REFLECTIONS on ADVAITA: PART 13 – GUEST WRITER: LOUISE STERLING

The Advaitan Teachings Offer a Map that Shows the Way Back from the False Identification with the Separate Individual to the Non-Dual, No-Concept Reality.

There is no subject-object duality. This is a movement in the mind that creates an artificial sense of separation. As described yesterday, the arising of desire and fear in the mind create a splintering that breaks up the pre-existent Unity into one (the self or subject), then two (the other or object) … resulting in the myriad appearances that make up your apparent world. Can You see that You are not a separate individual? This division in the mind has created the idea of a separate “you” … and by delineating yourself as a separate subject – everything else is also delineated as separate and different. You create the world of differentiation that causes you joy and pain. However – this news is also the way out of the trap. Since You created Your world, You can un-create it.

How is this possible? Listen to the teachers. Their Teachings are not here to bewilder or confuse. They provide the map that shows the way out. JUST FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS.

Before encountering the Advaitan Teachings, both Maharaj and Floyd believed they were “separate” individuals in a constantly changing world. They both made the return from corrupted consciousness to the Nothingness (following the same signposts) in a relatively short relative timeframe – and provided the map for seekers to do the same. Maharaj’s directions can be found in transcriptions of verbatim answers to seekers given in his loft. His pointers are level appropriate, and often also tinted with the intuitive response to the particular speck of corrupted consciousness asking the question, so seekers must take this into account when reading the discourses. Floyd’s map of the same return journey pinpoints seven steps that are documented in an ebook: From the I to the Absolute and a DVD of a July 2009 Retreat. There are also extensive entries on these seven stages throughout this blog – although as with Maharaj, these entries are aimed at different levels, and answers to particular questions are drawn out of the sixth sense response articulated to prompt a shift in a particular speck of consciousness.

How does the View shift? How is the everyday world perceived before and after this Understanding takes root? As described earlier, as a separate individual in the world, there is subject-object duality that differentiates everything perceived and patterns it with desires and fears that create pleasures and pains – always shifting, always unstable. When stabilized in Reality, the separate individual drops away. There is no subject-object duality – all is One and all is Nothing. This is the real nature of everything perceived. When the Nothingness is directly known, it is intuitively recognized in the myriad of appearances as emptiness: the call of the geese, the blue mattress, the statue of the Buddha, the dog pooh on the lawn. These perceived “objects” are not seen as different, but simply as different outer forms, arising from the same Unfathomable Emptiness. The nature of this Inexpressible Mystery is pointed to with the words: LOVE, JOY, BLISS. (Perhaps “prayer” is a label given to this natural, spontaneous movement of LOVE.) There is no desire and no fear. This patterning falls away in the absence of a separate individual to “protect.”

As Maharaj once said: “The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free ….Just as the colours in this carpet are brought out by light but light is not the colour, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world … Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realize, beyond all trace of doubt, that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it.”

(Remember – abidance as the “I am” simply enables You to see pure consciousness – without the attributes. This is necessary to separate the consciousness from the false identification with the separate individual – the little man walking about in the world. However, consciousness is not continuous. It is unstable, ever changing, switching on and off like a lamp in the darkness. What is beyond? In what does this ever-changing consciousness or world of experiences appear? These are the questions that the earnest seeker must ask to separate what is Real from what is Unreal.)

And so, the play of life unfolds – with all its dramatic moments. You play the role assigned spontaneously and effortlessly – the events pull the response out of You. You laugh in the comic moments, cry in the tragic moments, pull on a jersey and light a fire when the weather is cold, swim in the warm sea when the sun shines. Consciousness in motion – endlessly changing. Eventually, this speck of consciousness will leave the body, return to the pool of awareness that is not aware of … However; in the absence of a separate individual, there is no birth and no death. What You are remains. Find Yourself now and enjoy the stability of abiding as the Non-dual, No concept Reality. Use the map that points the way.

Please enter into the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)

For extended teaching on these questions see the ebook: From the I to the Absolute and the Advaita Retreat DVD (available before the end of Sept.)

Comments / clarifications may be sent to louise.advaita@gmail.com – a temporary email address available for the duration of these guest postings.