Most of them have become one-paragraphers. Sorry.
I’m putting these thoughts in one page — maybe this form is more palatable to some than long articles.
Ma alone is. You or I are not.
You have neither the responsibility nor the ability to take care of yourself.
Nisargadatta Maharaj said everything I needed to understand the path. He apparently said:
- My guru told me that I was the infinite
- I believed him
- I lived accordingly
The first three quarters of the first shloka of the Isha Upanishad are enough for one to see what one needs to see. The last one-quarter is polite sugar coating. But this one shloka may be too terse for you. I too realised its punch only on hind-sight.
There is no good or bad karma. There is no your karma or my karma. All karma is Ma’s karma. The whole universe is Ma’s karma, because she is the only doer. It’s obvious.
Life is a prison. (This does not mean the opposite. Death is not freedom. Death is nothing.) By “life” here, I mean, our individual existences.
There is only one living entity in the universe. That entity is Ma. The birth and death of a flower, or a dog, or a human, are steps in the constant churn of Ma.
If I can see atoms and molecules clearly, I can see Ma clearly. She’s right there, standing there, in the shape of everything I perceive. Everything I perceive is Ma.
The western view is that only physical things which bang into each other and have mass and size are physical and real and have existence. I believe emotions and urges are equally real and have separate existence too. Anger exists by itself. It does not come into existence when someone feels anger. It does not die when you stop feeling it. It merely passes through you and goes out of you, and continues to exist. Ditto, all emotions. Anger, fear, jealousy, love, are part of the fabric of this universe.
How to live, completely summarised in three bullet points, as far as I have understood:
- You are not the doer. Ma alone is.
- Knowing this, you must act. Continuously do what you think is right and necessary. Vigorously. (This last word is important.)
- Know, even as you act, that there is no connection between your actions and any outcome.
Enlightenment, the way it is described in “normal” discussions, is a sales pitch. Your life neither becomes easier, nor happier, nor richer, nor more blissful, after you realise what Ma is. You have to run your bidi business, or your software company, or take care of your ailing parents, or work in an office, exactly like you used to before you reached understanding. You will still have frozen shoulders and acid reflux.
Enlightenment, the way it is described in “normal” discussions, is, at its very root, a lie. The “normal” description says that you somehow become transformed into some sort of super-being. In reality, enlightenment, if such a thing exists, shows you, without a shadow of doubt, that there is no “you”, and never was. Enlightenment destroys your belief that a “you” ever existed. And if there is no “you”, who is getting enlightened? Who is becoming this super-being?
The universe is built out of raaga-dvesha — forces of attraction and repulsion. And raaga-dvesha are the fundamental forces of like-dislike, attract-hate, which you engage in as long as you believe in this game. Once you see this as a game, all raaga and dvesha drops away from you. Your body still lives, because it has atoms and molecules, which are held together by the physical forces of raaga-dvesha. (All physical things are atoms and molecules held together by attraction and repulsion, else all atoms would drift apart.)
People keep asking, “Can you see God?” It is the silliest question. I see all the universe as Ma, so how does one not see Ma? Ma is the only thing we’ve been seeing as long as I, or you, have had eyes.
Once understanding dawns on one, the ego loses its grip. But it keeps coming back through side doors and back doors, because that’s the way the human psyche is designed. We keep side-stepping the ego by constantly remembering that Ma alone is. Every so-called “enlightened person” too lives like this. Constant vigilance is key. And meditation, chanting of (a few chosen) mantras, reading a text about the Absolute, chatting with a fellow seer of Ma, helps in our vigilance.
Every action we do at a material level is a subtle assertion of our ego, because all actions are done by individuals who believe themselves to be individuals. Even the act of me writing this web page is an assertion of my ego. If you reach a state of awareness where there is total side-stepping of the ego, then you cannot breathe, let alone act out a human life. (I have literally experienced this for a few moments.) So, knowing this, you have to act, and pretend to be a separate individual. If you exist as a body-mind organism, you have some sense of “I-ness”, some ego.
How do you know that this page is not AI generated? Answer: you don’t. Each reader will need to take a call about whether the author actually understands these thoughts, or whether the author is faking it, or copy-pasting catchy statements from a ChatGPT page. Similarly, you will never know if a “great sage” is “enlightened”. You will have to take a call. Finally, you will have to take a call about whether you yourself have understood. No one will come to you in your dreams and give you a degree certificate.
The idea of samadhi, as described in yoga literature, is awesome, but it is not a mandatory experience for all seekers. It is a tool to help you understand the nature of Ma and dissolve your feeling about your “I-ness”. If you have experienced samadhi, that’s awesome, but after samadhi, do you still exist? If yes, how do you live? Does samadhi change your post-samadhi existence? Does the pain in your ankle go away, your cancer get cured, due to samadhi? Maybe you believe that samadhi will teach you that cancer doesn’t matter. Really? You believe that? That excruciating pain of cancer doesn’t matter? Ok, let’s say that it doesn’t. Then: what matters?
As long as you believe that there are two separate things, good and evil, you will be caught in Ma’s game. You will never see Ma. Even the most brutal form of this question needs to be faced at some point. The killer is Ma, the victim is Ma. The rapist is Ma, the person being raped is Ma. If you can’t stomach this, go to temples like everyone else, offer flowers, ring bells, and keep asking for a “good” and “happy” life. Realisation of the deeper truth is not yet for you.
If any guru, any book, tells you that realisation of the ultimate truth will make all sorrow go away, run very far from that book or guru. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa died of throat cancer. Christ, if we take the Bible to be historical fact, died nailed to a big wooden cross. (Crucifixion kills you by asphyxia. Not a nice way to die.) Ramana Maharshi had a malignant sarcoma on his left arm or elbow, which caused the death of his body two years later. And somehow you think you’re so special, so differently blessed, that you will not suffer? The cessation of suffering is a sales pitch to get you interested in investigating the deeper truths. Unfortunately, this sales pitch has resulted in a hordes of people seeking out “spiritual” practices because they’re afraid of suffering. They feel spiritual seeking will make them healthier, more handsome, and richer.
I sometimes feel that what these spiritual seekers call maya, I call Ma. There is nowhere to run to, if one wants to run away from maya. The vedantins will talk about “rejecting” or “detaching from” maya, but you literally exist in maya, as a part of maya. Rejecting maya is, to me, rejecting Ma. The things I am attached to are all shapes in, and made from, Ma. I will reject them?
Everything you are aware of, including all thoughts, all ideas, all material objects, are shapes in Ma, and made out of Ma. These things have no separate existence. There are no exceptions to this rule. If you listen to lectures on vedanta, then they tell you that one of the things you’re aware of is you, the “observer”. See drig-drishya viveka. But actually, that observer too is an illusion, because the hard reality is that if you’re aware of yourself “observing”, then that “observer” is merely a thought layered on the rest of your thoughts. Once you properly grasp this, ask yourself: in that case, what are you? (Don’t expect me to answer this. You have to realise the answer through your very own light-bulb moment.)
Realisation of all the things I’ve realised does not give one any answers. It does not tell you what Ma is, what you are. It dissolves, forever, all answers you used to believe in before. What then is left? A permanent state of not-knowing. If you can’t handle this, either walk away from this path, or find a real master (like I did), and ask him to guide you across the divide.
It may be possible to realise what I’ve realised without a master. But I don’t know how. I could not have done it. When the sense of self dissolves, you either go insane or want to put a bullet through your head. Only a master can guide you across that final divide and still let you live a “normal”, “sane” life.
Knowing that you are not, only Ma is, and yet committing to act, vigorously, all your life, is another paradox which can only be crossed by guidance. My master guided me. I cannot even explain in words how you can do it — you just have to realise it yourself, with guidance. So, words from people like me won’t help you.
Some people meditate to “realise God”. Others meditate because they have realised whatever they could realise, and now feel that there is nothing else to do but meditate, whenever they get time from their actions. Both reasons are good.
Can an “enlightened” person become un-enlightened? Once a person realises that the earth is round, can he ever shift back to a state where he truly believes that the earth is flat? As Vivekananda apparently said, “Once you see the truth of things, you can never un-see it.”
One of the most ridiculous statements humankind makes is “Seeing is believing”. This belief is at the core of a living being’s imprisonment in maya. If seeing was believing, then we would all believe that the earth is a flat plate and the sun revolves around us.
Maya is a set of beliefs. It includes the belief that you are a separate entity which has agency and is responsible for your own well-being. Through careful introspection, guidance from a master, and yogic practices, you shed those beliefs without (I hope) becoming totally nihilistic and putting a bullet through your head. This is what they call “enlightenment”, I think.
“I” is a mental construct. Causality too is a mental construct. We believe that X causes Y because we have this deep urge to find “explanations” for phenomena. We feel insecure till we feel we have “understood” what causes Y. This is how Ma has shaped our minds. In reality, events happen, deeds are done, and there is no causality, unless you treat the entire universe as a single causal machine.
The wind blows. There is no “blower” who is blowing the wind. In a similar way, events happen, and there is no doer who is making the events happen. We have bought into the idea of agents so deeply that we believe that everything which happens, happens because there is someone or something making it happen. This is the mental construct of causality. This is a key part of maya.
When someone who has understood some of these things says he “sees God everywhere”, he’s not hallucinating. His optic nerves are carrying exactly the same impulses your and my nerves are. He sees what you see, but he knows that what he sees is “God”, because there is nothing other than “God”. (I prefer to call her Ma. It is what many Hindus call Shakti — the manifest universe, the universe of name and form. Words, words, words.) When a person understands that the earth is round sees the land stretching to the horizon, he still sees flat land, like you and me.