Menoculayshunal; Being You

As begun last week, we are now in the territory of having to explore some of the tenets of Advaitic philosophy within this memoir to give context to the experience of Sandeepany and ashram living based upon said philosophy. In that post, attempts were made to convey something of the effect upon me that brought me to this PhD level study in the first place. Remember, this was not in a field I had formally studied up till now. I'd begun as an analyst/programmer, went through banking and medicine and yet here I was... the simple fact being that throughout all of those career choices, there was the underlying drive to understand a purpose in life... to understand MY purpose in life. And as I have said before, we can read all we like about another's experience, but in the end, unless we actually expose ourselves to the same circumstances, how can we judge?

The spiritual element arose in childhood, and even with some spells of 'darkness,' it never left. How to explain this? Why is it that others, who may indeed have similar experiences, name them differently? Interestingly, two comments of very similar content arose from last week's post; the idea of inherent traits and how one views the spiritual. (Thank you, Gail and Mark!) These were perfect inquiries to lead into today's post - and into next week's, too.

I can feel some of your toes curling at the mention of karma. I am equally confident that this will be due to knowing so little about it. There is a tendency to use the term in conjunction with 'destiny' and give it an airy-fairy, you had no choice quality. However, there is actually a great deal of depth and value to understanding the karmic cycle. Though that, too, offers obstacles to some who get stuck in the idea of coming back to life again and again. But it boils down to energy... and Consciousness (with the capital 'cee'). 

Photo by Monil Andharia on Unsplash

The foundational texts we covered in our early months included Tattvabodha and Atma Bodha. In these are laid down the basic structures of life as described in this philosophy. In the first, we learn what the Rsis understood about matter and its structure; tanmatras are the building blocks - the elements of ether, wind, fire, water and earth. Within these are to be found the anu - the atom... bear in mind that all this understanding arose from meditation and observation and intellectual analysis. Modern-day theoretical physicists, with all their fancy instrumentation and existing scientific breakthroughs, struggle to equal what has already been understood by those mahatmas of centuries past. (We counted among our student batch two PhD astrophysicists, and both were astounded as we progressed to the true depths of our study.) The second text builds upon the first, having established in its process that there is something beyond mere matter from which that very matter arose - the Consciousness, aka, Atma. That Atma is the Universal Soul. Every one of us feels its pull, even if we are not prepared to name it or recognise it. 

The driving factor to our daily living comes from that connection. How aware we are of it depends, according to karmic law, on how frequently Atma has reabsorbed our individualised soul (jiva). Each jiva is likened to the sparks from a fire. They are spat out by the heat of the fire to rise and glow for a while, then darken and fall back to the embers. Some will be rekindled, others not. The sparks are continually thrown until all combustible energy in their substance is exhausted, and there is nothing left to burn. 

No analogy can wholly interpret the nature of the soul, but this goes a long way toward it. We are, all of us, sparks from a single fire. We cannot know how many times we have been 'thrown up' to glow in the dark. Neither is the number of times the same for all. All that we know is the glow that we are currently experiencing. We are all in the praarabdha stage of our cycle. What happens to our jiva selves remains at source (Atma/fire); in its preparation stage, anything that happens to the individualised ember is sanchita. The combination of sanchita and praarabdha give rise to a store of possible outcomes in the future - agami. But remember, at all times, we are the fire only. 

All the sparks - we humans - perceive themselves to be alone and special. There is attachment to the physical being, the emotional being, the mental being - the ego. I-ness and my-ness abound such that when we are falling back toward the fire (ageing, facing 'death') we cling to these things. However, just as actual sparks which go through the flames many times are each time changed and altered, so is the jiva. Some jivas come to understand the cycle, while others are still not enough burned and tempered. We cannot all be at the same level of experience within karma. We cannot all appreciate that karma is the process of constant work, as our jiva is refined as a jeweller refines a diamond.

To be continued...