Give up everything

May 2, 2018April 10, 2018 ~ Tom Das ~ 1 Comment

Robert Adams Advaita

The following is by Robert Adams:

What happens is this. As you keep giving up all the reactions to life. As you begin to surrender everything to the one Self. The one Self which is the absolute reality, the pure awareness takes over.

And will do whatever you have to do, even better than you can do it yourself. This power that knows the way will take you over completely. And it will speak for you. Do everything for you that you have to do and yet you will feel that you are not the doer.

Yet everything will be done perfectly.

Many people are afraid to give up their senses. For they believe that they will turn into a vegetable. But this is not true. You will always function. You will always do what you came to this earth to do. And you will even do it better than you ever can imagine.

So do not concern yourself about these things. Simply go within, surrender everything to the Self.

Give up everything.

The belief in separation

November 5, 2017November 20, 2017 ~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

river meander advaita

It is the belief in separation
That allows for the belief in doership.
Otherwise all there is is One-Movement.

There is not even one movement:
If we go by the evidence presented to us by experience,
There is only movement happening.

No evidence for a doer-entity,
No evidence for an entity with ultimate responsibility.
Instead there is just life happening,

From the point of view of a person,
A body operating and functioning,
Seemingly by itself,
With all the workings and humanity of the organism manifesting,
However it manifests.

As truth is seen,
Layers of deception and wrong thinking fall away,
And the Freedom that always was and is,
Is revealed.

Like the sun when the clouds parts,
Nothing needs to be attained,
Only the obscuring clouds of wrong notions,
Need to be seen through.

The mind, no doer and action

June 4, 2017June 4, 2017 ~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

no-thinker

The key way the teaching works is upon the mind by removing the belief in the notion of doership. This belief is the key source of suffering, and when this belief is seen through then the suffering which is dependent on it dissolves away.

Often there is a process by which the habitual tendencies that cause suffering gradually fall away over time as the understanding of ‘no-doer’ infiltrates and has its effect on the mind’s conditioning.

Note that the notion of a doer is a false belief – there is no evidence for a doer being present, just as there is no evidence for a volcano god that erupts volcanos or a sea god that ravages the seas. The lack of belief in a doer does not mean there is no action, just as lack of belief in the above mentioned gods does not render the volcano or seas impotent.

Action and movement continues as they have always done. They happen seemingly by themselves, spontaneously you could say. Live goes on, and it feels much the same, the whole range of feelings and emotions continue, just without the suffering.

Integrating knowledge, spontaneous action

March 3, 2017October 5, 2017 ~ 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?

Why seeing/understanding alone may not be enough

February 23, 2017February 25, 2017 ~ Tom Das ~ 4 Comments

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

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

Freedom, no doer, who sees there is no doer?

January 8, 2017January 8, 2017 ~ Tom Das ~ Leave a comment

Q: But who sees there is no doer? Isn’t it the ego itself that sees through the illusion of self?

I use the word ‘ego’ to be synonymous with ‘doer’. Because there is a belief in being a doer, there is the notion that ‘I can change this’, ‘I can get somewhere better’, which is the seeking. This seeking is a subtle form of suffering.

When the doer is seen to be false, the seeking starts to collapse, and suffering fades.

To answer your question: who or what sees there is no ego? That which previously saw the ego is that which sees there is no ego. It is never the ego that sees: the ego is a construct of thought, which is always the seen.

The paradox of yoga

November 10, 2016December 5, 2016 ~ Tom Das ~ 4 Comments

The word yoga can be used to describe a series of specific methods which aid and direct the seeker towards the goal of the ending of suffering or of attaining realisation. So let me start by saying something quite obvious: all of the yogas* are practices to be performed or actions to be done. They are therefore meant to be performed by a person who thinks themselves to be a separate doer-entity.

The very existence of the (illusory) separate doer implies a duality – in fact the imagined doer is the essence of duality, the first conceptual step from which all other dualistic notions proceed from. The duality that it sets up is between that of the subject (the doer) and objects (the objects of the world in which actions are done).

The aim of all yogas is, through practice, to facilitate a seeing/realisation that the separate doer-entity is an illusion. And therein lies the apparent paradox. Yoga is action undertaken by the (imaginary) separate doer in order to see through this illusion of doership.