That Which Comes After Sweetest

I said in an earlier post that knowing the what or even the how doesn’t suffice for me. For myself, knowledge must be thorough and as all-encompassing as is possble. This is probably because Jnana Yoga is my path, and probably is the very reason Jnana Yoga is my path.

Here’s what I think I’ve shared with you so far…

So very much of our functioning in life centers around egoic identification. Some of this is practical, like using words such as “I” as a simple reference point. Most of this, however, surpasses practicality and is really where we get into trouble. Instead of using personal possessive pronouns as reference points in life, we become forgetful and convince ourselves that our beloved reference points are actual extentions of ourselves and when those reference points are “relocated” or our relationship to them is otherwise adjusted we experience misery – much as when a relationship ends and we crash and burn. Because of this usual occurence, people do more often than not serve as the tentacles of our ego.

Ego is about as close to being any devil as there ever was, and while “people” as they are, are not necessarily ego, our identification with them – something that’s literally impossible to avoid because of how we’re created and raised – is securely based in ego (in the I-thought, and consequently associated with me, my, and mine).

But this isn’t all bad. Obviously, this outlet for our ego is likewise an effective medium for us to experience profound connection and love, and I do believe that others in our lives are very often Love’s manifestion, and on that note it becomes apparent (and rather full-circle) that the Source of love in our life is likewise linked to the pain experienced. That connection, of course, is that the pain experienced is technically an act of sweet grace from the all-pervasive Love. We’re afforded (sometimes) wonderful people in our lives (sometimes not-so-wonderful) to serve as extensions of our ego – to cause ego flares.

Little by little, it’s only through these ego flares that sweet grace-bestowing Shivashakti works on and with us so that little by little we suddenly arrive at a place within that literally transcends ego/anava mala, and we find ourselves in the unfoldment of consciousness, otherwise known as Self-Realization. People are an extension of our egos, as a grace-filled act of God, precisely to facilitate the maturation and intensification of our anava mala/ego – without which liberation for us is at least 1/3 impossible.

So there you have it. Ego in a nutshell of around 3200 words. I’m sorry to have made you read through all of it, but I hope you see what I’m trying to communicate to you, my dear reader. As a thank-you for reading this far, I’d like to share a video below of a song that struck me once while at the gym. The song repeats “I love you” about a billion times. That phrase, as well as the beautiful souls interacting sweetly in the video suits everything I intended to convey in this series: Others are a sweet, sweet, part of our egos.

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

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Sweetest Satan

Image taken from Ananta Vrindavan Images

Hinduism Today magazine has long been one of my favorite publications. It’s a wonderful and credible source of Hindu vidya, and although the publication was founded by monks from a Shaivite lineage, the magazine itself often contains considerable information pertaining to many of Hinduism’s other sects. The magazine is officially Shaivite, but I think most readers would find it actually quite Smarta. The lineage leading up to the modern day Saiva Siddhanta Church is old and very much intact, and the fact that it manages to have such an immense and open presence here in the West, while remaining so very orthodox is great. For a while I saved every issue, and then as an act of nonattachment I stopped, and now I am again. Some issues carry more weight than others, but every single issue is my favorite issue.

In the most recent issue of the magazine published, there’s an article titled, “From Bondage to Liberation: Explaining the ego’s initial subjugation of the soul as a form of Shiva’s grace.” It couldn’t have come at a better time, considering the formation of these posts, and I feel it offers a warm-n-fuzzy feeling or silver lining to the information presented leading up to this post. I hope you agree.

Grace is a funny religious term. I don’t like it usually. Same goes with the notion of mercy. For one, the difference between the two is often poorly understood (as with myself) or misunderstood entirely (as with many people, in general). The simplest definition of grace that I’ve been able to find is “unmerited favor,” which pretty closely matches my current understanding. The connotation is one of doing something nice for someone even though they don’t necessarily deserve it. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that notion, as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t really understand God to operate in that kind of mode. To me, to suppose God shows grace to humans is rather negating to the concept of karma, which itself is fairly supreme. I can see gurus showing grace and mercy, and in some cases I think this is exhibited in the form of the guru mitigating a devotee’s karmas for the advancement of that devotee. But I digress.

So… back to ego and grace and Hinduism Today’s Satguru Bodhinath Veylanswami. According to the article in this issue of the magazine, egoity is named “anava mala.” According to the Mrigendra Agama, anava mala is the “individualizing veil; egoity.” Also according to this Agama, the grace of Shivashakti is bestowed upon not only sentient beings, but also upon “inert things,” and this acts as an intensifier to that anava mala.

Superficially, this sounds counterintuitive. Why would God’s grace intensify our egoity? To be clear, the Mrigendra Agam clarifies, “…but not with the intention of making the soul suffer. Whatever action is done by Lord Shiva, it is indeed and effective and unfailing help to the soul. It cannot be considered otherwise.” The text continues, detailing that liberation cannot happen until the anava mala is removed entirely.

“But even when the power of anava mala becomes ripe for such maturation, its intensification does not, and cannot, take place of its own accord. It is seen that always and by all means, the non-intelligent object, in this case the ego, is kept in action only by an intelligent being,” states the Mrigendra Agama. The Agama then likens all of this to a physician who’s applying a stinging medicine to a wound. The sting is technically painful to the patient, but certainly for his own good. Later, the Agama continues, “Even so, for the sake of the removal of anava mala, the experiences should not be considered as afflicting or aggravating activity, but rather as healing, for they drive the soul’s evolution through the understanding born of its experiences.”

“Since Shiva is all-pervasive, His immediate and active presence in all objects and beings cannot be set aside. But where there is no need for His action, He remains neutral and free from any action… For those souls in whom anava mala is reaching its phase of maturation and removal, Shivashakti descends immediately and unfolds in the form of grace. Grace is indeed the compassionate function which makes the intensities of anava mala’s bonds ripe enough for removal.”

Later on we’re explained that a specific form of Shakti manifests to help the loosening of the ego through intensification. “Tirodhana shakti is a pure and asupicious power, which takes command of and works in concord with the ego’s obscuring potencies in order to sytematically work through them.”

This deep and metaphysical explaination closes with, “Grace is, in actuality, the cognitive power of the bound soul brought about by its evolution through the ego’s dominion and the maturing process of the inert bond. The simultaneous occurance of cognition and the ego’s intensification is considered to be the bestowal of grace” and that this explanation applies identically with the preponderant states of karma and maya, the soul’s other two bonds (anava mala being the third bond of the soul preventing liberation).

Certainly by now, your head may be swimming. Fair enough. But where do we stand? I’m feeling like it might be appropriate to bring this post to a close and attempt a summary in another. Of course, why not have skipped all these many words and just cut right to the summary? It’s not my style. The friend who’s been mentioned before in these posts encouraged me to write a paragraph of 20 words. It made me chuckle. 20 words isn’t a paragraph (for me). It’s a sentence.

One more post. Then I’m done. I promise.

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti

Sweeter Satan

Taken from Google Images, “Ego”

As I mentioned in the last post, I believe that other people are indeed often extentions of one’s ego. I intend to explain in this post and perhaps another post or two why I believe that. As I mentioned in the last post, a certain friend has often been the impetus for posts here on Sthapati. It was similarly his idea that I break this information into multiple posts instead of slamming you all with the book this is turning out to be.

Also mentioned in the last post, in addition to that friend, were other sources of knowledge and guidance I draw from on this subject – and many others. I’ll start now with sharing some material directly from Tolle’s, A New Earth:

“In normal everyday usage, ‘I’ embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time, but also into human nature, referred to as ‘an optical illusion of consciousness.’ That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations, of reality… If you recognize an illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality… What you usually refer to when you say ‘I’ is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of ‘I’ in your mind and whatever the ‘I’ has identified with…”

He goes on to explain a person growing up and becoming identified with the I-thought, “When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents’ vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person…Soon after, they learn the magic word ‘I’ and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I-thought. The next steps are thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of ‘I.’ … When ‘my’ toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy has, but because of the thought of “mine.” As the child grows up, the original I-thought attracts other thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the sense-perceived body, a nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things the ‘I’ identifies with are roles – mother, father, husband, wife, and so on… Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think ‘I’ but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken you still use the word ‘I,’ but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.”

Tolle continues a little later to detail how identification is one of the most basic structures through which the ego comes into existence. Apparently, the word identification derives from two Latin words, idem meaning “same,” and facere which means “to make.” So when I identify with something, I “make it the same.” All of this can be somewhat tough to follow if you’re not used to diving deep, but if you’re a nut like me who does nothing without diving deep, this stuff is like gold. For me it’s never enough to know the what or even the how, but the why is also mandatory.

When I came to this world, like anyone else I was in bit of a fog. Through repetition and some basic infantile cognition, “I” came to know that Josh = my body, and later began expanding that association – no, that identification – outside of my personal borders. Suddenly, instead of just me being “I,” there’s now my things, my accomplishments, and …my beloved. From a purely linguistic standpoint, there’s nothing wrong with using words like I, me, my, or mine. Much like having the right tools to get a job done, personal and possessive pronouns are required to communicate relative ideas. From that strictly utilitarian perspective, there’s nothing egoic about those identifiers.

Problems arise when, as the Latins implied, I begin to equate (“make the same”) stuff that’s not really me with my actual Self. The person identified (see how this words arises, time after time?) as my beloved is essentially nondifferent from my Self. We’re from the same Source, we have the same Self, and we’re headed toward the same Destination. Just about anything else is ego, is Maya. In truth, if something were to happen to him/his body, I would be no less. It’s because of my identification with him that the idea of or experience of his leaving causes misery – my ego percieves the notion of “my” beloved leaving as some kind of attack on me. If Truth or Reality is eternal, there’s no logical way we can say that the body or personality of our loved ones or of other people are “real.” The stuff our bodies and thoughts are made of existed as other substances before their current form, and after this all-too-brief human existence, those same stuffs will decompose. The actual Truth of that situation – which every single soul will encounter at least once in life – is that regardless of physical manifestation, there’s never any difference in actual distance between us and Love. We see our beloved’s form, we identify with it – literally that form becomes “my” beloved, the identification means my ego/mind perceive “my beloved” as an extension of who I am, and so when my beloved leaves – in whatever form that might take – I am miserable, because I’ve already ignorantly tricked myself into fully believing that a part of me is lost. Much like an arm being cut off.

Taken from Google Images

It’s because of this, that Hinduism has done so much exploration on the nature of the human’s internal landscape as well as other components like attachment. What are we really attached to? The ego is the object and the subject of all attachment. The ego is like a habit of smoking cigarettes – it’s both the problem and the apparent solution. Smoking causes issues which stress people out, and then it manages to fool people into feeling relieved when they smoke because of stress – which only causes additional problems for the smoker. The ego does the very same. We’re fooled into thinking something based in the original problem is ever part of the solution. We develop attachments to distract the mind from the ego, because as Tolle states, exposing an illusion disolves it. Our Self has no attachments, because all that truly is, is the Self – without going into it too much, this knowledge is precisely the foundation of Jnana Yoga, leads directly to experiential awareness of the One, and is why I can’t adhere primarily to bhakti margs, which for their own existence (at least at the level practiced and experienced by most humans) necessarily mandate, perpetuate, and promote the notion of “other” – which is a tool the ego uses to continue its own existence.

***If you haven’t gathered by now, the common application of the word “ego” isn’t nearly the complete definition of the word. Most equate ego with arrogance, but many humble people are still filled to the brim with egoism.***

But there may be some silver lining to this cloud, after all. According to the current issue of Hinduism Today magazine, Satguru Bodhinath Veylanswami explains through a Shaiva Agama how the ego is a tool of the One, meant to help us.

All that and a bucket of chicken coming up!

Om Shri Mahaganeshaya Namaha
Om Shanti