The Guru Spake :
07122011Ujjain
© Vinay Vaidya
1.
One fine auspicious day in March 1986, The Guru living eternally in my Heart of the Hearts as 'Self' and also as 'self', as 'Brahman', 'Supreme Truth' and 'Sat-Chit-Anand', 'Ishvara', and 'The only Dharma', said to me;
You feel the life, and the world, utterly absurd and meaningless, the way one keeps living always in misery, sorrow and helplessness, -in this and many more rest of the presumed births. Everywhere and everyone feels likewise at some point in his life. And usually, one either tries to escape from this apparent fact or to find out a way to end this state of being. For himself, as well as for the whole humanity, if he could ever find such a way. And it seems, rarely one succeeds despite all his efforts. Why?
Because 'Absurdity' as such has a point of reference and if you fail to connect to it with that right point of reference, the right perspective, you may try the hardest and still end-up in despair and agony. And the only right way is to trace the right perspective and you shall discover without fail, the beautiful significance and meaning of the 'sense of absurdity' that keeps haunting you always. Don't try to see what is absurd and what should be done to make that meaningful. You will never find a way to put meaning into what is essentially absurd. But try to understand the perspective of 'Absurdity' as such. Wherefrom it comes? And exactly 'who' is the one that experiences 'Absurdity'?
'Who' is the entity that 'experiences' and faces the sense of absurdity, meaninglessness and purposelessness? The simple answer is: 'consciousness'.
Let us refrain from saying it 'a consciousness', because that would spoil the whole perspective. The 'consciousness' is not a personal attribute, though everyone tends to and habitual to believe so. If you can see that the 'person', as conceived in the form of a cluster of different kinds of ideas in memory only, and there exists no such a person as a fact, you may get at the reality that consciousness helps in generating the ideas and memory is a store-house. And this reality is not an 'idea' to be conceived or caught in the memory as information. And this 'consciousness' is the only relevant perspective, the right reference within which, where-in and where-from the sense of absurdity should be examined. And according to your predisposition, you can deal with it as an entity which is objective, subjective or both at the same time or different from these both categories, or something more in addition to those. This depends on 'attention'. 'Attention' is the essence of consciousness.
Nothing owns existence in the absence of attention. Though it is only the attention that gives existence to each and everything, it itself remains undefined. And though we say that everything happens in the presence of consciousness, consciousness itself is there when it gets attention.
This attention is the touchstone of consciousness and then various attributes like body-consciousness, sensory-consciousness, animal-consciousness, are attached with it. Even it is common belief of many that at the time of death, consciousness leaves the body. And curiously enough neither the dead nor the alive can have evidence to this. And if the dead have such an evidence, they can't share this with the alive if the consciousness is not as the common link to support them both.
So, consciousness is contained in this single speck of attention, the person and his world in the consciousness and attention is the indescribable immediate ever-present alive yet immutable truth, within the reach of every-one. When turned onto itself the whole person and his world can always be traced to consciousness, and consciousness can be likewise traced to the fact of attention.
So, when the attention is withdrawn from the person and his world, and given to consciousness, the person and his world get annihilated, because they never had an independent existence of their own.
They were projected through and into consciousness. Then withdrawing attention from the consciousness, (which happens spontaneously, without effort on one's part,) the consciousness is further merged into attention. The self-resplendent attention remains as the Reality, Self, Brahman, Ishwara, Dharma, or Truth. It is the True Love, Devotion, Yoga and Action (Karma).
This is the purport of All Vedantika Sadhana (practice).
MandUkya upaniShad explaines how 'm' is to be merged into 'u', 'u' into 'a', and 'a' into 'aum' = ॐ.
Gita also emphasizes the same.
What was your experience when you were fast asleep? Where was this 'absurdity' at that time? You shall soon realize that it is the 'I am the body' idea that springs-up along with the arrival of waking state, and the world is experienced through senses in the first instance. This 'world' includes the body also, but at once the perception of the world is split into two because of memory. Then 'I am' is taken as body and the rest of the world as 'world'. Even before the emerging-out of that 'I am the body' -idea, consciousness was there un-assailed by this 'world' that looks now so tremendously real and other than 'me'. During sleep, you were enjoying the blissful sleep, oblivious of the existence of such a world somewhere. Similarly, you were oblivious of the misery, absurdity, meaning or meaninglessness, success or failure in the world or life around you. If you can recall that state of your being, that is when there is no world or the one who experiences the world, you may realize for certain that your that effortless spontaneous being, the natural state knows no birth or death. In comparison, the 'I am the body'-idea exists always in association with something that is external to your true being. So the waking state itself is a temporary incidence that comes to you and leaves you again.
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2.
After getting-up first of all ‘I am’ notion emerged in the state of Consciousness which is ever so immutable and the underlying principle of all mental modes. But even before the mental modes are flung into full swing this ‘I am’ sense is already there and persists with all consecutive modes of the ‘mind’. It is already there in the dream-state of consciousness and even in dreamless sleep. In the three major states of consciousness, namely the sleep, the dream and the waking, it is there and all mental modes are strung onto it like the beads of a rosary. These modes are mental-states one always knows intuitively and due to lack of inquiry, gets attached to them due to the wrong notion that he ‘experienced’ those states. Even though this signifies a greater truth that whatever ‘he’ is in reality is altogether something else than those mental modes which he thinks he went through. Then, by this very understanding he begins to see that he is never sad, angry, anxious, or likewise any of the feelings and the mental modes and the things projected as world and the worldly elements. Once this is clear he may try to either to dislodge and disown all mental things, or to find out, what ‘he’ is that is swayed over under various mental modes. He may see those modes instantly in a moment, with keen attention or may see that this sense of ‘I am’ is not such an experience similar to mental modes, but is the ground of all experience. It is then up to him how he deals with it, this sense of pure ‘I am’ -sense. He may then like to associate ‘I’ with the person and his memories and call that person ‘I’, or may abide in the consciousness wherein and whence, wherefrom this ‘I’ am’ sense
Repeatedly emerges out and re-merges into, whenever the ‘waking state’ is there. Obviously the ‘waking state’ is connected with the physical body, and so, as soon a man wakes up from sleep, the ‘I am’ sense arises and then as a secondary notion the body and the world of memory are distinguished as two different objects. And just because the brain is there, the simple ‘I am’-sense gets translated into ‘I am body’ sense. That too happens in the beginning, as a non-verbal idea only. Soon other associated ideas join it.
Then the idea ‘I am a person’ comes into action.
When one understand this whole gamut, one no more identifies oneself as or with anything, -physical or mental.
Absurdity happens when this identification is there. You know You ‘are’, but don’t know what you are. So the mind proposes several objects and in the beginning you accept any of them as your true being, but when you enquire into, you find out or rather discover the beauty and the purpose hidden in the ‘Absurdity’.
What difference come-up when you wake-up? Of course the ‘I am’ idea and then its reality at once gets translated into the ‘I am the body’-idea and a particular body is ascribed with this. It is, the ‘identification’. Then whatever is associated with this ‘I am the body’-idea is accepted in the memory as ‘me’, though it is
Basically an assumption and as such a ‘thought’ only. Thus a new
‘identity’ takes place. This wrong assumption gets strengthened but when its reality is questioned, it vanishes and the underlying
‘Reality’ is revealed. It was always there as ‘Self’, but covered-up
by the ‘self’. The One underlying consciousness where all divisions cease, yet You remain. It is your ‘Reality’.
It is important that while in the usual waking state to wake-up to this phenomenon of emerging and fading-out of this phantom,
Which obscures the Reality from our eyes. Thereby one understands and is astonished at the beauty and significance of
‘Absurdity’.
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