Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste. So I just wanted to share the wonderful, ecstatic state of consciousness I find myself in. After the big yajña that we had, the homa-yajña, agnihotra, and that this brought about a great healing for me. And more than that, it gave me insight into why I, and a lot of others, suffer.
Even though we’re on the spiritual path, sometimes, well, a lot of the time, we overdo it. We think, “If I work harder, I’ll get the result.” But it’s not a matter of working hard, but a matter of working smart. So I want to go over just a few of the insights from the last few days.
Who am I? Of course, this was Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi’s mantra. And if we follow this sense of “I am” back to its root, what we find or what we discover is that “I am consciousness. I am conscious and I am consciousness.” And there’s a state even beyond that where one is pure awareness without an object.
Consciousness always has an object, so it’s in duality. It’s part of the saguṇa-brahman, the Brahman with form, name-and-form.
But then the nirguṇa-brahman, what is that? It’s pure consciousness, or just awareness without an object except itself. So this brings up some very interesting experiences in meditation.
One of the best ways to know if you’re on to something in meditation is if you see light. And of course, the Secret of the Golden Flower, our most popular series on this channel, is about going into meditation with the object to perceive one’s own consciousness.
Well, how do you do that? With a mirror. And the mirror in this case is one’s own purified mind. The mind has to be purified by intelligence. And what’s the first order of intelligence?
Aham brahmasmī: “I am Brahman”. I am the source. I am the light. The pure consciousness, the pure awareness.
So when we, for example, if we’re out in the dark at night with a flashlight or torch, as they call it in India, and we shine this torch in different directions, you know, then we’re going to see objects within that light, the cone of light coming out from the torch, the flashlight.
But we’re not going to see objects that are outside of that, because they’re hidden in the dark. But if we take the flashlight and we turn it around so it’s shining at us, then all we see is the light. So in meditation, the idea is to reflect the light of consciousness in the purified mind.
And that’s why in the Golden Flower meditation, one meditates on looking at yourself in a mirror, except you’re not looking at you, at your reflection, the reflection is looking at you. It’s a little trick, a little mental trick, but it works.
So if you practice this method, or any bonafide method of meditation—I’m very fond of mantra meditation myself. But the mantra has to be empowered, you have to be initiated into it. You have to be, you know, following certain principles and stuff.
But this Who am I meditation is also very good. So who am I? Well, if you ask anybody on the street, they might say, “Oh, I am Mr. So-and-so. You know, I am married to such-and -such, my wife or husband. I am a banker or a mechanic or whatever,” you know, “my livelihood is. I am the owner of this house. I am the driver of this car.”
In other words, “I am the owner, I am the doer. I am the thinker. I think so and such-and-such, this-and-that, and I have so many opinions. And I am the knower. I see you, I see this place where we are. I hear so many sounds and things going on. So I am the knower, the thinker. I am the speaker, the owner, the doer,” like that.
These are all possible answers to the question, Who am I? And they’re all wrong. Why are they wrong? They’re temporary. They’re conditional. They depend on a certain situation existing in the material world. And of course, the material world is always changing.
So what to do? It means our sense of self is always changing, if it depends on these different identifications. How to tell the difference between an identification and who I authentically am is very easy.
If I’m identifying with something, it’s something that I perceive. I perceive this body. I perceive the thoughts in my mind. I perceive the inputs of the different senses. I perceive these different objects around me, and so on, the phenomena in the material world.
So if something is perceptible, if something can act as the object of consciousness, that’s not who we are. It can’t be who we are. Because who we really are is the consciousness that perceives those objects.
So this is why the ego, which is nothing but a collection of thoughts, of “I am this, I am that, I am the doer, I am the owner, I am the knower, the thinker, the speaker, the whatever.” All these thoughts, this aggregate as Buddha would call it, are not ourselves. Our real self is the consciousness that perceives all these thoughts.
Elementary, my dear Watson. Right?
But yeah, how often we get caught up in all of that.
And even when we’re on the spiritual path, and we think, “I am a follower of this yoga, or this meditation, or this religion, or this philosophy, or this teacher,” or you know, so many different identifications. These are also false, but necessary, in the beginning at least, of the spiritual path.
Why is that?
Because we cannot let go of identification, of ego, of projecting our self-identity onto externals. We can’t let go of it just like that. I mean, it’d be wonderful if we could. But we find it’s really quite impossible, because we’re conditioned. We have vāsanas. Vāsanas are mental tendencies from the past, based on memories.
See, the mind evolved as a mechanism for protecting the body. And any time we experience pain, or a reduction in consciousness, awareness, as a result of something, we make a memory of that, and then if something similar happens again, that memory comes up.
And that’s a vāsana. So we all know vāsana as desires. But it also manifests in more subtle ways, as tendencies, biases, prejudices, you see. So vāsanas are actually pushing and pulling us here, and this way, and that way. Here and there, throughout life.
These are also not-I. Because they are thoughts formed by external conditions in the world. So these vāsanas have to be overcome. And the only way we can overcome them in the beginning, is to have a sense of ego that,
“I am a spiritual person. I am not going to follow these impulses, without considering what the result is going to be. I’m not going to just allow my desires and my mind to run wild. I’m going to have a critical attitude toward my thinking. I’m going to evaluate the value of the different thoughts and impulses that come up in my mind. I’m going to create vāsanas, deliberately.
But the ones that I want, for example, the habits of sādhana, getting up early in the morning, chanting prayers, doing yoga, meditatio—different, different, all kinds of spiritual processes, whatever our sādhana might be at the time.
So these things actually form an ego. The ego of a sādhaka. It’s a different kind of ego, different in quality, but it’s the same in principle, the same in function as a regular ego. Just the subject matter has changed, you see, and this is necessary in the beginning especially, to bring us on our path towards enlightenment.
But even when we reach enlightenment, we still need the ego. Why? Well, what am I going to wear today? What do I have to do today? What kind of food do I need to buy or prepare? You see, what are the choices in my life, in my day-to-day life, to protect the body?
We still need the ego, a little bit of ego, huh? And that ego has to be well-trained. It can’t take command. It can’t be allowed to rule. It has to be held in check.
Just like if you have an animal, a horse or cow or something. You tie the animal. You don’t just let the animal wander. Well, stupid people let their dogs wander and disturb everybody, but that’s not really very intelligent.
What we need to do with the ego is to train it and subdue it. And keep it within bounds by means of intelligence, vijñāna. Vijñāna means intelligence based on spiritual knowledge—wisdom, really.
So when we have this wisdom, we keep our egos in check. We don’t destroy them. We don’t dissolve them. We don’t… you know, of course when we’re in meditation and sādhana, we do set them aside. We set aside the ego because we don’t need it.
See, the ego is there to protect the body, but when we’re in meditation, we’re in a safe space. We’re connected with God. We’re in yoga. Yoga means the individual soul, the individual consciousness and God are connected, the Absolute consciousness.
So in that state, we don’t have any need for ego. We don’t even need mind. We can just be what we really are, which is pure consciousness. And our pure consciousness cannot be distinguished, cannot be discriminated from the sum total of pure consciousness, which is God.
See? and that’s mukti, that’s realization, that’s enlightenment. Liberation. But that doesn’t mean that we disappear as individuals—and we’ve gone over this. This is a controversial point, I know, but we’ve gone over it in the last few episodes on this channel, that there are five different kinds of mukti; and sāyujya-mukti or merging into the Absolute is only the first type, and it’s prerequisite for all the others.
So what is sāyujya really? It’s simply realizing Who am I? I’m not this ego. I’m not a separate being. There is nothing that I could identify as being myself that is actually mine. What to speak of in myself [that] is not even mine.
This body, this body is going to get old and die. This mind, I mean if you just just observe your mind for a few minutes, and you tell me, is it yours? Is it under your control? The mind is crazy. It’s like a monkey. It jumps all over the universe.
Or what to speak of are external possessions, house, car, this, that, other people. None of that is me. None of that is even mine. The body goes on breathing and digesting food and the heart beating and so on even while I’m completely asleep and unaware.
Is the body really me? No. Is the body really even mine? No.
We are a guest. We come into these bodies for a certain time and we exist for a while, and run around here and there and do stuff. But we can’t really say the body is myself, [or that] the body is even mine.
The body is a loaner. It’s a facility. The human body is a wonderful facility, compared to a boat for crossing the ocean of the material world and attaining enlightenment, getting to the other shore, as Buddha put it.
So we should understand consciousness is fundamental; this body and other things are not. This ego can be a help on the spiritual path or it can be a great obstacle. It depends on how we train it.
So the purpose of sādhana is to train the ego, the body, the mind, everything to be a sādhaka, to be someone who is eligible for liberation.
And then that liberation comes as a gift. Like Bashō said, “Here I sit doing nothing, and the spring comes and the grass grows all by itself.”
Āūṁ Tat Sat. Āūṁ Śakti Āūṁ.