Happy end of summer, dear friends!
Yesterday I had the great pleasure and privilege of attending a workshop with Swami Ramananda, the president of Integral Yoga Institute in Manhattan. It was held at Dharma Yoga Brooklyn, where I also have the pleasure and privilege of teaching yoga. Right at the beginning of this workshop a remarkable thing happened.
We sat down for our opening meditation when suddenly the entry buzzer to the brownstone next to the studio began chirping “Hello, is anybody there? Is anybody there?” Silence ensued, and the group kept meditating. A few minutes later as we ended our sitting practice Swamiji said, “Well, we just had a cosmic lesson in jnana yoga-the voice said ‘is anybody there?’ and no one answered. How perfect!” We all laughed, but he hit the nail on the head
So who’s there? Who is writing this and who is reading this? One of the true purposes of the science of yoga is the breaking down of this terrible barrier that we feel between the individuated “I” and the rest of the world. Let’s face it – being a human hurts, even if many times throughout the day it’s wonderful, and it hurts because we feel separate from people, the world, the Divine perhaps. There is a palpable sense of fear that we carry around with us, knowing as we do that the body is perishable, fragile and temporary. We (and everyone we know) are going to die, and we know it. If we don’t feel this fear consciously, then surely we feel it deep inside ourselves and more often than not this fear guides our mental/emotional patterns, and thus our actions and destiny. On the other hand, if we act like we’re going to live forever in these bodies (which most of us do), then we’ve disconnected from reality and are running from this fear. And in truth, all of our consumer capitalist culture preys and depends on this fear as it tries to get us to identify more and more with our possessions which, like our bodies, will definitely not last forever. That’s why they keep rolling out the gadgets and IPads and ICrap! I mean come on, it’s called an “I” Pad!
So I’m going to share some of what I find when I look into myself and ask “who am I” and I invite you to look along with me. For starters I can identify at least three possible versions of “me” that are at work at all times.
The first “me” is the conglomerate of thoughts, emotions, and reactions to the world, to the sense data that is constantly streaming in. The yogis would separate the thoughts and emotions, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll put them together. You know and experience this as well, and it is sometimes called the monkey mind. It may sound like this:
“Ooh, that smells good I want some, wow it’s finally such a beautiful day at, oops I forgot to dry my laundry, I hope she still likes me after last night, my job is boring, I hope my car doesn’t break down, what a great yoga class, my partner’s a jerk” and so on. It essentially comes down to this: I like it, or I don’t like it. As the Buddha wisely pointed out, grasping and avoiding will be the last things to go. So there is a never-ending stream of this that carries on throughout the day and often into dreams at night and most of us are completely identified with this up and down stream of experience which the Blessed One rightly called the Ten Worlds, or the Ten States – Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Tranquility, Rapture, Learning, Realization, Boddhisattva and Buddhahood. Millions of times each day, we sway between these states.
The second “me” is the part of me that chooses where to put the awareness and what to do with these different states. This could be called the will, or for you yogaheads the vijnanamayakosha. It’s the “me” that chooses to listen to and identify with the aforementioned thoughts, or not to. It’s the “me” that during meditation holds the attention on one object, or doesn’t, depending on how strong it is on that particular day and how much training it’s had. It’s the “me” that makes decisions and chooses the when, where and how, and it feels distinctly different to us than the thoughts themselves, since it has the option of listening to them or shutting them out. Distinguish between these two, dear reader.
The third “me,” (this is more subtle) is the Witness. I’ve written about this in another blog so I won’t go too deeply into it, but it’s the sense of seeing, hearing and comprehending these two other “I’s.” If I start to think “I am hearing myself think, I am hearing myself think,” then even as I’m thinking that thought, I’m hearing myself thinking it. Try it for yourself. Just repeat that phrase over and over again, noticing that as you think a thought some presence is there hearing you think it. This is true with every experience we have in life. As you see something, something is aware of you seeing it, and as you decide whether you like or don’t like what you see, that presence also sees that. The Witness is crystal clear and perceives (and understands) everything that is happening, even in times of great confusion, and it exists within us and around us in all times and places, except during deep and dreamless sleep. At least for now!
So will the real “me” please stand up? Am I the thoughts? Am I the will that chooses to listen to the thoughts or not, to act on them or not? Am I a Witness to this debacle? Am I the Atman, the Soul that is hidden like a priceless jewel deep inside all these “me”s or am I a non-entity, a non-Self as the Buddhists hold? Am I reborn in Christ in the resurrection? Will this “me” perish with my body or will it reincarnate, or go to heaven or hell? If I’m just the body and I become paralyzed, am I really alive anymore? If I’m just the mind, then where do I disappear to in dreamless sleep, or coma? Am I Love, or a random combination of Carbon, Hydrogen, etc?
These are real questions that we all have to confront and try our best to answer, since there is one thing for certain in this life-our bodies will return to the earth that spawned them and to the energy field that they are really already a part of at the subatomic level, and whether we meet that day with equanimity or terror is going to influence how we live our lives AT EVERY LEVEL of our existence.
So the bad news is this: I’m not giving you the answer, because the answer is not expressible in language. In fact, language is in some ways the barrier to knowing the Truth, because it is conceptual, and all concepts are limiting by nature-and we are unlimited in our possiblities. However, I will suggest this: we’re all of these “me”s and more. Look deeply into yourself and never stop asking this question, because this is what fuels our growth as humans. As complex beings we perceive, we analyze, we act, we create, we are and we become all at the same time. Thus we are a conglomerate of “me”s, so I hold that if it ain’t paradoxical, it ain’t the Truth! And that’s why I ain’t giving you the answer. For more on the paradoxical nature or Truth, try reading some Nagarjuna. Then take a nice nap.
One final thought-don’t hold too strongly to your beliefs about yourself. You’re pigeonholing yourself terribly if you do. The philosophy that things are empty of an unchanging nature makes a lot of sense and is practical because it allows for changeablity within ourselves, which includes the idea or story that we hold in our minds about ourselves. It has been rightly said that the “me” that exists right now in the present is the conglomerate of ideas that I have about the “me” that lived in the past, the good, the bad, the ugly, etc. So if I can change my back story to something happier, then my present changes. What I mean by this is that maybe I can see my life story and everything that has happened to me as a teaching tool designed to awaken me to my perfect nature. Thus when I awaken to Buddhahood, I’ll realize that I’ve always been a Buddha, which means that the real “me” already contains all the Ten Worlds, at all times, including this Perfect one. It’s just a matter of which one I choose to bring forth into the world and share with others, from moment to moment. Which, of course, is why learning to concentrate/meditate is so important, so that I can use the will to keep the highest, most altruistic vision of myself and the world in focus as much of the time as I can. And just like anything else, it takes practice.
So don’t hold it too tightly, and try to make it fun. A nice paradox: act as if the fate of the world depends upon your actions while simultaneously laughing at yourself for thinking that they will make any difference.
It is this final wish that I share with every one of you and with every being: that you claim your Highest and Best self-story at all times, and remember the perfect Being that you already are.
Om Shanti
Barbu
