Non-duality

Am I the body? Am I not the body?

~ Tom Das ~ 7 Comments

This post is continued from a prior post: Integrating knowledge, spontaneous action

Q. I’ve been reading Ramana Maharshi recently and he keeps on saying ‘I’m not the body’.

Tom: Yes, that’s right.

Q: But I don’t really hear you talk about not being the body.

Tom: Yes, that’s because it’s a ‘thorn’. Remember the phrase I’ve mentioned: ‘Use a thorn to remove and thorn and throw them both away’?

Q: Yes, I’ve heard you say that. Please can you explain it again?

Tom: Sure. The first thorn represents a wrong concept that is active in your mind and causes suffering, just as a thorn in your foot causes suffering. You then take a second thorn and use it as a tool to remove the first thorn, but then you throw them both away. If you don’t throw away the second thorn, then you now have a new thorn (concept) that will cause you to suffer.

Ramana often talks about rooting out the ‘I-am-the-body’ concept, and the concept ‘I-am-not-the-body’ is just to negate the initial thorn. But then you throw it away too.

Q: So I am not the body is not true either?

Tom: Exactly. Or, lets put it like this: for a moment just forget what Ramana says, forget what I say – for all you know we could both be talking a load of rubbish! Afterall, lots of intelligent people believe strange and silly things, and we could be no different, right? So forget what we say.

So let me ask you a question: do you know for sure that you are a body?

Q: Well it often seems like I am a body…

Tom: But do you know for sure?

Q: No, not for sure.

Tom: Good. Now, do you know for sure that you are not the body?

Q: No, not for sure.

Tom: Good. That’s our basic experience. We don’t know either way. The body appears and follows us around, as it were, but we don’t know exactly what it means. Is the body me? Is it not me? The truth is I don’t know. That’s it. That’s the truth. We don’t know. Isn’t that right?

Q: But when I say to myself ‘I am not the body’, it feels so good, it just feels really nice.

Tom: Yes, of course, because you are negating the concept (I-am-the-body) that causes so much suffering. It’s a good thing to practice, it’s a great practice in fact. If it works for you I recommend you practice it.

Q: Oh, I see, so it’s a practice.

Tom: Exactly. We are not saying don’t practice. We may need the second thorn, that’s why it is there, that’s why it is taught. So use that thorn, use that tool, practice ‘I am not the body’. When it has done its work, when it has weeded out the ‘I am the body’ concept, then you won’t need it any more and you can throw it away too.

Q: OK, I got it now. Wow, there are so many thorns, aren’t there?

Tom: Yes!

Q: I often get confused about whether or not the world is a dream or illusion or not, but that’s just another thorn too, right?

Tom: Exactly. ‘The world is an illusion’ – it’s a very powerful thorn, one that benefited me a lot whilst I was seeking. But again, do you know for sure if the world is an illusion?

Q: No, not for sure…I know what you’re going to ask next…

Tom: …And do you know for sure that the world is not an illusion?

Q: No, not for sure . I knew you’d say that.

Tom: (laughing) That’s it! We don’t know either way! It’s so simple – Got it?

Q: (laughing) Got it.

Tom: so you can practice these, all these thorns. All these thorns are concepts. Use them – they are most definately useful – use them if you need them. The concepts are used to weed out the beliefs. You may need to practice them for weeks or months, but when their work is done, and the suffering has dissipated, throw them away.

❤

Also see Ranjit Maharaj talk about this.

 

Annamalai Swami: ‘Don’t sit and meditate’

~ Tom Das ~ 3 Comments

Annamalai Swami: Bhagavan watched me very closely in the years that I served him in the ashram. One time I went to the Mother’s temple where many people were talking about worldly matters.

Bhagavan called me back, saying, ‘Why should you go to that crowd? Don’t go to crowded places. If you move with the crowd, their vasanas will infect you.’

annamalai swami final talks

Bhagavan always encouraged me to live a solitary life and not mix with other people. That was the path he picked for me. Other people got different advice that was equally good for them.

But while he actively discouraged me from socialising, he also discouraged me from sitting quietly and meditating during the years that I was working in the ashram. In this period of my life, if Bhagavan saw me sitting with my eyes closed he would call out to me and give me some work to do.

On one of these occasions he told me,

‘Don’t sit and meditate. It will be enough if you don’t forget that you are the Self. Keep this in your mind all the time while you are working. This sadhana will be enough for you. The real sadhana is not to forget the Self. It is not sitting quietly with one’s eyes closed. You are always the Self. Just don’t forget it.’

Bhagavan’s way does not create a war between the mind and the body. He does not make people sit down and fight the mind with closed eyes. Usually, when you sit in meditation, you are struggling to achieve something, fighting to gain control over the mind. Bhagavan did not advise us to engage in this kind of fight. He told us that there is no need to engage in a war against the mind, because mind does not have any real, fundamental existence. This mind, he said, is nothing but a shadow. He advised me to be continuously aware of the Self while I did the ordinary things of everyday life, and in my case, this was enough.

The above is an excerpt taken from Final Talks by Annamalai Swami, p. 67

Integrating knowledge, spontaneous action

~ Tom Das ~ 4 Comments

This post is continued from Discarding Knowledge as Ignorance

Do you go around repeatedly saying your name so that you remember it? Do you have to walk around saying “I am Tom, I am Tom, I am Tom?” (obviously substitute in your name).

Or do you spend most of your life not even thinking about your name, but when someone calls out your name, the understanding ‘My name is Tom’ automatically acts: you turn your head and respond?

It’s the same with understanding there is no doer: initially you may need to think about it, go through the reasoning, and realise there is no evidence for a doer. It is a conscious process. Because we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as being a doer, there is often a process of deconditioning.

It may also take time for all the suffering based on the ‘I am the doer’ notion to fall away. Other notions such as ‘I am to blame’ or ‘I could/should have done it differently’ or ‘I am not worthy’ may still all be at play. All these depend on the root belief ‘I am a separate doer-entity’. Again, there may be a conscious process of applying this understanding in order to deal with suffering as it arises and uprooting the associated beliefs upon which suffering depends.

But once this has been done, then we don’t need to think about it. The knowledge of ‘there is no doer’ has been ingrained into us. We do not need to think about it, we no longer need to repeat the process of understanding.

But just as when someone asks your name, you can spontaneously respond ‘My name is ____’, when someone asks you ‘Are you a doer?’, you can instantly reply ‘there is no doer’.

This post is continued here: Am I the body? Am I not the body?

Discarding knowledge as ignorance

~ Tom Das ~ 5 Comments

This post is continued from my previous post: Practicing knowledge

Discarding knowledge as ignorance

Once the purpose of the tool has been fulfilled, then the tool can be dispensed with. There are two main problems with this. Firstly, you can dispense with the tool too quickly, before it has done its work of rooting out ignorance. Secondly, you can cling onto the tool for too long, which essentially means that you have started to believe in it.

I see both of these errors happening all the time. People often dismiss the need for practice completely. While there are different paths to follow (including no-path ‘paths’), that does not mean that for some a path or teaching cannot be of benefit. All teachings are provisional which means that they produce limited results. This is true of all teachings and all actions/practices – they are all limited and produce limited results. But these limited results can still be of use to us in recognising what is already (and always was) present , ie. Freedom. 

Other people believe the conceptual tool. They have merely substituted one concept for another, one ignorance for another.

Hence the traditional advice is to liken these conceptual tools as being thorns, to remind you not to hold onto the second thorn, useful as it was:

Then, like the thorn used to remove a thorn, throw them both away.

See Ranjit Maharaj discuss this here.

This post is continued in the next article: Integrating knowledge/spontaneous action

Practicing knowledge

~ Tom Das ~ 4 Comments

This is continued from a previous post Problems with utilising conceptual tools:

Practicing knowledge

This brings us to the idea of practicing knowledge. Just to be clear, the knowledge we are talking of here is in the form of concepts, as described previously above. In this case whenever we notice ourselves suffering, we notice it is because we have identified as being the doer/body-mind. We then take up the sword of knowledge ‘I am not the body’ and use it to slay the ignorance ‘I am the body’.

Other similar ideas are concepts of identifying as being the witness or identifying as consciousness or considering the world and body-mind to be an illusion. These concepts all which work in a similar way to negate the identification as the doer/body-mind. Here’s an example from Yoga Vasisthta:

You are bound firmly on all sides by the idea, I am the body’. Cut that bond by the sword of knowledge ‘I am Consciousness’ and be happy.
Yoga Vasisthta

Whenever ignorance rises, we cut it down. When it doesn’t rise, we can leave it alone. Initially we may have to repeat the phrase ‘I am not the body’ or ‘I am Consciousness’ or ‘I am Brahman’ in our heads repeatedly, like a mantra, until it sinks in, but after sometime it is ingrained into us and we only unsheathe the sword when it is required.

To be continued in a future post: Discarding knowledge as ignorance

Problems with utilising conceptual tools

~ Tom Das ~ 3 Comments

Continued from 2 previous posts:

  1. Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough
  2. Integrating the understanding of no-doer

Problems with utilising conceptual tools

Generally speaking, the more you believe in the concept, the better it works, but conversely the harder it is to throw it away once the task at hand (rooting out the ego/’I am the body’ notion) has been completed.

Other problems with believing in the concepts is that it sets you against other traditions and teachings that either utilise other concepts, thus breeding division and sectarianism, and also it can lead to some unintended consequences, some of which can be quite unpleasant.

These include spiritual bypassing, which is where emotional and psychological issues are not dealt with properly as ‘I am not the body-mind so I have no issues’ or where the body is neglected and not properly respected as it is deemed to be ‘insentient, inert and not me’.

Another problem with utilising concepts is that the ego is perpetuated and can even be strengthened during this part of the teaching. Eventually it can be seen that all teachings are also subtle ways of continuing/perpetuating the egoic process which is itself based on the illusion of being a separate doer-entity. Until then, these conceptual teachings and practices based upon these concepts may be useful, but eventually we see that all teachings are potential obstacles. Why? Because Freedom is already fully present, and on a subtle level all teachings assume that Freedom is not already here and reinforce the notion that this moment is deficient in some way.

You can probably think of other negatives of this approach yourself, and perhaps have seen spiritual seekers on this journey fall into one of these traps.

To be continued in a future post: Practicing knowledge

Integrating the understanding of no-doer

~ Tom Das ~ 5 Comments

This post follows on from my previous post: Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough

This understanding of no doer may initially take time to become embedded, and you may have to ‘practice’ it to start with. It’s just like many other forms of knowledge:

Take the example of a child learning his (or her) name. At first he doesn’t know his name. Upon his parents repeating his name to him multiple times, he finally starts to realise that his name is ‘Tom’. Maybe at first he forgets his name a few times and doesn’t respond when someone calls him. After sometime it becomes ingrained and embedded into his mind and he no longer has to think about it.

Eventually he can’t help but know his name. When someone calls out ‘Tom’, he automatically knows someone is calling him, whether he  like it or not.

It’s the same with the understanding ‘there is no doer’. Initially the understanding may be a bit shaky, but after sometime, after repeated practice, after going through the logic behind it a few times and seeing the truth of it, it becomes more ingrained. Eventually it becomes effortless as knowing your name.

To be continued in my next post: Problems with utilising conceptual tools

Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough

~ Tom Das ~ 4 Comments

This post follows on from my previous 3 posts relating to the body:

  1. Do you know for certain that you are the body?
  2. Are you or are you not the body?
  3. Why does understanding the body matter?

Seeing this is not always enough

However, for many people simply seeing there is no doer is not enough. Why? Well we have lived our lives for many years with the deeply ingrained belief that we are doers, with the belief that we are the creator of our thoughts and instigators of our actions. This habitual belief is not so easily washed away, and even when seen, it can continue to operate and cause us to suffer.

In vedanta a common methodology used to counteract this is to utilise a concept that opposes and counteracts the ignorance:

‘I am not the body’ is a tool by which one can weed out the ‘I am the body’ notion.

Practice of the knowledge ‘I am not the body’ is a conceptual tool by which one can weed out the belief in ‘I am the body’ concept.

Note that ‘I am not the body’ is a concept. If believed in, ie. if considered to be genuinely true, it would be a belief. You do not have to believe a concept is true in order to benefit from it. You can use the concept either way, whether you believe in it or not.

To be continued in my next post: Integrating the understanding of no-doer

Why does understanding the body matter?

~ Tom Das ~ 3 Comments

This post follows on from my previous 2 posts relating to the body:

  1. Do you know for certain that you are the body?
  2. Are you or are you not the body?

Why does this matter?

It is the belief that ‘I am the body’ (or ‘I am the body-mind’) that gives rise to all this suffering. More specifically it is the belief that I am a separate entity, the doer, that thinks thoughts and instigates actions, that is the root cause of suffering.

This belief in ‘I am the body’ or I am the separate doer-entity goes by many names. It can be called ignorance (avidya  in Sanskrit), samsara, the ego (ahamkara), original sin, conceit, hell, etc…

It is the root cause of suffering.

Uprooting this belief is the primary purpose of all wisdom traditions and wisdom teachings, and each tradition and teaching provides us with a unique methodology for doing this.

One of the simplest ways of seeing this truth of no-doer is simply by calming the mind (samatha in Pali) and looking and seeing there is no evidence for a doer-entity (vipassana). The Buddha referred to this as no-self (anatta) or emptiness of self (sunyata)*.

To be continued in my next post: Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough

*in the original Buddhist writings (the Pali suttas) the word sunyata (meaning emptiness), was used to refer solely to emptiness of self, which is another way of saying no-self or no separate-self. A few hundred years later the Mahayana sutras were written in Sanskrit and expanded the idea of emptiness to include emptiness of all things, or more specifically, all things being empty of intrinsic-self or instrinsic-existence.

Are you or are you not the body?

~ Tom Das ~ 7 Comments

This follows on from my previous post.

It is an observable fact that our direct experience alone does not provide us with sufficient evidence to say whether or not objects in the world arise solely from consciousness (ie. philosophical idealism), or whether consciousness is a product of the material word (eg. the human brain) which in turn perceives an image of that material world (ie. philosophical realism).

Portale_Leonardo_da_Vinci.png

Not that these are the only two possibilities – there other theories that could also account for our present experience, and perhaps other explanations that our limited human minds are incapable of understanding – but for the purposes of this article we will not go into this.

The point is, from our direct experience alone, we do not know if what we call the body is solely an image that arises in our consciousness, or if that image is a representation of a real body somewhere outside our consciousness which in turn gives rise to consciousness.

To be continued here: Why does understanding the body matter?