduality), your original nature, and dwelling in the natural state as taught by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
F.: [Continued form yesterday] Consider further the pointer offered yesterday from Ralph Klein who said that persons prefer the familiar “experience of the self, no matter how false, defensive, or destructive that identity may be.”
The relative-existence power of ego-states that prefer the familiar (even when false, defensive, destructive, or painful) was described in an August of 2007 post. When it was reported to Child Protective Services that a mother was burning her infant girl with cigarettes, it required the strength of three social workers to pry that child away from the mother who had physically tortured her daughter.
The post noted: that child’s attachment led it to cling to its abuser, to that familiar source of pain, rather than to leave and escape the pain. The Stockholm Syndrome has been discussed earlier as well, and many persons function under the auspices of that disorder, thinking that they “love” their abuser.
Why? Childhood abuse can give adult-aged abuse that flavor of being “familiar.” Too, the “repetition compulsion” drives persons to repeat the same “familiar” scenarios over and over, no matter how unnatural or painful those scenarios might have been…and might now be.
Dependent and/or co-dependent scenarios convince persons (1) that they are the roles they are playing (2) that they are “in relationship,” and (3) that “relationships”—of “a” to “b” and “b” to “a”—are both necessary and real.
As long as such dualistic relative pairs such as “a” and “b” being in “relationships” with “each other” are taken to be an accurate assessment of what is happening, then the Reality of the unicity will never be known.
And if the Reality of the unicity and the falsity of the perceived multiplicity are not understood, then persons will believe that their roles truly define who they are; thereafter, most will be trapped in dependency and co-dependency because every role requires some person to play the symbiotic or parasitic counterpart.
The power of the ego to warp perception is nearly limitless. When driving through a desert in the Four Corners area of the U.S. with a daughter, a mirage was observed for a period. When the angle of the road changed and the mirage disappeared, there was no mourning, no sense of loss, and no emotional or mental pain.
Years later, during a “breakup” as “The Girlfriend” felt as if she were dying, that is when the mourning, the sense of loss, and the emotional and mental pain manifested. The fear of being alone, and the desire for a false identity (or mirage) to continue, generated untold pain and suffering for a time.
In the first case, the supposed “loss” of a perceived mirage was assigned no meaning; in the second case, the supposed “loss” of a perceived mirage/role was assigned major significance.
Such is the power of ego-state assumption and egotism to wreck havoc on the relative existence. Only if the strangleholds of fear and desire are cast aside can peace manifest, and that is why these Advaitin pointers are offered repeatedly:
1. Fear and desire are at the root of all dis-ease and misery.
2. That which gives you pleasure will eventually give you pain.
3. That which gives you the most pleasure will eventually give you the most pain.
4. Personality is at the root of all relative divisiveness and separation and chaos.
Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
