Advaita Vedanta realization, enlightenment, nisarga yoga site discussing non-duality (nonduality), your original nature, and dwelling in the natural state as revealed by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
F.: [Continued from yesterday] The “mind”-chatter referenced in yesterday’s post, along with all the accompanying disharmony and chaos and instability, is the result of assuming personality types as identities and then constantly integrating (but more often disintegrating) into associated types.
The result is, even among those persons who are trying to “grow” and who are involved in “self-improvement,” is a notion that “progress” is being made. Thus, a temporary sense of happiness seems to manifest alongside all those concepts, only to have that happiness fade away as the misery of disintegration and entrapment in another personality type comes about as a result of stress or extreme piety or spiritual giantism.
Thus, “The Kind Helper Type Two” disintegrates into “The Mean Controller/Boss Type Eight”; “The Carefree Adventurer Type Seven” disintegrates into “The Rigid, Critical Perfectionist”; and “The Cocksure Performer Type Three” shifts to “The Fear-Based Type Six.”
So what is the problem with concepts? All of the above. Conceptualized identities, based in body-mind-personality identification, will guarantee constant fluctuation between personality-dominated states of emotional intoxication that prevent abidance as the natural state.
That disharmony and chaos and instability that dominates persons when they are attached to the relative (and to their body-mind-personality identification) should be seen now to be in sharp contrast to the harmony and peace and stability that manifest when all concepts are cast aside and abidance as the Absolute happens.
Yet the seeker cannot begin by trying to focus on the Absolute. The falseness of the relative must be seen first. It must be understood that programming and conditioning result in the normalizing of the abnormal, and the result is an effort by conditioned persons to live unnaturally or supernaturally.
Persons must see the abnormalities (relatively speaking) if they would be free of the effects of their programming and conditioning that have left them as warped as Pavlovian dogs that salivated because of a sound rather than a smell.
Only if the falsity of the relative is first observed will it be discarded. Then alone can the True Self witness the Absolute. Until that happens, and until all concepts and dualistic beliefs are cast aside, dwelling in the natural state cannot occur.
[A follow-up]:
W.: How does one not have any concepts regarding money or regarding parenting or relationships or work? I just don’t understand how you live in this relative as if existence without any concepts.
F.: Again, what happened to “I want to cast aside all concepts, I'm ready! What do I do?” Look at that quote and then your subsequent comment. “They” fooled you originally, but now, you are fooling your self; stated in another manner, your self/selves are fooling you.
Here’s the sequence: you are trapped in constant thinking, your thoughts generated by a “mind” filled with concepts (a.k.a., lies). If you can transcend body and mind identification, and if you can cast aside all personas (including “The Good, Even Great, Spiritual Man”) then you might reach the fourth step on the path.
Having abandoned every persona and every assumed identity—functioning happens automatically and spontaneously. Then, the first of two witnessing levels can happen; eventually, the second of two witnessing levels might happen.
After that, awareness (which is primarily the stuff of the Unmanifest), happens during the manifestation. The original nature is known and dwelling as that natural state follows. Efforts to live supernaturally end; being driven to live unnaturally ends. In fact, all efforts end and peace happens.
Your relative troubles began after you were programming and conditioning by ignorant persons who convinced you to believe that you are living an existence that really is dualistic in its nature. You wanted love and a sense of security and stability in an environment where persons were incapable of offering unconditional love and where insecurity and instability were too often the "norm."
You determined to be “good” and not “bad” to get strokes. You were set on a course where you became driven to help others and to sacrifice time and energy and money, not altruistically but with a hidden agenda to get your imagined needs met and to allay your fears that a host of desires would not be met.
You came to take an illusory life as what is real, but is the energy lying in wait at the wall outlet “living”? You still believe that you were born and that you are the body. You are still fixed at step one while thinking you are at step three.
You have told others that you are abiding in a place where you actually are not, and you have told them how to take the journey that you think you have completed, yet you are actually still bent over in the starting blocks of a race that you have not yet begun.
If you would be free, you cannot defend your concepts about “money and parenting and relationships.” Those are topics for persons who have not even arrived at the first step on the seven-step “path.” Instead, all concepts and duality must be cast aside if you would abide as the no-concept, non-dual Reality. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
