All ‘change’ is ‘death’.
# Growth is additive change
# Decay is depreciative change
# Transformation is total change
About transformation and the revelation of faith
Faith is revealed in times of uncertainty/lack of control,
When your model of life (formed from your past) does not explain your current experience.
It would also apply when your experience is not stable and consistent, flickering all the time, where the doors and access to perception keeps opening and closing beyond your control (appearing to do so at their own whim).
A person will always judge “transformation” as negative since all judgment is only based on the past.
When there is the nulling of everything you were in the past, how can it be judged as positive in any light?
The only way transformation can be judged positively is by faith.
Transformation: Judging by past (negative) —–vs—— Judging by faith (positive)
What is loved has been lost —-vs—– What is loved has not yet come.
To live itself is to step into the unknown and it is to have faith.
The lowest nadir point in transformation,
Is like the point where the caterpillar has entirely de-structured and become the cocoon.
It is like where one walks alone into the unknown into pitch darkness.
It is here, where all movement happens through faith and faith alone.
Faith is the vehicle that carries you through such dark times,
Where one knows not where one is,
Where one knows not whether what is happening is a blessing or a curse,
Or even how to make any sense of what is happening.
Suicide, Depression, Bitterness, Alienation/Separation/Anti-social feelings, Thoughts of destruction of everything, all show a crisis or a lack of faith.
This faith is actually the force of life itself that moves everything inexorably.
In deeper reality, that is the underlying condition at all times anyway.
When growing or dying or transforming, there is a lot more uncertainty.
At such times there is a lot more of stepping into the unknown,
But also, in a sense, a lot more of change/life.
Life = change/unknown/mystery/spirit.
The vortex of time moves you through various stations.
When things are stable and repetitive, there is a chance to build something of your own.
There is then this transition to feeling like an independent individual capable having personal power.
Here, this underlying movement of faith/life sort of veils itself into a clear knowledge of the world/certainty.
However, the greatest mystery of death still lurks somewhere in the recesses.
Although greatly veiled in a steady structured predictable lifestyle lived in the known,
Death has still been the intrigue for all of mankind for all time.
‘What is before birth’, and ‘what is after death’, are still 2 unknowns.
We find our present self and its condition sandwiched between these 2 unknowns.
We know not where we come from, and we know not where we are going,
But life/god makes itself more or even most visible in times of great change/transformation, removing all apparent refuges/securities, and revealing that this was the only thing that was real and all else was only its appearance.
The 4 stances people take towards an alien
Suppose you were totally alien,
The 4 stances people might take towards you are:
1. Dominate
2. Oppose/Fight or Avoid
3. Live and Let Live
4. Explore
I’ll describe each of the aspects:
Domination is like the way we deal with children and education.
The stance that, “They don’t know anything and we have to shape them”.
This is also the stance held by all conquerors.
If we feel threatened by them,
Then we actively oppose or fight them,
Or passively avoid them,
Depending upon what we believe is the better way to protect ourselves.
The 3rd option of live and let live,
Comes when we no longer feel threatened by them,
And we are strong enough to be equals with them and let them be.
We then live with mutual understanding while keeping our boundaries with them.
The 4th option happens when we perceive them to be higher than us.
Then we pursue/explore and attempt to know more and more of them,
So as to transform our selves and our own lives through that knowledge.
To be fully alive
Life is change.
All that does not change is dead.
So total change is total life.
To be fully alive,
Is to be like a fire,
That blazes, sparkles, and dazzles.
Everything you do must change everything,
So as to fall into endless transformation.
Whatever you do must be:
Towards what matters to you the most,
Towards what means the most to you,
Towards what you most deeply feel/desire/care about.
It must transform and change you fully from moment to moment.
Living in a way where the whole moves the whole.
Where all of you is free,
In full power, glory, and splendor.
Living every moment from the creativity,
Of ushering a whole new world at each moment.
Bringing/Gathering all of one at each moment,
Only to fire up and change it all up in the next.
More on Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas.
The 3 states of energy manifestation are referred to as: Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas.
Tamas = The tendency of energy manifestation to maintain its current configuration.
Rajas = The tendency of energy manifestation to move in cyclic activity (or cyclic transformation activity)
Sattva = The tendency of energy manifestation to evolve or transform in a non-cyclic way.
These 3 states can coexist simultaneously in different proportions.
If I have to put it in a single word:
Tamas = Inertia
Rajas = Activity
Sattva = Evolution
I could abstractly picture them to be:
Tamas = Point (maintenance of configuration and solidity)
Rajas = Circle (cyclic activity or cyclic transformation)
Sattva = Line (non-cyclic transformation, evolution, moving towards the subtlest source in a straight line)
Rajas + Sattva = Spiral (circle + line)
All of physicality is basically tamas.
It is only because forms maintain their integrity over time, they are experienced as a persistent reality.
The food chain (i.e. transformation cycle of life forms), birth and death cycle etc. also comes under Rajas.
The wheel of Samsara I would say is Rajas.
Sattva is spiritual seeking, learning, yielding to the higher realities,
And transforming oneself and one’s understanding.
A life form transforming and moving closer to its source,
Or to subtler and subtler planes is sattvic.
About Samskharas
The house, family, relatives, lineage, political, economic, and national situation,
And other such circumstances you were born and conditioned into,
Are from your ‘Samskhara’, i.e. the inheritance acquired on the basis of your past.
This samskhara also includes your disposition and attitude towards all of those circumstances.
That whole mental setup unfolds itself over time as we grow up,
Just like how a seed manifests a plant, and then a tree over time.
Just as there is samskhara for an individual,
There is also samskhara for the collective.
The individual samskhara is a subset nested within the collective samskhara.
For instance, if you were born in the 14th century,
Your would not be inheriting a car, laptop, tv etc. no matter where on earth you were born.
Similarly if you were born in the future, say 2150 AD,
You might be privy to accessing special electro magnetic light healing technology,
Which would be capable of healing all sorts of physical and mental diseases and afflictions,
Something we can only dream of today.
If samskhara is the imprint of the past, there is also a force that impels everything forward to change.
Like when looking at the solar system as seen from the heliocentric model, we see that everything moves round and round in orbits around the fixed sun.
But if we go beyond that model, we see that the sun itself moves around the milky way, and the planets perform a vortex like motion.
Similarly, various larger forces of evolution are actually constantly changing things.
Things from one perspective appear to be cyclical, but there is also evolution simultaneously happening.
Evolution is transformative in nature,
For instance, the growing up and the aging process.
How can one go beyond one’s past?
It begins to happen when a yearning for something beyond arises,
I.e. when that begins to take hold, take foot, in one’s life experience.
This yearning/longing then begins to carry the being beyond its past.
And begins to transform it.
There is only consciousness, and there is only the work
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 field
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.
Insight on food transformations
By adding sugar, jaggery, milk, chocolate, butter, and mixing/roasting/frying,
Almost any neutral food can be transformed into an attractive sweet dish.
Even foods like bitter gourd can be made into a candy that kids can like.
Alternatively, even if a drop of poison or venom is added to a food,
The whole thing becomes instantly inedible.
This kind of food transformation power has interesting parallels with our lives too.
Some people are great at sugar coating everything, giving solace, pacifying and calming others down.
They probably developed that skill though, by living their early life in an environment surrounded by opposite kinds of people, who were full of rigidity and who would create violence, destruction, and disastrous conflagrations on a dime.
Conversely, some others are great at destroying others’ self-esteem, like how a drop of poison ruins an entire dish.
Another interesting aspect is the sheer difference in power of the positive and negative substances.
For instance it takes just a drop of poison or venom to ruin an entire food dish.
While on the other hand, to transform a neutral raw food into something palatable takes a lot of care and work.
I have always wondered about this, regarding why in existence the destructive forces are millions of times more potent than their positive counterparts.
One explanation for this could be, maybe we have not yet discovered the elixirs which are the true counterparts to what we call poison and venom.
Another explanation could be that maybe we are not in a balanced neutral plane of existence on earth.
Probably this is a feature of this planet/realm, where the potential strength of the destructive powers outweighs that of the positive by a million.
Maybe to balance this inherent power differential, destructive forces like poison and venom occur much more rarely.
My feeling is one day we might probably discover or synthesize the positive equivalents of those substances.
But as of now, this is the way it is, in my understanding.
About transformation
Transformation is about:
Finding your own deepest desire,
Yielding to it,
Letting it change you,
And finally rule you.
Finding your own deepest desire,
Yielding to it,
Letting it change you,
And finally rule you.
Journey to the Abstract 