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.
FROM A SITE VISITOR: [Received 22 March 2008] A woman in my office sent me a copy of what you wrote today. When I read the words from the woman who said she’d never been anything but Waynes wife, I froze I felt paralized. I got a chill because I’ve felt the same way since my husband passed. You helped her in a retreat but I can’t get off work to come there. I feel like my life has been on hold since his funeral and that has been years ago. I go through the motions, but I do not feel like I am even there. I want peace. I had to get a job and I got busy with work and church but here I am years later and nothing has changed. I have read some other things from you but I can’t begin to understnd what youre talking about but if you helped her I figure its worth asking. Can you help me?
F.: If peace is to manifest, You must know Your Self...the True Self. Your original, Real Nature must be understood. Yet most will not, so most persons (the non-Realized) will believe that they are miserable or that they are fluctuating between states of misery and happiness.
Their so-called memories and impressions block them from knowing the Self, from understanding (and abiding as) that which is real rather than that which is false. Because memories and samskaras are obstacles to seeing truth, most will look without rather than within for whatever it is that they think they are seeking.
In looking without, all that can be seen is illusion. In that process, they will also believe that they are seeing all that they have gained and all that they believe they have lost. Only if they were to ignore all without, which is illusory, can they then look within and find Truth and the freedom that brings.
Take the misery being suffered by the site visitor whose e-mail initiated this discussion. Looking without, a “husband” seemed to appear. As with a mirage in the desert, only one fate awaits: whatever seems to appear will eventually disappear.
Because of the Am-ness, you will seem to appear, and what you take “floyd” to be will seem to appear. Eventually, both will seem to some persons to disappear, but neither the appearance nor the disappearance are real.
So what is involved with this temporary manifestation, this short-term “appearance”? Breath, body, and consciousness. Which of those three is capable of feeling pain and suffering? Not the breath, so most will say “the body,” but they would be in error. How can you understand that?
Before the doctors began resetting all of the bones that were broken during a motorcycle accident, the body was subjected to general anesthesia. If fully awake and conscious, the pain of their incisions and the insertion of metal rods and plates and screws would have been unbearable.
However, as a result of the level of consciousness having been manipulated chemically, that was not the case (at least until regaining consciousness during the surgical procedure, feeling the pain, but not being able to let anyone know).
Manipulate the level of consciousness and a surgeon can cut open a chest and handle the body’s heart or remove it and replace it with a substitute. Since the events are not being registered via the full consciousness, it is not aware of those happenings, so pain that would typically be considered horrendous is tolerated.
Therefore, pain is registered by nerve fibers that transmit signals to the spinal cord which redirects the message to the brain. There, pain signals are processed but are also subjected to the machinations of “the mind,” which accounts for the significant variances in the thresholds of pain that humans display.
Since the body registers none of the pain signals when under the influence of general anesthesia, it can be seen that experiencing pain involves not the breath and not the body as much as the level of consciousness and the play of "the mind." Such is the case not only with physical pain but with mental-emotional pain and suffering as well.
All of the body functions notwithstanding, awareness of pain and suffering can be seen to ultimately involve the consciousness. Thus, when false identities are thought to be real, the case is this: the consciousness, blocked or contaminated by programming and conditioning, registers a false sense of pain and suffering if false identities are assumed to be real and think they have experienced a "loss."
More to the point, what is to be understood is that all which is mental and/or emotional deals with the relative and with relative illusions. While the Realized witness feelings rise and fall, only ego-states can trigger emoting. Is the belief that mental pain or emotional pain regarding a "loss" is real? Then an ego-state is involved.
Ego-states are fabrications of the fictional "mind," so any pain or suffering associated with the "loss" of an ego-state is also generated by the false content of "mind" and is also fictional...no matter how "real" it seems as it is registered via the corrupted or blocked consciousness.
How to transcend even this consciousness that allows ego-states to seemingly experience pain and suffering? Even the consciousness must be transcended and abidance as the Absolute must happen. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
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Click THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “PEACE OF MIND” (There Is Only Peace If You’re Out of Your Mind)
