🔱 Om Namo Bhagavathe Sri ArunachalaRamanaya 🔱
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The Paramount Importance of Self Attention, by Sri Sadhu Om, As recorded by Michael James
Part Five - Mountain Path: April – June 2013 - Excerpt
Note of 5th January 1978
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Sadhu Om: If 'I' is taken to be a form, the world and God will also be experienced as forms (Ulladu Narpadu verse four). Even the conception of a 'formless' God is a mental form or image. Nirguna dhyana or formless worship of God is a futile effort, like a person chasing the horizon in order to touch the all-pervading space (Sri Arunāchala Ashtakam verse three).
Reality cannot be found by meditation, which is attending to the mind and its images. It can only be found by non-meditation, which is self-attention. However, Bhagavan said we should not think that sαgunα worship [worship of God as a form] is useless. We should practise either sαgunα worship or self-attention.
In verse four of Ulladu Narpadu Bhagavan asks: "Can what is seen be otherwise than the eye [that sees it]?" That is, the nature of what is experienced cannot be different to the nature of what experiences it. Therefore, the appearance of the world and God depends upon the appearance of the seer, 'I', and their forms depend upon the seer's form.
'Eye' is also used in Tamil to mean jñāna [knowledge or consciousness], so the 'endless [limitless or infinite] eye' is self, which — being limitless and formless — can see only limitlessness and formlessness. Therefore, self can never see any name or form, nor anything other than itself. It experiences only formless self-awareness, 'I am'.
This is expressed by Bhagavan in verse twenty seven of Sri Arunāchala Aksharamanamalai: "O Arunāchala, sun of bright rays that swallows everything [the entire appearance of the universe] ..." (see also Sri Arunāchala Pancharatnam verse 1). That is, in the light of pure self-awareness, which is Arunāchala, the ego-'I', the world and God will all disappear.
When there is body-consciousness there is world-consciousness. If none of the five sheaths were experienced as 'I', neither the world nor God could be seen (Ulladu Narpadu verse five). The world and God are therefore created by our misidentifying a body to be 'I'. Hence the creator of both the world and God is only the 'I' that mistakes itself to be a body, so we should investigate 'who is this 'I'?' From this we can infer that the world and God are only as real as the idea 'I am this body', and since this body-identification is unreal, so too are this world and God.
How are vāsanās [mental propensities or dispositions] to be erased? Now we take these vāsanās to be 'I' or 'mine'. This gross body is itself an expansion of them. In sleep we do not experience any of them, so we assume that they remain then in seed form, and in order to explain the seeming ignorance of sleep (which exists only in the view of our waking mind), we postulate a causal body, whose form is conceived to be the sum total of all vāsanās. This causal body seems to veil or obscure our pure self-awareness, and hence it is conscious only of a state of dark ignorance.
However, by practising self-attention in the waking state we will become more clearly conscious of our self-awareness in spite of the play of our vāsanās, and thus we will be conscious of it even during sleep. The vāsanās will then be seen as shadows created by the dim light of our mind, which is a reflection of the bright light of self-awareness.
So long as we attend to vāsanās and their products (our thoughts and desires and the objects of the world), we will continue to take them to be 'I' or 'mine' and thus to be bound by them. However, if we ignore our vāsanās and instead attend only to 'I', we will destroy them — that is, we will expose their non-existence.
We should not be put off by the strength of our vāsanās and by their seemingly endless play. We should remember that they appear because I am, but they do not come to trouble us during sleep, even though we continue to exist then. Therefore I am real, and vāsanās are unreal. With this strong conviction we should be courageous and remain disinterested in our vāsanās, and thus we should carry on self-attention undisturbed.
Bhagavan gave us the following definition of reality: only that which is everlasting, unchanging and self-knowing is real. [Hence nothing other than 'I' is real, because everything else is transient, mutable and known not by itself but only by 'I'.]
When we accept the existence of the world we see, we should accept the existence of a power — which we may call God — that is responsible for it and for ordaining our prārabdha, which is whatever we are to experience in this world. As Bhagavan says in verse one of Upadesa Undiyar:
Karma giving fruit is by the ordainment of God. Can karma be God, since karma is jada [devoid of consciousness]?
However, because God does not appear as an object perceived through the five senses, we say we do not believe in him. This is like saying that we see the pictures on the cinema screen, but do not see the light that illumines them. The world is those pictures, and God is the self-knowing light, 'I am', which makes the appearance of the world and the functioning of karma possible.
The world does not exist apart from the body or the mind, as Bhagavan says in verses five and six of Ulladu Narpadu. The world is merely an expansion of the mind projected through the five senses of the body. The world-picture is projected on the screen that is the mind; it is illuminated by the mind; and it is seen by the mind. Therefore, since this mind is nothing other than self, in verse one of Ulladu Narpadu Bhagavan says:
[...] The picture of names and forms [the world], the one who sees [it], the screen on which [it] depends, and the pervading light [of consciousness that illumines it] — all these are he [the 'first thing' or base], which is self.
To mistake a body, which is one of the pictures, to be 'I', and thus to feel that the world, which is all the other pictures, is other than and outside of 'I', is a delusion (māyā). Without this delusion, 'I am this body', no world-picture would be seen. Because we thus limit 'I', thinking it to be within a body, the concepts of 'inside' and 'outside' arise.
So long as the delusion 'I am this body' is experienced as real, the world will also be experienced as real. Therefore the only way to experience the unreality and non-existence of the world is to investigate this feeling 'I am the body'. When we do so, it will disappear, and then we shall no longer be troubled by the false appearance of this world.
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Arunachala - Photo by Markus Horlacher
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