The mechanics of fear and love,
Is such a massively deep topic to explore.
I often wonder:
Is it possible to really be indifferent?
Is it possible to be without relationship?
Is it possible to really stay separate?
Is it possible to be neutral?
Is it possible to neither love nor hate?
From my intuition, it seems like that is not possible.
Life being a dynamic verb, nothing it still.
So everything has to move towards expansion or contraction?
It feels like that force that maintains and forwards unconsciousness and ignorance,
Is in the hate (contraction) direction,
While the force that maintains and forwards consciousness and knowledge,
Is in the love (expansion) direction.
Since all things are in polarity,
Whatever we invest and expand into, will inevitably disinvest and shrink its opposite?
I see everything is a state of pulsation in nature,
Like the heart beat, expanding and contracting.
Birth is like the expansion influx (like the inbreath),
Death is like the contraction deflux (like the outbreath).
I see birth and death as the alternating pulse between sound and silence.
The sound of creation booms into the manifest as birth,
And at death there is the return to silence/uncreated?
I feel like the experience of life is like music.
With multiple overlayed pulses of all kinds of instrument and voice timbers.
A multidimensional flow of pulses.
So then, both fear and love are as natural as expansion and contraction?
I have noticed that,
I fear all that I have an antagonistic relationship towards.
So maybe the presence of fear itself…,
Is revealing the antagonistic relationship present?
I wonder,
Is fear the ‘anticipatory recreation’ of the experience,
Of the repercussions/reaction from the other,
To my own antagonistic attitude towards the other,
Being mirrored back to me?
So then are fear and love, direct experiences,
Of the mirrored attitudes/relationship we hold towards the other entities we encounter?
Another aspect is self-hatred.
That is a condition where there is a projection of value and worth on the other,
While the self is cast to the shadow of unconsciousness/hate/shame.
There is then a constant focus on the other or on transcending oneself.
So here there are some interesting relationships I see.
When there is self-hatred of one’s body and its strength,
There is fear of other bodies and their strength.
I think here, the fear comes from the war with the conscious and unconscious identifications.
Unconsciously there is identification with the body,
But that is not supported by the conscious identification which is caught up with the other,
So the unconscious identification generates fear as resistance,
When you pursue the other.
So somewhere I wonder,
If we take extreme cases,
Like fear of a ghost/monster,
Is that the dissociated unconscious fragment of us,
That we have disowned,
That is getting attracted to us,
Because of our deeper desire for integration and wholeness?
Isn’t our worst fear that we will become the ghost?
That total assimilation/transformation is the terror.
What will happen to us,
If we let everything in?
Also I used to wonder about the fear of falling.
I have that fear because somewhere I desire to fall like that.
So is my intensity of fear of falling proportional to the intensity of desire I have to fall?
Is the intensity of fear I feel for death proportional to my own desire for death?
Fear and Desire seem inseparable like 2 sides of the same coin.
It seems like each is a resistance to the other.
Desire is a resistance to Fear.
Fear is a resistance to Desire.
Another thing I am reminded of is the story of the beauty and the beast.
The beast gets converted into the prince out of love.
Would this be true for all that fear?
That all that is feared if consciously loved,
Will become flowers from filth?
The ground of filth when nurtured by nature,
Becomes flower and fruit right?
Are all that we love/hate/desire/fear,
Are they all nothing but our own Self?
Supposing we want total wholeness and totally open ourselves up,
To attracting all of the unconscious to us back into our consciousness,
Will it result in a total war and destruction of all of our identity?
Is that what happens in enlightenment?
Is that the ultimate transformation?
The self here is the subset of qualities owned vs. the superset of all qualities in existence.
That division is what created self-other and the concept of relationship itself.
Love-Hate are like Yin-Yang.
The black fish has a white eye,
And the white fish has a black eye.
So total love and total hate do not exist and cannot exist.
Just like no absolute quality can exist without its opposite.
Going into total-hate or total-love,
Will result in transcendence to a dimension beyond duality.
These are some of my contemplations.
I’ll stop here for now.
All sadhana is preparation
All sadhana is preparation,
That is, it is the work towards creating the conditions,
For the opening to happen,
And for the bounty of life to be received.
In my understanding,
Karma = Work/Effort/Sadhana that leads you towards or further into bondage/illusion.
Kriya = Work/Effort/Sadhana that leads you towards liberation/freedom.
My understanding of ‘understanding’
The purpose of understanding I feel is to help you let go/digest/dissolve/transcend the thing.Â
Otherwise the understanding is not taking you in the right direction, if it only increases the holding of it.
True solution is dissolution (David Hawkins).
I see understanding as the tool to catalyze the dissolution.
Understanding should carry you back to the state of wonder with greater fluidity and openness.
The deepest fear and the deepest desire
The deepest fear is the ‘fear of death’.
It is not ‘death’ itself that is feared (because it is unknown), but the ‘fear of death’.
The fear is of the ‘image of that possibility’.
Fear is not about the actuality but about the possibility (as imagined).
Fear is the projection of a negative possibility onto the unknown.
But it derives its substance from the past memories/known.
So the unknown is defended against, by fear.
All fears are illusions though, because:
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.”
So in a way, our greatest fear is of total disillusionment.
I feel the deepest desire/longing is the desire for:
Liberation, Mukti, Transcendence, Enlightenment, The highest possibility,
To merge with the deathless source,
The desire for God itself (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence).
I think all other desires and fears are different mixtures of the above 2.
Like how sugar and salt is mixed in different proportions in different foods.
They all taste unique, but carry these 2 essences.
When the heart is fully cleansed,
It radiates deep devotion.
It feels like a boundless vacuum, or an infinite fall.
It is like falling in love, but with the fall never ending,
Because it is a state inspired and generated from within, not from outside conditions.
Devotion is the highest expression/potential/possibility of the heart.
Devotion is just you being really straight and committed to your own deepest desire/longing.
Karma, Samskharas, and the completion process
Karma means ‘action’ (verb).
Samskhara means ‘imprint/engram’ (noun).
In colloquial usage though, karma and samskharas are used interchangeably.
The mind in its clear pure state is like a clear mirror,
Where it simply reflects reality exactly the way it is.
Now, imagine a mirror that holds memory.
Suppose you go on a trip and carry the mirror to various places.
On returning home, you would be seeing colorings/ghosts of the past all over the mirror image, right?
This is the nature of a mind loaded with samskharas (impressions/imprints from the past).
The completion process (samskhara dahana kriya) is about thinning out these imprints, so that you can eventually see clearly through them.
One good visualization to imagine this is:
Imagine you are holding a ‘color checker board’ in front of you.
If the color slots on the checker board are totally opaque, then, you can only see the color and nothing through it.
If the color in the piece is made more and more transparent (decreasing opacity), you would gradually start to see what is behind the color piece more and more.
After reducing the opacity i.e. thinning the color to a certain point, you would be able to easily see through it even if there is a bit of coloring still present, right?
This is what is done in the completion process.
Generally in psychology, when the light of your consciousness shines through the color pieces in the checkerboard, it is known as ‘projection’.
# If the color piece is totally opaque, then there is ‘total projection’.
That is, you are entirely seeing your past imprint and nothing of the actual reality in front of you. Total projection completely obscures reality.
# If the color checker board has no colors and if all the colors are replaced with clear glass pieces, then there is no projection at all, and you are directly seeing what is in front of you with no coloring. There is then 0 projection.
So essentially, the spectrum is like this:
Projection(0% transparency) ——- (50% transparency)——- Reality(100% transparency)
For most of us, there is a wide spectrum of opacity variation for these color pieces.
It is neither 0% nor 100% transparent but somewhere in the middle.
Positive colored pieces make us see life through positive colorings (seeing through rose tinted glasses). This is commonly referred to as good karma.
Negative colored pieces make us see life through negative colorings/lenses (seeing through a hell bent mind). This is commonly referred to as bad karma.
The very process of living exhausts karma (colloquial usage).
The main difference between a regular person and spiritual seeker is that the spiritual seeker exhausts the karma at a much higher intensity.
Exhausting karma here means thinning the colors out.
All samskharas in a way are partially unlived or undigested experiences.
That is why they continue to color our present experience.
To digest all these imprints is therefore the goal of the completion process.
In a way, these positive coloring and negative coloring set of lenses are what you call your identity (that is, the combination of our specific likes-dislikes).
So in the completion process, you are also thinning your identity out and eventually merging with the actual reality.
Consider the experience of eating physical food from a plate.
At first we have a more intense experience of it in our tongue,
And then we experience the more subtle experience of the consumed food getting digested, right?
Then what follows is, the nutrients are extracted and the remaining food is sent out.
Similarly,
Karma is food for the gods/soul.
Digestion of karma (the completion process), enriches the soul with wisdom which are the nutrients in this case.
How to become ‘Nishkarma’
There is ‘Dharma’,
Which is ‘God’s Karma’.
Deviation from ‘Dharma’, creates ‘Your Karma’.
If you transform, dissolve, and align yourself back into ‘Dharma’,
Then, you become ‘Nishkarma’.
The burning of karma
Our experience has 2 components:
# A cyclic-physical component
# A non-cyclic intelligence component
The non-cyclic intelligence is like the fire of consciousness/awareness.
The cyclic-physical portion is what we call birth and death of the body-mind.
The residue of all the countless lives lived in the past,
Or time spent in different planes,
Keeps gathering as samskharas/tendencies in us.
So the fires of our current life rotate around these stored memories/patterns/imprints.
Just the experience of everyday living is coming from this fire burning up this karmic collection.
If we want to be truly liberated,
We have to raise the pitch and intensity of this fire of consciousness.
So that it burns like a bonfire.
This intensity of fire would then consume the karmic material at a much higher pace.
All that would have happened to you in many years, happens in a month or weeks say.
Experience happens with great intensity, including both sufferings and joys.
Life experience is then on fast forward.
Everything is a blur and whizzing past.
This raising of the pitch/intensity of the fire of consciousness,
Happens naturally as the longing to transcend deepens.
This longing naturally happens as a consequence,
Of our own ripeness, maturity, and level of evolution/development.
This then naturally increases the speed and intensity of our life experience,
As a result of this fire burning larger and stronger.
Eventually this fire consumes everything,
All your stored residues,
And you will be liberated.
You would then identify with the fire rather than the material it was burning through.
This identification slowly shifts as the process commences.
Initially you are identified with the material and feel there is also a fire present.
But eventually the fire gets more and more strong, and this causes a fundamental shift in identification.
You start to experience yourself as the fire itself more and more,
A deepening of this identity shift keeps happening,
Until finally, only the fire remains.
The deep decision to choose life
This thought current was inspired by ‘Sadhguru (Jaggi Vasudev)’.
This writing is part of my effort to gain clarity.
I still have a lot of work to do myself.
Here are my musings:
A deep decision is made first:
Are you FOR life —OR— Against life?
This is also a bit confusing.
Because: It is like asking are you for white or black.
It seems like there isn’t a right answer?
And it is just about polarization.
That is why I think Sadhguru was saying:
‘Make a stronger choice, else you will be in the middle.
Being totally dead is fine, being fully alive is fine.
It is being half alive half dead that is the torture and strife.’
If I am for life: I have to give myself completely into enhancing my life and all other life around me.
If I am for death: I should commit suicide.
Anything other than these 2 choices, puts me in the middle.
This would be in line with the larger cycle of life-death existentially.
When life is on, you are on.
When death is on, you are not there anyway.
Death is sorta like deep sleep, it is not something you do, it happens existentially.
We can only facilitate it, just like we facilitate sleep at night by turning off the lights and lying down.
Similarly, even life can only be facilitated and harnessed.
So we are sorta facilitators/channelers of life energies,
And in a sense, we do not create anything fundamentally.
We are only co-creators/active-participants in creation.
This is the deep humiliation our ego/self has to accept.
There is only an appearance of choice,
Which is no choice really, because it is only a choice of suffering or not-suffering.
All resistance against the existential = suffering.
One has to be compliant to it.
This free will is only for supporting and enhancing life.
Else, all the free will does is create more and more suffering and unawareness.
The only real desire for everyone is a LARGER experience of life.
And it is the wavering in moving downstream with or upstream against this longing,
That is causing suffering.
The strife between the life drive and the death wish (Eros and Thanatos).
Facilitation of life —vs—- Facilitation of death.
Trying to die is like the same struggle of trying to sleep when the hormone has not yet released.
Trying to live is like overexerting yourself and getting debilitated as a result.
Any effort in any direction seems to be counterproductive unless it is done with total vision/clarity of the higher world of forces.
This writing is part of my effort to gain clarity.
I still have a lot of work to do myself.
Here are my musings:
A deep decision is made first:
Are you FOR life —OR— Against life?
This is also a bit confusing.
Because: It is like asking are you for white or black.
It seems like there isn’t a right answer?
And it is just about polarization.
That is why I think Sadhguru was saying:
‘Make a stronger choice, else you will be in the middle.
Being totally dead is fine, being fully alive is fine.
It is being half alive half dead that is the torture and strife.’
If I am for life: I have to give myself completely into enhancing my life and all other life around me.
If I am for death: I should commit suicide.
Anything other than these 2 choices, puts me in the middle.
This would be in line with the larger cycle of life-death existentially.
When life is on, you are on.
When death is on, you are not there anyway.
Death is sorta like deep sleep, it is not something you do, it happens existentially.
We can only facilitate it, just like we facilitate sleep at night by turning off the lights and lying down.
Similarly, even life can only be facilitated and harnessed.
So we are sorta facilitators/channelers of life energies,
And in a sense, we do not create anything fundamentally.
We are only co-creators/active-participants in creation.
This is the deep humiliation our ego/self has to accept.
There is only an appearance of choice,
Which is no choice really, because it is only a choice of suffering or not-suffering.
All resistance against the existential = suffering.
One has to be compliant to it.
This free will is only for supporting and enhancing life.
Else, all the free will does is create more and more suffering and unawareness.
The only real desire for everyone is a LARGER experience of life.
And it is the wavering in moving downstream with or upstream against this longing,
That is causing suffering.
The strife between the life drive and the death wish (Eros and Thanatos).
Facilitation of life —vs—- Facilitation of death.
Trying to die is like the same struggle of trying to sleep when the hormone has not yet released.
Trying to live is like overexerting yourself and getting debilitated as a result.
Any effort in any direction seems to be counterproductive unless it is done with total vision/clarity of the higher world of forces.
The ‘self’ and the ‘Self’
The self ‘gets born’/emerges and the self dies/returns.
The self emerges from the ocean like a wave,
And then dies/returns to the ocean.
The self manifests/emerges like a breeze in the air,
And then returns/’fades back’ into the stillness of air.
Our selves are only instruments to serve our deeper origins.
All our creation is to manifest source’s will/intentions/forces.
The hand of the Self/Source/God is there in every drop of creation.
Every grain of sand has been created from,
And embodies this source intelligence.
The lost self is the one which assumed independence,
And lost sight of its connection to source.
Like a wave that has emerged,
And forgotten it is actually the action of the ocean.
All pain is really resistance to change.
Life/Pleasure —vs— Death/Pain
Because really all pain is the pain of disillusionment.
This resistance happens from ignorance,
Ignorance of the ocean,
Ignorance of the source from where one arises,
Ignorance of the vision,
That the self is actually a temporal activity/appearance,
And that one’s real nature is that of the Source/God/Self.
The ignorance is that,
The self assumes itself to the source/”Self”,
Which is no different than the moon thinking it is the source of light.
When in reality it is only the reflector of the light of the sun.
That is why in the Hindu scriptures, there is a distinction made between:
Source of light = Param-atma/Sun
Reflector of light = Moon/Jiva/Atma/Soul
To achieve completion in the vision,
Is to see the source light reflected through everything.
Where you know you are the light,
And you also see your own prism channeling this source light,
And where you see all others as other instruments/prisms,
As other reflecting instruments of this same source,
Essentially channeling/using that same source energy.
<br/
The source light/energy is like air or space.
It is everywhere.
And all creation is suffused in it.
Our very existence and emergence into form is the will of source.
And our return to the formless is also the will of source.
Death is only death of the illusion,
Of what we believe we are.
Our birth and death is only of illusion,
That is, the alternation of:
Illusion and Disillusionment.
The truth however eternally exists.
The self emerges from the ocean like a wave,
And then dies/returns to the ocean.
The self manifests/emerges like a breeze in the air,
And then returns/’fades back’ into the stillness of air.
Our selves are only instruments to serve our deeper origins.
All our creation is to manifest source’s will/intentions/forces.
The hand of the Self/Source/God is there in every drop of creation.
Every grain of sand has been created from,
And embodies this source intelligence.
The lost self is the one which assumed independence,
And lost sight of its connection to source.
Like a wave that has emerged,
And forgotten it is actually the action of the ocean.
All pain is really resistance to change.
Life/Pleasure —vs— Death/Pain
Because really all pain is the pain of disillusionment.
This resistance happens from ignorance,
Ignorance of the ocean,
Ignorance of the source from where one arises,
Ignorance of the vision,
That the self is actually a temporal activity/appearance,
And that one’s real nature is that of the Source/God/Self.
The ignorance is that,
The self assumes itself to the source/”Self”,
Which is no different than the moon thinking it is the source of light.
When in reality it is only the reflector of the light of the sun.
That is why in the Hindu scriptures, there is a distinction made between:
Source of light = Param-atma/Sun
Reflector of light = Moon/Jiva/Atma/Soul
To achieve completion in the vision,
Is to see the source light reflected through everything.
Where you know you are the light,
And you also see your own prism channeling this source light,
And where you see all others as other instruments/prisms,
As other reflecting instruments of this same source,
Essentially channeling/using that same source energy.
<br/
The source light/energy is like air or space.
It is everywhere.
And all creation is suffused in it.
Our very existence and emergence into form is the will of source.
And our return to the formless is also the will of source.
Death is only death of the illusion,
Of what we believe we are.
Our birth and death is only of illusion,
That is, the alternation of:
Illusion and Disillusionment.
The truth however eternally exists.
Different planes, death, and enlightenment
Our different bodies exist in different planes:
# Physical -> Astral -> Causal -> Spirit
# Gross -> Subtle -> Causal -> Source
# Assiah -> Yetzirah -> Briah -> Atziluth (From Kabbalah)
Death happens at different levels.
Physical death -> Astral death -> Causal death -> Merger into Source
# The source first empowers all the bodies in an inbreath like process, which is the sequence during the birth process:
Causal vessel/body 1st -> then Astral vessel/body 2nd -> then Physical vessel/body 3rd.
# Then the source is disengaged, an outbreath like release happens, and dying happens one by one.
First the Physical vessel lets go -> Then astral vessel lets go -> Then causal vessel lets go.
Birth and Death at all levels is the play of the spirit/source.
It is the breath of spirit.
# Spirit inbreath -> Becoming Maya (the various planes and bodies)
# Then Spirit outbreath -> where its lets go all the illusions and returns to true nature.
In Enlightenment:
You trade the drop for the ocean itself, which is [the ground of intelligence, quantum field], from which all drops emerge.
To be enlightened is to know/realize at your being that you are the source itself, but operating through that drop.
This realization then maximally empowers the drop to serve the higher will of the field.
# Physical -> Astral -> Causal -> Spirit
# Gross -> Subtle -> Causal -> Source
# Assiah -> Yetzirah -> Briah -> Atziluth (From Kabbalah)
Death happens at different levels.
Physical death -> Astral death -> Causal death -> Merger into Source
# The source first empowers all the bodies in an inbreath like process, which is the sequence during the birth process:
Causal vessel/body 1st -> then Astral vessel/body 2nd -> then Physical vessel/body 3rd.
# Then the source is disengaged, an outbreath like release happens, and dying happens one by one.
First the Physical vessel lets go -> Then astral vessel lets go -> Then causal vessel lets go.
Birth and Death at all levels is the play of the spirit/source.
It is the breath of spirit.
# Spirit inbreath -> Becoming Maya (the various planes and bodies)
# Then Spirit outbreath -> where its lets go all the illusions and returns to true nature.
In Enlightenment:
You trade the drop for the ocean itself, which is [the ground of intelligence, quantum field], from which all drops emerge.
To be enlightened is to know/realize at your being that you are the source itself, but operating through that drop.
This realization then maximally empowers the drop to serve the higher will of the field.
Journey to the Abstract 