Spark 3
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
PRACTICE IN THE CONTEXT OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Within a dream, a person wonders, “What am I to do in order to wake up from this dream?” She further adds, “What should I do repeatedly so I can speed up my waking up?” Little she realizes that ‘doing once’ or ‘doing repeatedly’ would involve some movement in space and time, and both these coordinates are illusory within the dream.
If a man in Piscataway finds himself, for example, in Chicago in his dream, and he wishes to go to Milwaukee, all his plans about how he may travel are meaningless for he, in reality, is just not in Chicago!
Whether practice has any validity at all is one of the very intriguing debates in the context of Self-Knowledge. That is because the idea of ‘doing something’ involves doership and that is a contradiction. All techniques, methods and exercises done consciously with a view to shed our ego come under the scanner here, for the doer is the ego. Isn’t the thief going round the town in the disguise of the policeman, claiming that he will soon catch the thief?
Despite this philosophical problem, we are told by many mystics to ‘see,’ ‘be’ or ‘inquire’ etc. which is regarded as not belonging to the category of ‘doing’. What is more, seeing can coexist with doing while the two are distinct. You have (or you are) certain intelligence that can undo the illusion that your mind has always created. Let this intelligence, which is above the mind, operate. An operation of the mind (or by the mind) cannot apparently solve the mystery created by the mind. To rise above the mind, in a manner of speaking, you have to resort to a force that is subtler than the mind. Some mystics call it simply intelligence.
“The liberating operation may be beyond the mind; what about preparing for it, madam?” is the question some people would ask. Calming the mind, purifying it, making it single-pointed, rendering it still and so on have been attractive proposals for long. Seekers fall in love with these to the extent they wish to remain in certain practices forever! Theories of how to arrive at the Aha moment have enchanted people so much that they get busy describing the theories and forget about the actual arrival. It is like someone getting so excited with the map that he does not get on with the travel to the actual territory.
The question, “so should we practice anything at all or is it wiser to give up all practices?” is itself questionable. It seems more appropriate to say, “You will anyway engage in some practice or the other when you are on a certain level of consciousness. You will give them up out of laziness in another state of consciousness. And when you come upon the true realization that all practices are meaningless, the Aha just happens.”
Swami Chidananda
San Gabriel, California
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