Maalok: Listening to your answer above - that very few people achieved the goal of Self-realization even when practicing self-enquiry - people could be discouraged to even try. Perhaps in this context it would be helpful for you to elaborate on what is meant by complete Self-realization? Is Self-realization difficult or rare? Is it rare because people dont practice self-inquiry properly? David: Self-realization is the definitive ending of the experience of the individual I. It is a permanent state of knowing awareness, that contains, inherent within it, the understanding that ones true identity is the substratum out of which the world and all its names and forms appear. Many people have brief glimpses of this reality, but lose them when the mind, the individual I reasserts itself. I believe that the permanent eradication of this sense of being an individual person is a rare event, although I know many people who would disagree with me on this subject. I once asked Nisargadatta Maharaj why some people, such as Ramana Maharshi, realized the self very quickly through a single act of self-inquiry, whereas others spent fifty years meditating and failed to reach the same state. I was curious to hear his answer because I knew that at this stage of his teaching career he was persistently maintaining that reincarnation did not happen. This meant that he couldnt say that people such as Sri Ramana arrived in this world with an advantage over other people who might not have done as much meditation in their previous lives. In his reply he said that some people were born with a pure chemical and some were not. I think he got the chemical analogy from the layer of chemicals that coats a film. From what I gathered talking to him, we are all issued with a film for our life, that is to say, a more-or-less pre-determined script that plays itself out as our lives. The quality of the chemical is determined by a coming together of all sorts of factors that are mostly prevalent at the time of conception: our parents genes, astrological configurations, the environment we are due to be brought up in were a few that he named. Those who have the good luck to be issued with a good chemical realize the Self, and those who have a bad or dirty chemical never do, irrespective of how much they try. When I commented that this all sounded very deterministic, and that there didnt seem to be much point in spiritual effort if the quality of our issued chemical determined whether or not we got enlightened or not, he said that some people came into the world with a chemical that was only very slightly impure. These people, he said, could realize the Self by associating with a realized teacher and by having a strong and earnest desire to know and be the truth. In this particular model, the people who meditate or do self-inquiry for years without success are not necessarily doing it wrongly or badly, they are simply in the unfortunate majority whose chemical is so impure, no amount of effort will clarify it. And since there is no reincarnation, the effort these people make is not carried forward into future lives. I found this unique model - I have never heard or read about this theory anywhere else - to be quite perplexing. In the years that I was going to see Nisargadatta Maharaj, the front cover of I Am That, his own book of teachings, contained a detailed statement by him on how reincarnation took place. Yet, during the last years of his life, I never once heard him admit that reincarnation was true, or say that effort or maturity in one life could be carried forward into another. The disciples of Sri Ramana I have been with, such as Lakshmana Swamy and Papaji, have all said that spiritual effort in past lives is carried forward, making it possible for enlightenment to happen relatively quickly in the final birth. When I asked Lakshmana Swamy why he had realized the Self so quickly in this life, he said that he had finished his work in previous lives, and Papaji said he had memories of being a yogi in South India in his previous life. Sri Ramana never talked about his previous lives, although he did concede once that he must have had a Guru in some other life. I personally feel that he completed all his spiritual work in some other body and arrived in his final birth in a state of such utter purity and readiness that enlightenment came to him virtually unasked while he was still in his teens. I think people need to take a long-term view when they take to self-inquiry or any other practice. Its not bad to think of enlightenment as something that might occur at any moment, in fact I think its a laudable attitude to have, but at the same time one should not be disappointed if it doesnt happen. For many people, asking oneself Who am I? is chipping away at a mountain of ignorance and mental conditioning. It may bear fruit in this life, but if it doesnt, the benefits will be carried forward to some other incarnation. Meanwhile, the practice, if it is carried out regularly, will give you enough peace and quiet to justify the investment of time and energy you put into it, here and now.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 11:09:33 +0000
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