An endless revelation
The withdrawal of the projection:
The world falls back onto the Indriyas (senses),
The Indriyas (senses) fall back onto Manas (mind),
The Manas falls back into the Pranas (life energies/breath),
The Pranas fall back into Tejas (fire/heat of the body),
Lastly, Tejas falls back into Sat (reality).
Mistaken essence is the cause of sorrow/suffering.
There is only God/Brahman/Field/Consciousness.
That is the only essence.
All else that is experienced is the play of this singular essence.
So no part of what is seen is essence.
The mistake is to mistake any part of this play to be essence.
It is like gold that is continuously being remodeled and smelted.
Here gold is the essence, and all of the ornaments made with it are subject to change.
So no ornament-form is essence.
Similarly no form in existence is essence.
Essence is formless and quality-less,
And it is not graspable as an object.
One can only be it and experience it directly.
Another analogy would be a VR game,
Where only the “hardware/software/power” are real.
The rest of experience is just the play-out of those 3 as the flow of time.
This is analogous to our essence play as the BME (Body, Mind, Energy) process in time.
No thing is real, and no thing exists.
Only god/brahman/field/consciousness exists.
The evolution process is the play/dream of this field,
And our individual experience is like a figment of this evolution process.
Here are the different combinations:
# This Time, Same space, Same people
# This Time. Different space, Same people
# This Time, Same space, Different people
# This Time, Different space, Different people
# Different Time, Same space, Same people
# Different Time. Different space, Same people
# Different Time, Same space, Different people
# Different Time, Different space, Different people
Here, time, space, and people refers to what/whom you hold in your mind more than the actual physical reality differences or the actual people around you.
Since your conscious experience of reality is mostly only from what/whom you engage/invest/attend to in your mind.
A timeline for your life can be charted out with these 3 variables,
Marking out the broad episodes and flow in your lifetime till date.
A diagram might look something like this say:
I wonder if this time-space-people position is some sort of destiny, or prewritten to some extent.
Is it prewritten that we would be at this particular time-space-people point now?
Is the overall map of our life already charted out in a vague way?
In terms of where and whom we’d be with in our minds at a certain time?
In our lifetime we may meet around a 1000 people?
1000 in proportion to 7.5 billion is like ‘7.5 millionth’ of the world population.
That means I would have to live 7.5 million lives interacting with 1000 new people in each life to cover the whole population?
And how much do we even understand the few people around us? (let alone the 1000 people we may roughly know).
We may reach some depth only after many years with a few people, that too only if we keep up the intensity.
Imagine the varieties of experiences possible.
Sat yuga = The age of spirit = Mystics
Treta Yuga = The age of mind = Imagineers
Dwapara Yua = The age of electricity = Engineers
Kali yuga = The age of the physical = Warriors
Millenia ago, if you saw something, and wanted to share it with the group,
You would have to talk/draw/act and somehow convey what you saw.
Today with electrical gadgets like cameras and smartphones,
You could just shoot a video and instantly share it with everyone in the group.
Since the information is in the same medium (of direct vision), you would not need to explain much too.
Also, we can send something like this to 100s or 1000s of people now due to the internet,
Whereas earlier you would have to go one by one or gather the different people together,
And then attempt to convey what you saw.
Drawing from that analogy, in Treta yuga,
We would have zillions of machines made for modulating the mind field,
In the same way our cities today are filled with electrical gadgets constantly modulating the electrical field.
Imagine if a person from 10BC came and visited our cities in 2021.
He would see electrical contraptions everywhere, right!
Similarly if we find ourselves suddenly plopped into Treta yuga,
We would see mind machines everywhere, and the whole landscape may look truly alien.
Then you could easily share an insight, thought, dream, mental idea, concept, plan etc. directly in the same mental format without the need to verbalize.
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.
This post will require some familiarity with ‘Patanjali’s yoga sutras’.
Referring to the terminology from the eight-fold path,
I’ve understood that all real knowledge is from ‘Samyama’,
Which is a combination of ‘Pratyahara + Dharana + Dhyana + Samadhi (union)’.
It is ‘Knowing by Being’ or ‘Knowing by Union-ing’ vs. ‘Knowing by Doing’.
You know everything through ‘direct absorption’ with the object.
In Vedanta, all knowledge is from:
‘Phala vyakti’ shining on ‘Vritti vyakti’.
That is ‘Reflected consciousness’ shining on ‘Modification of the mind stuff’.
We think objects exist external to us,
But in reality, everything that we know appears within us as a modification of our mind stuff.
So union-ing with the object is to union with the Vritti (mind-modification) of your own mind substance.
There is tons and tons more to say on this topic,
But I’ll leave this here as an introduction or segway.
There is a dimensional gap between quantity and quality.
Because quality is immeasurable, analog, and infinite.
Any amount of quantity will still be “infinitely less” than infinity.
Experience by nature is qualitative.
Like consider a dream.
What is the nature of it? Is is measurable in any sense in space or time?
How large was it? How much time did it contain?
Even now, every scene you see is infinite,
But you can snap a 12MP digital photo of that using your camera.
The sound that you hear from your guitar is infinite,
But you can record a 128kbps Mp3 using a sound recorder.
The digitization process converts the pure infinite analog into bits to approximate the quality of it.
But the resolution of this captured information can never equal the infinite resolution/information present in the actual reality of creation.
Similarly our minds are like the digitized versions of what reality actually is.
The real “terrain” though is infinite.
Our minds are like captured maps from this terrain,
Like a combination of photos and illustrations.
The real nature of existence is unfathomable and beyond all logic.
There is no inside-outside.
There is no self-other.
There is no you-world.
There is no body-environment.
There is no voluntary-involuntary.
There is just the one.
All of these are distinctions made by the mind,
Like throwing a net from a boat into seamless sea water,
And then calling each square of the net a label.
We create mental maps and use them to control and navigate in our life.
But the map is distinct from the territory.
The map is the lens through which we view the territory.
The territory is one undivided ocean of consciousness.
Reality/Territory appears to us as experience,
Based on how we see it through the maps of our mind.
Each map is a perspective.
And the multiple maps you carry in your mind,
Are like multiple perspectives to see the territory.
But the territory itself is like an unbounded kaleidoscope,
And it contains all of what all of the maps reveal.
We think we are born and we die.
But it is only the persistent appearance that dies.
In fact if you observe each moment,
Things are continuously arising and passing.
We see events because of our lack of vision.
When anything is seen very minutely,
We see that things happen in a continuous stream (continuum).
If life is the bird, its 2 wings are creation and destruction.
Our experience is like a continuous music in time.
Life on earth in the body is the theme of the music now.
This theme will shift and another kind of music may play,
Once the physiological process is completed.
So one very broad perspective of looking at this is:
There is only you and your karma unfolding.
The true completion of your birth,
Is when you complete the karma of the birth.
From this perspective – there are no situations/people/places,
Rather there is just an appearance to work with, whatever it appears as.
How does one complete karma?
In my understanding, it is by transformation.
We penetrate the darkness that surrounds our lives with our light,
And transform it.
We do this until we fulfill the potential (desire) in this birth,
And attain integration, enlightenment, and wholeness.
Then another cycle might begin in the next.
Consciousness creates its own darkness,
Filled with puzzles and possibilities (maya),
And then opens up a point of light (awareness),
With the desire to keep expanding its sphere of reach.
There is only the dream.
There is only the field.
Whatever suffering comes to you is only an appearance of/in the dream field.
The suffering does not come from any particular person, situation, or any thing/event or condition,
They are all only appearance and props of the will of the field itself.
The whole moves the whole, no part moves the whole.
One of the best analogies for this is the movie screen.
The whole movie is playing out in the screen,
And the pixels making the characters in the screen do not have any causal relationship with any of the other pixels, though they might appear to have it in a specific movie.
The whole movie is already there in the film roll,
And the pixels on the screen are not causing each other in any way.
They are all independently responding all at once.
However in our minds when we create meaning, we try to look for causal relations.
Even if causal relations appear to exist they are still only a persistent illusion.
For instance, say you are watching the movie ‘Groundhog day’,
And he keeps waking up everyday in the same bed with the same alarm clock and time,
Next time you see the bed, you’ll immediately predict correctly that the alarm will ring and wake him up.
But that kind of causal relationship is a feature of that particular movie,
And in reality all the pixels are independent of each other and only following the projector reel.
So it is a case of ‘the whole moves the whole’, no part moves the whole wrt. the screen.
Causation is an illusion.
There is only the field, and whatever plays within it is the play of the field itself.
Whatever world, condition, situation, circumstance, or relationship appears,
Is only an appearance that the field plays out just like a movie.Â
The power of the field generates “Experience”.
We have various gross-subtle bodies that relate to what is outside to create experience.
Even the transformation of those bodies (by the field itself or by the power of the higher bodies of your own), is also an appearance of the field.
The field is consciousness, only the field is.
All else is an appearance of the field.
The field is the substrate and all that appears are its modulations.
Depending upon what is awake in you,
i.e. the highest body awake in you and its vision/potential/power,
It will transform all of the lower bodies.
Paradoxically when it comes to our bodies, all of them are subservient to the field.
So all their power is only surrogate power, that is of surrendering to the field itself and thereby channeling more of it.
The more you yield to the higher, the greater the powers and vision you channel.
The field is our highest ultimate body technically speaking.
So ultimately if the field itself is awake in you, it will draw you back into itself by transforming the rest.
In a way, during the transformation, nothing fundamentally changed,
All that changed was that all the particles rearranged themselves by yielding to the higher frequency zone that was awake in you, and along with that, all the lesser powers played themselves out and completed themselves.
The feelings determine the activities of the mind.
The mind only attends to where the heart is, in the first place.
For every ‘Mental Image’ -> There is a juice/feeling/chemistry about it.
Journey to the Abstract 