An Advaita forum focusing on Realisation, enlightenment, non-duality, Real Love, peace, freedom, Your original nature, abiding naturally, the Oneness, the Nothingness, and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
Here, there is nothing that is believed, so there is no one here who wants you to believe anything, either. Here, the invitation is to be free of all that you have been programmed, conditioned, acculturated, and domesticated to believe so that you can be free, period.
You will recognize that you have returned to your natural state by a complete absence of all desire and fear. After all, at the root of all desire and fear is the feeling of not being what you are. Just as a dislocated joint pains only as long as it is out of shape, and is forgotten as soon as it is set right, so is all self-concern a symptom of mental distortion which disappears as soon as one is in the normal state. – Nisargadatta Maharaj
The suffering individual, the seeker who desires to find, the earnest academic and scholar – all these are examples of the false self characterized by the net (however refined) of desires and fears. The self in pain (or pleasure), fractured by duality, is like the pain of the dislocated joint. How do you become free? Find where you are attached. What do you long for? What are your afraid of? What are the invisible desires and fears you are reluctant to relinquish? What are the appearances you seek to preserve?
In the absence of realization or Self-knowledge, you believe you are continuous. This sense of being a person with all its attributes appears to persist. You imagine that you have watched yourself “evolve” or “develop” over time. You are sure that this mind-body-personality entity is who you are, a fixed reality. Not true. These ideas are all fiction; a collection of beliefs glued together to shape an identity, like grains of sand stuck together to create a manikin of sand. You are simply regurgitating the tale spun by others and rote learned by you, just as you recite other tales. What you think you perceive is filtered by your beliefs. When you believe you are a limited person, bound by the beliefs of body, mind and personality identification, then this is how the world appears to you – an external world populated by persons including the separate individual you think you are.
However, this false self or image does not actually hold up under examination …because it is not real. The Advaitan Teachings invite you to examine and question all of the tales spun by you about your identity (tales originally spun by society’s spin doctors.) What do you know for sure? Even what you believe is the fact of your birth is second-hand knowledge. Do you have absolute proof that this sense “I Am” came into being with the birth of the physical body – and that it is unique to that physical body? Just because your parents and the society sprout this perspective does not make it true. And that unique sense of self that you think learns, develops, evolves, becomes smarter and more refined – is this who you are? At the level of mind and personality, are you simply this collection of attributes (book learning, preferences, desires and fears) – changeable, temporary and inconstant? At the level of the body, are you this limited temporary physical body that persists only from babyhood to adulthood to old age?
Another line of questioning is offered by Maharaj: Of course the self based on memory is momentary. But such self demands unbroken continuity behind it. You know from experience that there are gaps when your self is forgotten. What brings it back to life? What wakes you up in the morning? There must be some constant factor bridging the gaps in consciousness. If you watch carefully you will find that even your daily consciousness is in flashes, with gaps intervening all the time. What is in the gaps? What can there be but your real being, that is timeless; mind and mindlessness are one to it.
Once this line of dispassionate questioning begins, it will not cease. The spell or hypnotic trance of self-identity is broken not by finding answers – but by questioning and eliminating all answers. Remember the advice offered yesterday -- The old grooves must be erased in the brain, without forming new ones. You cannot know the answer to who you are; but you can know all that you are not.
This fine-tuned enquiry or investigation is not the preserve of the academic and learned or those who claim “spiritual wisdom”. The realized state is freely available to all who seek. Yet not many are willing to pay the price --which is relinquishing this precious notion of individual selfhood and the desires and fears that create the appearance of a unique self.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
For extending teaching on the Advaitan Understanding – and the removal of the false that obscures Your Real Nature, see the links on the right hand side of this blog or go directly to the Advaitan ebook series at The Official Website of Floyd Henderson )
Comments / clarifications may be sent to louise.advaita@gmail.com
