Reality and Illusion

The ego mind paints its own picture onto reality and we then judge “good” or “bad” on the basis of this hallucination. Our ego mind cheats us by projecting its own hallucinated view of reality, in which we believe. – Lama Yeshe

The mind of an individual is a part of the cosmic universal mind. You must understand that your individual mind is part of the universal mind. The space in this room is an individual space, but it is also a part of a greater space. Because you have four walls around it, you call it your room space. Similarly, the individual mind is a concept and not a reality. – Swami Satyananda Saraswati

The idea that our reality is an illusion runs through many spiritual traditions and has cropped up again as people attempt to interpret quantum physics.  Absolute reality (and face it, what other kind of reality matters?) is not to be found in the circumstances that we seemingly find around us.  The sensory world albeit how indisputably real it seems is not it.  Instead it is the mind that constitutes our reality.  “It’s all in your mind?”  Actually, it is all in our mind. 

Our symbolic mind can be seen as a conceptual overlay of reality.  It is an attempt at describing, encoding and interpreting reality symbolically, whether linguistically, mathematically or otherwise.  This is a wonderful capacity but the problem is that we come to live in a world that is primarily conceptual.  We take the map to be the territory.  As one of my favorite writer-teachers, Robert Anton Wilson, said, “We all see only that which we are trained to see.”  We see our world through the eyes of our own experience based upon our cultural conditioning. 

Absolute reality is beyond concepts, beyond interpretation and more immediately present as the tip of your own nose.  True reality is not something that we need to seek but that which is already ever-present.  It is the unified field of consciousness underlying the illusory separateness of our experience.  Absolute reality is not involved in our space-time continuum.  However it is ever-present.  It is foremostly within us although it is also projected without.  It is immanent as well as transcendent.  Our primary problem is that we focus entirely on the manifest circumstances of our experience rather than resting in the reality of our unified being. 

Why Bother With Spiritual Practice?

"It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are."
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Sadhana means setting the mind right so the light of God is seen directly.

– Paramhamsa Satyananda Saraswati

I just had my 59^th birthday.  Big deal, I know.  However, I agree with the position that the purpose of this life is to awaken to our true identity, to experience a unified consciousness – “The” Unified Consciousness, aka “God.”  The reason is that I have had some “tastes” of that experience and I know that it makes all of our worldly concerns seem absolutely trivial.  I’m not talking about world hunger, war, poverty, disease, human trafficking or any of the other darkness in the world.  I’m talking about our ordinary ego-centric concerns for security, pleasure, personal control, romance, even “righteousness.” 

Aging can be used as a means of gaining some perspective on one’s body and one’s life.  Everything, even what we identify with as ourselves, is a temporary manifestation of something “greater.”  This body that I enjoy through the senses is a transient phenomenon.  In fact it is constantly changing.  We grow, develop, reach our prime and then decay.  But “that” is not really who we are.  Underlying the surface of phenomena is the timeless, non-spatial essence of our being; the inner witness.  Who this inner witness is, is not a question that can be answered through the ordinary workings of our minds.  It is not material, not mental or emotional but it is always here, right now. It is always present as the locus of experience.  This is the true essence of our being(s).

Sadhana, or “spiritual practice” is any means that works to help us enter into our deeper identity.  I practice and teach hatha yoga asana and pranayama, various meditation techniques and devotional song, kirtan.  Reading and contemplating spiritual texts can also be a form of sadhana.  These all work well, especially in combination.  But as I remind students, one’s practice must be regular and consistent.  Regular ongoing sadhana enables us to de-condition ourselves, release toxic emotional energy and false beliefs that we have accumulated as to who and what we are.  It is work that we must do on ourselves and there are no real shortcuts.  However, the work is not really all that painful or arduous; in fact it can and should be joyous, at least more often than not.

With ongoing practice the inner peace which is cultivated begins to grow.  However, it must be nurtured to some extent.  I have found myself withdrawing from “normal” situations and relationships because they do not serve it.  Why stay attached to people and things that distract me from bliss?  Of course the attachment is within me, the reaction is my own and no one and nothing is to blame.  However, loud music, violent media, judgmental conversations, one-upmanship, gossip, etc. simply do not serve spiritual practice; at least not for me.  Any and all situations and relationships reflect where I am attached or not.  As Ram Das wisely puts it, “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”  When we recognize and release our attachments we can evolve further.

In the Dhammapada, Buddha states, “Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind, and produced by mind.”  Sadhana is a means of purifying one’s mind.  It is a means of bringing negative mental patterns to light and letting them go, as well as cultivating and reinforcing positive ones.  When we let go of our mental baggage we open space for the light of God.  It is not a matter of judging whether something is “good” or “bad,” but of letting go and trusting the “goodness” of our own essential nature.  When we truly surrender in our practice we give up any and all expectations, desires, fantasies, ideologies in order to enter into “reality.” 

Growing older allows me to let go of attachments, although I am hardly “liberated.”  It also reminds that life is short and that it is necessary to focus on what is essential.  Sadhana connects me with that even if I can’t truly define what that is. 

Freedom and Immortality

"Our divine perfection – not registered by the physical eye but only by the heart’s knowing – is who we truly are. Our mortal imperfections – registered by the physical senses – are not who we truly are. Yet we keep trying, in love, to find each other’s perfection within the world of imperfection. And it simply is not there." ~ Marianne Williamson

Liberation, bondage, what are they to me? What do I care for freedom? For I have known God, the infinite Self, the witness of all things. ~ The Heart of Awareness

We can characterize the spiritual path as it is stated in the Upanishads as the movement from the unreal to the real, from darkness into the light and from death to immortality.  It involves a growing awareness that we are not these bodies, not our temporary personalities even, but something deeper, more essential and ultimately beyond measurement, quantification or definition.  We are beings of consciousness, which is essentially unlimited by either space or time.

It is the dawning recognition that this world of dire circumstances is basically ephemeral.  It has no substance beyond the belief we are willing to invest in it; the projection of our collective hopes and fears.  Although many would argue that this is a retreat from the very real problems of the world, it really means empowering ourselves.  By waking up to who we truly are and seeing our circumstances for what they truly are we are in a position to make whatever changes we deem necessary. 

Imagine being locked in a prison in a dream.  While dreaming, you search here and there looking for a way out.  Maybe you even give up.  But what if you start to awaken and realize that you are dreaming?  Everything changes.  The circumstances by which you were victimized no longer have any power because you recognize that they were only in your mind.  You can turn the prison into a pumpkin pie with ice cream.

I liked the film “Inception.”  Many people made fun of its underlying premises because they were not terribly logical; dreams within dreams where one could be killed, etc.  Of course the nature of dreams is that they don’t make sense to the rational mind.  The rational mind wants to analyze everything for some kind of linear causal connection.  If we pay attention “reality” is often more like a dream than a linear sequence of events.  You think of someone you haven’t seen for a years and then suddenly meet them unexpectedly.  C. G. Jung described these kinds of phenomena as synchronicity.  Just as when we start to recognize the linear inconsistencies in a dream and awaken, synchronicities remind us that this supposed waking world is also a dream.

The problem with dreams is that they are pretty much always based on previous experience.  They reveal our samskaras, our collected mental patterns.  Occasionally perhaps we might have a truly prophetic dream in which the gods speak to us.  However, mostly not.  True awakening means transcending the three conditioned states of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep.  It is the recognition that we are not part of the system at all.  We are always absolutely free and immortal.  As Deepak Chopra, MD puts it, “We are not victims of aging, sickness and death.  These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change.  The seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.”

Meditation is a primary means of disengaging from the dream, from unreality, and being real, letting go of the darkness and revealing the inner light and realizing that there is no birth and no death.  Our very nature, swarupe, is freedom and bliss.  Practice and realize this.  Then keep on practicing until you are established in that realization.

Beyond Love

Love is a by-product of a rising consciousness.  It is just like the fragrance of a flower.  Don’t search for the roots; it is not there.  Your biology is your roots; your consciousness is your flowering. – Osho

Whatever we think we mean by love is not love.  As egos we are only able to glimpse the possibility of love when we are free from attachment.  “The one you love you cannot possess,” states Tantra.  Because we are under this mass hypnosis of avidya, we operate from a basis of delusion and fear which causes us to cling to this false self-identification of ego.  Because we are not authentically ourselves we can’t truly experience love. 

Ego is the movement into separation.  The expansive I Am becomes the limited “I am this body.”  We become “skin-encapsulated.”  On a biological level we “love” another out of sexual desire.  We bond with each other because oxytocin is released in the blood.  We bond in a very limited way where the self-clinging of ego becomes pair-bonding, family-bonding, ethnic-bonding.  Spiritual love, true love however, doesn’t exclude anyone.  It is based on the recognition that there is “only one of us here.”  The Mayans have an expression for this.  Inlakesh means, “I am another you; you are another me.”  It is essentially the same as the Sanskrit Namaste. 

True love requires spiritual work, i.e. sadhana.  We can’t do this on a purely intellectual level.  We have to enter into the stream of devotion.  We have to develop a practice of meditation.  We have to love and appreciate ourselves on a soul level.  We can’t see God in another until we have accepted that God is within us as well.  Sadhana, spiritual practice is basically a means of dehypnotizing ourselves and waking up to who we truly are.  Meditation is a state of consciousness which can arise out of many diverse methods.  The method whether TM, kriya yoga, mahamudra, vipassana, contemplative prayer, ecstatic dance, etc. is just a means to help us enter into a sacred inner space. 

In the tradition of Bhakti Yoga, “The Yoga of Love,” there are different terms for different stages of love.  The first term is “bhava” which means a loving, devotional attitude.  Love begins with the intention of loving.  It begins with the cultivation of a positive attitude.  In a sense it is more conceptual than emotional; the acceptance of the inner divinity of oneself and the other, the “object” of our loving intention.  This the first stage of “conscious love.”  It has nothing to do with our notions of “falling in love” which is really a state of unconscious infatuation.  Bhakti yoga is the path of conscious love, rising rather than falling in love.  “The method and purpose of Bhakti,” said Swami Satyananda Saraswati, “is to take you away from identification with the little "I": the body-mind. The aim is to reduce personal whims, conflicts, disharmony, etc., which tend to imprison and severely limit awareness. The aim is to make the mind a perfect reflector, a perfect mirror of experience.” (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1992/djuly92/bhkyog.shtml)

“Prem” is the second term.  It means “love.”  Bhava paves the way for the more spontaneous flow of love from the heart.  Prem is the experience of bliss as one sheds the false form of ego and longs to unite with the Divine essence.  There is wonderful mantra “aham Prema” which means “I am love.”  Prem is the awakening to our essential nature as loving awareness.  The universe, the multiverse, is the evolving product of the outflow of love from its formless essence.   Love is the essence of everything that exists.  As we willingly shed our ego defenses it is revealed as our own Self.

Bhakti is the flowering of love.  It is the state of devotion wherein the “little I” is completely transcended.  As Swamiji says, “. . . in bhakti the 'I' is lost; there is only 'you'. That state of self-awareness is known as bhakti.”  Love in all of its forms helps to disintegrate the cage of ego that we have come to live in.  With the flowering of Bhakti there is no cage left, no separate self, only Love.  (http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1995/bmarch95/say295.shtml)