DARKNESS IS THE MAIN PROBLEM

Our vision is blurred because of veiling (avarana) and distraction (viksepa). The language of gunas attributes these two problems to tamas (darkness, inertia) and rajas (outgoing nature, restlessness). Certain darkness (gu) has enveloped our vision, and a luminary comes along in our life who removes (ru) that darkness. He (or she) is called guru. We pay homage to him (her) and a day is specially marked every year for remembering him (her). That is guru-purnima*.

Right Action

The problem of darkness besets us when the question is, “What is the right thing to do?” Presidents and Prime Ministers err with regard to action, and so do common men and women.  National and international affairs are therefore in jeopardy; so are matters in every family. Wrong actions lead to wrong results and life gets very complicated. If only we could see clearly, at the time of taking decisions, much harm could be avoided.

An individual, in her personal life, goes on committing errors – again because of this darkness. She is unable to see her situation properly. She sees a snake where there is actually a mere rope. She runs away in fear while she could have just walked on. If there was enough light, she would have seen the rope properly. In eating and drinking, exercising and working, speaking and writing, investing and spending, in all matters of daily life, seeing rightly assumes utmost importance. Without it our life moves from error to error.

The guru removes darkness and helps us see rightly.

Tradition emphasizes methods, techniques and practices to cleanse our inner equipment so that we can see properly. When the surface of a mirror is clean, the reflections are clear. If the energies within us are free from impurities, the vision of right action is clear. All over the world, therefore, people are engaged in worship, japa, yoga, pranayama etc. All of this is meant to bring about inner purification, citta-suddhi, nadi-suddhi, antahkarana-suddhi, as the words go. (The word nadi is pronounced with n as n in nut, a as a in car, d as d in dance and i as ee in deep. The nadis are the invisible paths through which subtle energy flows inside our body. Kundalini rises up through the main nadi called sushumna.)

Alas, man tends to make everything mechanical. He makes his practices a separate compartment of life. He finds ways to deceive himself and becomes a hypocrite in the process. So all the practices, given by religions of the world, do some good but fall short of causing radical change. The basic selfishness in man does not go.

Right Seeing

Can seeing itself lead to seeing? Can we grow day after day in our maturity through right seeing as the primary means? Let the practice of techniques and methods play the second fiddle. Let them not occupy the main seat. They do not deserve the front seat. They are in the department of karma (and upasana) and the Vedanta scriptures have declared the supremacy of wisdom (jnana). Seeing is the hallmark of jnana, while doing is that of karma.

The GURU operates from within us and also from outside us. She comes to us in many forms. She is by our side all the time if we have the eyes to see. She helps us see the whole of life every moment. By sharpening our vision in the present moment,we can go to the root of our problems. Then there is the uprooting of the misery in life. That is freedom.

Swami Chidananda

Varanasi

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

*Guru Purnima falls this year on Sunday, July 25. On this full moon day, centuries ago, Veda Vyasa began to write the Brahma-Sutras, which became one of the three foundation scriptures (prasthana-traya) of Sanatana Dharma (now called Hinduism). The other two are Bhagavad-Geeta and the Upanishads

Insight

Surge: 74

TRUE CHANGE: CHANGE IN CONSCIOUSNESS

Call it the expressions of unending selfishness or the result of deep insecurity, a human being manages ‘not to change’ deep inside, while adapting his public behaviour very cleverly. Desire and fear lurk in his consciousness but he learns to show himself as highly service-minded and not afraid of material loss or criticism of any kind. His public behaviour makes him not only acceptable in the society but quite good in his own opinion. However there are skeletons in the cupboard and he therefore lives in conflict and his daily life lacks true peace.
Change in behaviour is not a big deal. You will achieve it with some intelligence. You succeed in conforming to the demands of family members, colleagues or the society in general. This business of getting social approval begins in school days when many a student gets the approving nod from his teachers. They say he is well-behaved. Words like obedient, loyal and disciplined are heaped upon the so-called good student. Less importance is given to the question if he is creative or if he is free from inner conflict. The poor boy may have suppressed many a curiosity or explorative urge in order to satisfy the expectations of the teachers and other elders. There is then no holistic growth for he is not learning in an atmosphere of freedom. The pressure of expectations makes him a second-hand personality.
Change in consciousness is of very great value. Your intelligence has to penetrate very deep in order to bring about it. You then show care and love to people not just because that is expected from you but you see clearly how lack of care and love is injurious to yourself and others. You directly notice the foul smell of insensitivity and indifference even as they arise in you. If you are a scholar, a speaker or a writer then you have a lot of knowledge. It does not ensure however that you have changed. Information does not mean transformation. Through constant intellectual activity, you may gather a lot of knowledge. Through direct perception, your consciousness changes. Hidden fears and lurking desires leave you when the magical faculty of seeing (which is not thinking or analysis) exposes their illusory nature.
You change in behaviour when thought operates. Change in consciousness takes place when attention works on thought. Thought is concerned with the self, which is its own creation. When you think, you cannot but keep the interest of the self as a priority. When you pay attention to how thought operates, there is no priority. There is only an effort towards understanding what is. This effort at understanding the movement of the self is distinct from the usual cerebral activity of reading books and forming concepts.
We must see therefore the importance of silence. Sitting silently, we may take a look at the way our thought operates. Without interfering with rising memories, without encouraging or suppressing any of them either, we may learn a lot through alert watching. While clever thinking brings to our view many solutions to problems, this seeing takes a quantum leap and dissolves problems. Words have power, we have always heard. Thought has power, we know it too. Do we realize how much power alert silence has?
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
March 15, 2010

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INSIGHTS
Surge 73
Shiva: Two Aspects

Shiva is auspiciousness. That is what everybody seeks. Also called shubha, mangala and kalyana, it signifies all is well. In this life of ours, the dark clouds of disappointment, despair and insecurity do not seem to leave us and we are constantly seeking the bright sunshine of happiness, cheer and fearlessness. Shiva represents just these most desirable conditions – outside and inside. So when we say Om Namah Shivaya, we are implicitly expressing our longing for order, harmony and total well-being.

Shiva destroys. He negates the false. He removes asat. Advanced Vedanta declares that this negation of the false is the only thing that needs to be done. “The true reward of wisdom is the complete ending of all illusion,” says Viveka-Choodamani1. When the misconceived snake no more appears, the beam of light has done its job. It goes without saying that the rope, which alone was there all along, becomes visible with no obstruction. When clouds go away, the sun shines forth without any need for something to be done for us to see the sun. The essence of wisdom is therefore to stay alert, notice the distortions in our perception and be free from the prejudice that causes distortion.

The third eye of Shiva is thus Clear Seeing (samyag-darshana). Lust, greed, insensitivity and indifference are products of certain conditionings; they are our delusion and they are not part of right seeing. They go away in right seeing. Using a metaphoric language, it is said Shiva’s third eye burns away Kamadeva, the god of passion. Seeing every situation rightly, without the coloured glasses of our likes and dislikes, surely puts an end to our selfish desires. What remains is pure love, symbolized by the coming together of Shiva and Parvati.

Scholarship does not help in living rightly. The unique skill of keeping an open mind does. No wonder the Geeta2 admits, “He alone is happy who does not come under the sway of desire and anger.” Scholars are sometimes seen to have as much desire and anger as anybody else, if not more. They are able to talk or write a lot on the state of freedom from desire and anger; but they are not free. This does not mean scholarship is evil. On the contrary, it is good in its own place and serves much purpose in keeping the society informed. The means to freedom is the ability to remain watchful, moment to moment.

The wise one sees how foolish it is to be jealous; giving up (negating) follows this seeing. She sees the meaninglessness of personal ambition – of the pleasure of visualizing herself as wealthy or mighty. She sees clearly how thought projects that pleasure and there is no actual happiness in being, let us say, the Chief Executive of a large organization. She sees that certain conditioned patterns are behind the urge to become the CEO. To pursue something projected by thought is different from pursuing a fact. Getting nearer to a picture of fire cannot give to us warmth; getting closer to fire can and will.

Pursuit of pleasure is a movement of thought, observed Krishnamurti. It is one thing to eat some good food and enjoy it when we are hungry. It is quite another to be driven by memories the next day when we pass by the same restaurant and make an unplanned diversion into the eating place, order the same dish as yesterday and so on. No wonder the food does not taste as good as it did yesterday. In such cases of being led by thought (memories, fancies, projections, images), we lose touch with the reality. We become insensitive to the true needs of our body. The natural intelligence of our body goes unheard. The body says, “I am not hungry; I am tired; I need rest.” Thought says, “This is time to eat; it is foolish to rest now.”

To see forms of psychological confusion within us is the nature of right perception in daily life. Then we have invoked Shiva. He destroys all distortions and restores to us our contact with truth. That is truth, well-being and beauty: satyam, shivam, sundaram.

Swami Chidananda

Shivaratri, February 12, 2010

Notes:

1 vidya-phalam syat, asato nivrittih – Viveka-choodamani, verse 423

2 shaknoteehaiva yah sodhum.. Geeta, 5.23

Surge: 72

SELF-INQUIRY, SILENCE AND POWER

The power of silence excels over that born of thought. All thought is limited but the ground of silence is limitless. All thought has the narrowness of conditionings but silence is free from the foul play of conditionings. When thought empowers us, there is something artificial about it; silence is natural and its fragrance therefore is wholesome. Thought is partial and silence impartial. The ego is made of thoughts (memories) and silence alone is free of ego. We need to understand silence and a silent mind alone can do it.

Self-inquiry de-conditions us. It shows the falsehood of all thoughts – those projecting us as inferior and those presenting us as superior. Though this may defy the understanding of beginners, our true nature is simply not within the reach of any verbal description. The right answer to the fundamental question, “Who am I?” is silence.  This is similar to the mystery of this universe. The basic building block of it all – the atom – is not describable in definite terms. The subatomic particle, the electron, is an enigma by itself. They can neither say it is a particle nor confirm it is a wave. More new theories, like the string theory, keep coming up, to explain what it is ultimately. This ‘I’ is like that. Any answer to the question of our identity has temporary validity; it is dismissed later, or now itself, from another angle of view.

Self-inquiry is practical: It applies to daily life, to every minute of our existence. In every transaction, even as we assume a position in relation to somebody, the question, “Who am I?” has a bearing on the position held. If you think you are the benefactor and somebody a beneficiary, the question WAI (Who am I?) can dilute the notions, if not eliminate them. Can a pen claim it wrote the poem, ignoring the poet? Can a decorative statue, seemingly holding the ceiling on its hands, claim to support the roof? Are not the pillars really the essential support? Do we benefit anybody at all really? Are not various circumstances and diverse factors practically forcing us to play the role of being of help to others? When we see the larger picture, our idea that we helped somebody gets weak and slowly disappears into thin air.

WAI-FI in place of Wi-Fi: Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is popular these days. Motels, restaurants, coffee houses, malls and libraries and so on boast of providing Wi-Fi, where you have internet access on your laptops just like that. You connect to their internet host through the wireless modem built into your laptop. Could we have WAI-FI zones as well? These are areas – parks, river banks, lakesides and so on – where an atmosphere conducive to meditation and self-inquiry is available. Wai-Fi means Who-am-i Fidelity, which means Self-Inquiry Friendly. Let people sit and introspect here. Let them re-examine ‘what they think of themselves’. Let them bring under close scrutiny all their notions of being good, bad, wise, unwise and otherwise. Let them put aside the habitual arguments of thought and, with fresh eyes, observe everything inside and outside. Let them see, without anything colouring their perception, their own thoughts and emotions; let them see trees, birds and other people, with absolutely no prejudice.

Silence is the way to silence. When we do not react but look at something quietly, there is silence in our seeing. Such seeing can help us discover dimensions hitherto unseen. Upon seeing these new dimensions, our old likes and dislikes disappear. The absence of attachment and aversions (raga-dvesha) is silence, the gift that silent watching brings to us. The absence of any bias such as gender bias, regional bias etc gives to us the healthy space to think and act with grace and power. There is the coming together of intelligence and compassion here. The quiet, pure heart sees much more than otherwise; therefore it is intelligent. The pure heart has sympathy for one and all; therefore it is compassionate. The pure heart is the basis of the truth: Awareness Heals.

May we devote this year 2010 for a better understanding of life through a deeper understanding of who we are.

Swami Chidananda

Varanasi

Friday, January 22, 2010

Do not be cruel to yourself. You may not be aware of the ways in which you have inflicted pain to your own self. And you continue to do so even now, in ignorance.
I am not talking of physical violence. The context is psychological and, of course, it affects the body anyway. When you blame yourself unnecessarily or condemn yourself for no true fault of yours, there is cruelty to the self. Relax and be gentle to yourself.
Ambition is the source of much of this kind of cruelty. Therefore you find in this world many millionaires who are neither happy nor let others stay at peace. They live in tension. They fret and fume when small things go wrong (in their opinion, and not really). They seem to be achievers and they are proud of the image they have created in the public eye. The truth however is that, for a little that they have indeed achieved, they have caused a lot of problems also in their surroundings. They are not true assets of this world.
Do you curse yourself when do not perform well? If you do, that surely worsens the situation. It is healthier for you to (take a deep breath and) just examine how you could do better. Please do not heap negative judgments upon yourself. If you do, you will find yourself caught in a vicious circle. Because you think low of yourself, you will spoil the next performance; and because you performed poorly, you will think even more negatively of yourself.
We come across an irony when people get depressed that they did not “meditate this morning”. They call themselves spiritual seekers and they are not aware of the burden that label is causing them. They say, “Oh, I again got up late and missed my meditation today. I have become terribly lazy.” If they know what meditation is, they would right away observe that very thought of guilt or shame at the present moment. To be in the now is the essence of meditation.
So do not regret that you got out of bed late; rather, as there arises a habitual thought of regret, stay aware of that wave. Be in a learning mode and examine (by observing, and not by thinking) the way of your conditioned mind.
You may not suspect how ideals might have caused injury to your psyche. Your fascination with an ideal may have blinded you to the actual, to the realities of your situation. You have a mental picture of Mahatma Gandhi and he becomes your ideal, the role model. You do not have a proper understanding of Gandhiji but all the same have created an image of him. For any variation with that image, you blame yourself and get sad over your imperfections. Upset over your failure to become as good as he was, you go through many related negative emotions. For example, you may get angry with your spouse who, you think, came in the way of your living the ideal life. You may find fault with the society as a whole, which does not appreciate your ways of seeing things.
Heal yourself now. Not by pampering yourself or by indulging in some pleasure pursuit after throwing all ideals to the winds. Heal yourself by staying normal. The excitement of (the prospect of) becoming great or the depression over certain inability to achieve heights are both a play of the mind. What is most important is for you to understand what you are, without any judgment. “Who am I? What am I?” are thus important questions. Stay with such questions and let the frills go away from the mind. You will then find great love and sympathy for yourself. Through that, you will love all and sympathize with all too.

Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
Thursday,  December 10, 2009

One Ego – Many Faces

1.    The ego is born in forms (roopa), stays in forms, and consumes forms.
2.    It drops one form, and without delay, takes another form.
3.    Its inner truth is without form!
4.    Its forms disappear upon inquiring, “Who am I?” (The essence – Pure Awareness without forms – remains).
5.    It is neither the body nor the Awareness. It is something ‘in between’.
6.    It assumes the ‘form’ of the body and pretends to ‘know’ as Awareness does.
7.    Its names are many: ego, knot, bondage, subtle body, mind, worldliness and individual soul.
8.    Its appearance breathes life into the appearances of ‘he, she, it and they’.
9.    Its advent makes ‘past, present and future’ (time divisions) look real.
10.    Its emergence brings a sense of reality to ‘here and there’ (space divisions).
11.    Its rise makes all our problems look real.
12.    Searching for it is the way to complete victory in life.
(Basis: Maharshi Ramana’s Saddarshanam: verse 27 for points 1 through 4; verse 26 for points 5, 6 and 7; verse 18 for point 9; verse 19 for point 10 and verse 28 for points 11 and 12.)

Swami Chidananda
Monday, March 24, 2003

Surge Sixty Three

Is Our True Nature Divine?

“That Thou Art,” is one of the Great Statements¹ of the Vedanta. It means every one of us is divine in our true nature. God and we are one, implies this revelation. We know God to be indestructible and full of love. The Vedic utterance here² is meant to be an eye-opener for us, saying we too are full of love in the depth of our hearts. Usually we live in self-doubt if not in self-condemnation.

How are we divine? A simple way to explain this is – we have infinite capacity to love and we are undoubtedly lovable. Love here is in the truest sense of the term, and not in one of its narrow connotations as most movies, plays, novels or short stories present. Love is a state of being, where there is no selfishness or fear. In that state, we look at all people with a great sense of harmony. We have no intention to take anything from them, nor are we worried about losing anything to them. This state has no personal likes or dislikes³.

The ignorant work for happiness, but the wise do out of happiness, observed Swami Chinmayananda. This answers the popular question, “Why would a divine person do any work at all in this world?” Most people take some kind of discontent or dissatisfaction as a prerequisite to live in this society. They imagine that a man would drop dead if he were satisfied in all respects. They do not see anything other than desire or ambition as the driving force behind action. The truth however is different. Love moves mountains.

Almost everybody in the world suffers from some form of insecurity or the other. Today, in the face of the global economic depression, large numbers of people in the developed countries also are under stress. A study of the Vedanta can help them see through their own self-created misery. Such a study can throw light on the dividing line between biological insecurity and psychological insecurity. Spiritual wisdom eliminates the latter and then we see that, in 99 out of 100 cases, the former hardly exists.

“You are the Atma,” roars the Vedanta, “You have identified falsely with the personality made of the body and the mind.” Countless thoughts, following this false identification, continuously reinforce the foundation for all sorts of negative conclusions. We are then sorry for not having a big house, while our true need is just a little place with basic amenities. We are sad that somebody else is more recognized than we are, while we have received enough love and regard from a good number of people. We are depressed that we do not know enough philosophy (to talk over tea), while a lot of verbal knowledge seldom enriches our life.

It is neither by possessing things nor by avoiding them that we become happy.  Similarly neither company of people nor resisting them ensures happy living. Harmonious living is marked by not depending on things or people. When we are happy within us, we welcome them when they come and let them go when they leave⁴. This state is not arrived at by willing to be so. This becomes our natural state when we let go of all artificialities in our daily living.

When pretending ceases and we stop clinging to false prestige, we remain in our nature. The Vedanta calls this true nature of ours divine, “You are That.”

Swami Chidananda

Varanasi

Monday, March 30, 2009

Surge Fifty Eight

Peace: Geeta’s Guidance

Very few in this world are able to live in peace and tranquility. Material discomforts are the cause of agitation in a lot of cases and disturbed human relationships are the cause of trouble in other. Many imagine that living in spiritual centers (ashrams) ensures peace. Others fancy Himalayan settings. Yet others dream of special time zones, such as free mornings, cooler or warmer months, and vacation periods etc, as the gateways of peace. While all such factors of place and time may marginally help, the real key to peace is more elusive than is available to ordinary reason.

Giving up all selfish desires is the way to peace, says the Geeta (2.71). When the self (ego) ends, we find peace wherever we go. Otherwise no external arrangements are to any avail. To give up (the self and) the selfish desires, we need to have the wisdom of the Self. We must know we are full, adequate and completely secure. It is spiritual ignorance that makes us cling to a hundred things in the world and seek security in them. The Vedanta wisdom helps us let go of all false clinging.

The Song Celestial again says (5.12) we can discover profound peace if we abandon our attachment to the fruits of action. This is actually not different from the earlier revelation. The advice is put in different words. The emphasis on ‘what we get’ in a relationship is the attachment to the fruit. Such stress is born of the activity of the self only. We imagine that our worth is linked to the material rewards or the praise by people. Such thoughts are once more the result of spiritual ignorance. We must realize that our dependence on factors like comfort, profit, recognition etc keeps us eternally bound. What is more, such dependence is merely a bad thinking habit. We can drop it. A powerful insight into the truth, often facilitated by satsanga (contact with a sage), makes us just drop it.

Meditation is said to open the doors of deep peace (6.15). As we gain a better understanding of meditation, we realize that Shri Krishna is not giving a different medicine to our ailment here. Seeing is the essence of meditation. Rather than riding on thoughts, pleasant or unpleasant, we stay as the light of awareness that sees the play of thoughts as they construct the self and its myriad projections. There is no ‘adding fuel to the fire’ in this right seeing, as we are merely the witness. The mischievous machinations of the mind have to die a natural death upon being watched quietly by us.

Peace is ours when we wake up from our complicated, dreamy way of living, characterized by false identifications with goals and groups.  When we rediscover the plain human being within us, the entire structure of seemingly endless fears and agitations collapses like a house of cards.

Swami Chidananda

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Surge Forty One (Advanced)

Limitations of Positive Thinking

A confirmed hunchback kept saying to himself, “I am straight; I am all right” and lo, he became straight! Everybody hears of the power of positive thinking and the miracles that autosuggestion and other techniques achieve. We cannot deny that our own thoughts have terrific power in them to change things outside and inside us.

However, truly healthy living requires a holistic approach and positive thinking falls short of it.

First let us see what negative thinking is. To undermine our abilities and say, “I cannot do it,” when actually we have the capacity, is indeed terrible. In such negative thinking there is understating of our gifts or, what is worse, an unfavorable (low, damaging) self-description while we are all right as a matter of fact. Such negative thinking holds us back from possible achievements and even harms us at times. Negative thinking sometimes can be about others too, making gross understatements (or even wrong, uncomplimentary judgments) of our friends, colleagues etc.

Negative thinking is certainly bad and positive thinking easily scores over it.

Coming back to positive thinking now, the problem with it many a time is that it overstates what we can do. So it is away from truth. And the miracle may not happen. Instead we may land in deep disappointment. Secondly, positive thinking takes a part (and not the whole) and focuses on it so much that lot of other things become unimportant. It thus breeds certain insensitivity in us. All activities centered in achievement have this problem. We get so excited about achieving something and becoming somebody that certain other aspects of life (and interests of others) take a back seat.

Positive thinking is based on will and, despite all its glories, this will (called will power sometimes) denies awareness. When we decide on a goal (unless there is a sportive quality to it), we cannot keep an open mind any more.

So in a manner of saying, “no thinking” is the best, where the call is for gentle awareness that frees us from the limitations of (any) thinking. It is not literally absence of thought, but is of the nature of ‘not being bound’ by the energy of mere thinking. Thinking springs from the realm of the known and we wish to open the doors (and all the windows too) to the unknown.

Swami Chidananda
September 15, 2005