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 from yesterday. Please see the 9 March 2008 posting for the e-mail which is being responded to in this series] The Realized Advaitin knows that a seeker must understand all that she or he is not before ever being able to understand what He or She Is. The seeker must be able to understand that an appearance of being some identity or other is not what is Real at all.
Similarly, the seeker must understand what the relative seems to be but is not before ever understanding what the Absolute Is. The seeker must be able to understand that relative appearances and “experiences” are not what is Real at all. (How could “experiences” possibly be Real when there is no “experiencer” that is Real?)
Now to continue with the discussion of those false selves or personas. Only the ego and its accompanying egotism would buy into the notion of a “purposeful life” or a “purpose-filled life.” Sure, whatever happens happens, but nothing more than that is involved.
WHO thinks he/she has a purpose? How can a speck of energy have anything? All is merely being witnessed, as if watching a play, but what persons believe they are witnessing is not what is Real at all.
[Consider the pointer regarding the steel beam offered in previous postings: to use an electron microscope to view that which appears to be a “steel beam” would reveal that it is not a steel beam at all but is a swirling mass of energy.]
Personality inspires the adoption of personas, and personas function with the fictional “mind.” Together, “mind” and personality drive persons to expend 90% of their energy in the employment of all sorts of appearance-enhancing words and actions to try to inflate their false self-images and to appear to be “doing good” and “helping others” and “changing the world.”
The most rabid of all among that group of persons/personas are the ones suffering guilt or shame for “being bad” and “harming others” and “not making the world a better place” in their “past.”
In the “dualistic world” of pretension and pretending, most persons function at the dualistic extremes throughout the relative existence, so “The Scoundrel” becomes “A Saint” or “The Saint” becomes “The Scoundrel”; "The Prostitute" becomes “A Nun” or “The Nun” runs away to become “A Prostitute”; "The Lawmaker" becomes "The Law Breaker"; or "The Helper," feeling stressed or "better than," becomes "The Controller" or "The Sociopath."
Thus, in the relative existence of role-playing, chaos reigns, instability rules, and egotism flourishes. All roles, once adopted, are soon elevated to “super” status. [For example, the “false I” attains employment and becomes “The Employee.” After a short period, “The Super Employee” emerges as a new identity.]
As a result, a false sense of separation is fostered. To believe that some lofty purpose is coursing through “you” is to believe that “others” have less purpose coursing through them. The ego’s imagined hierarchical order of things thrives on its false sense of separation, yes?
“Pecking orders,” therefore, dot the landscape of the relative existence 24/7, reinforcing belief in the concept of "separation" and blocking any opportunity for an understanding of the Oneness to emerge.
Hence, one can observe pecking orders being established and fought over in the home, at work, in traffic, in lines, in stores, in religions, in social strata, in economic levels, in neighborhoods, in nationalistic dealings, in international contretemps, in all places and in all ways. Separation and egotism subsequently exert an even more dominant role.
And that, Danny, will lead to the events you catalogued: world wars, inquisitions, invasions, religious wars, "interpersonal" fighting, chaos, and killings as well as the subsequent misery and suffering among persons.
Such is the case when personality and personas are taken to be real, when the content of the falsehood-filled “mind” is believed to be truth, when ego-assumption generates egotism to sustain false roles, when the masses are programmed and conditioned to take the apparent multiplicity to be real, and when few ever understand the unicity and the Absolute. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
