Saturday, March 7, 2015

The Devil in the Mirror

Desire and bondage to the objects desired and the plans to secure them are attributes of the individualized selves, not of the Self or Atma resident in the body. The sense of me and mine and the emotions of lust and anger originate in the body-mind complex. Only when this complex is conquered and outgrown can true virtue emanate and manifest. The sense of ‘doer’ and ‘enjoyer’, of ‘agentship’, might appear to affect the Atma, but they are not part of the genuine nature of the Atma. Things get mirrored and produce images, but the mirror is not tarnished or even affected thereby. It remains as clear as it was. So too, a virtuous person might be subjected to some contaminating activities due to a backlog of acts in previous lives, but they cannot obstruct the person’s present nature or activities. The virtuous person has these genuine, basic attributes: purity, serenity, joy and is ever cheerful.

Why are Baba’s words that important to us and full of wisdom?
What is happening when reading his thoughts?
It was already a great insight when he was talking about the pratibimba, such a great insight that I never forgot the expression, pratibimba. It felt like those syllables pra-ti-bim-ba would contain everything what matters to be a right answer to us, to fulfill all our desires and to tell us, it is just about ‘that’ and nothing else and if you know ‘that’, you know everything and there is nothing else to know.
A magic word – pra-ti-bim-ba, but it is easier if we call it only ‘that’, but the short word ‘that’ is really reduced to one thing only, in the pra-ti-bim-ba can by anything mirrored as image, it is the image and that would just be the process of it or the essence and that is ‘pure love’. But we have three words and we have to look at each word separate to get to the ‘insight’ of ‘I am that’.
We have to analyze it. Like with that dress yesterday. It looked white and golden and it was blue and black and a million people wondered about it and why it looked that different.
‘I am that’ is telling us that we are something, but it doesn’t tell us what. It is the principle and we have to ask first the right question, ‘who am I?’ – The answer is, ‘I am that’. Or Baba said in the interview room about Soham, the mantra with the breath, so – inhale, ham – exhale, the meaning is ‘I am that’ or ‘I am God’ or ‘I am Shiva’.  If we transcend the relative objective world we get in a state of transcendental awareness or pure being. What is a Samadhi? Sama means even and buddhi is the intellect, it means an even intellect or with other words equanimity.
If we are in that state of pure being, we just are, without thoughts, without feeling for time and space and when thoughts are coming back, we are in the mind again.

Desire and bondage to the objects desired and the plans to secure them are attributes of the individualized selves, not of the Self or Atma resident in the body.

Last study circle was one lady she said, that we are really that, divine and not the body. I couldn’t help to tell her, yes that’s it.
If there is a painful situation and it cannot be removed for some reason and it goes on, but it maybe helps to get aware that it is not real, it should at least not make it worse, but if we see it as real, it goes on. But for the mind it is real, for whatever reason, it is real and painful, we are in a certain situation and the question is why we got into that situation.
Karma is the answer. It might be Karma, but when it is painful that makes it not really always better even if we think it is Karma and even if it is right, it just doesn’t go away like that and it can get even worse if we think it is Karma, because it means we have to suffer it.
So what is Baba telling us in that sentence exactly?
He talks about the ego, but he doesn’t call it ego, he calls it individualized selves to point out the difference to the higher self which is the Atma, but the Atma is also resident in the body. With these words he confirms that the higher self is the Atma. We hear him talk a lot about Atma and from time to time about the higher self and mostly we hear him talks about God, but we have to understand each and every expression the right way to know exactly what Baba means when he talks about the individual self or he talks about Atma. It helps if we want to get able to understand his words.
Here he makes the exact difference between individual self and Atma, higher self and if we don’t forget it, when he is talking again about the Atma, we know by definition that Baba means not the ego, not the body, but the higher self which is beyond the body.
How does it help us?

Desire and bondage to the objects desired and the plans to secure them are attributes of the individualized selves, not of the Self or Atma resident in the body.

First they are resident in the body, but who is the resident and what is the individualized self, what makes it different from the resident in the body? Desire and bondage to the objects desired and the plans to secure them is our focus if we live just in the mind a kind of what we think normal life is and if we don’t have a spiritual purpose. The attributes of the individualized selves are different from the Atma as well, but the Atma is resident in the body.
He is telling us by that already in the first sentence that there is a conflict between our everyday day interests and our life only in the mind and the spiritual life.
It tells us as well that the Atma is not interested in all of that, so who is the Atma?
The higher self? Who is the higher self?
We have to get the experience of it. Baba calls it the resident of the body, the indweller, the master of the heart, divinity.

The sense of me and mine and the emotions of lust and anger originate in the body-mind complex.

The plan to secure our desire is part of the mind, attributes of the individual self. I was in that ashram and Baba asked one night in a personal interview I had in the dream in my meditation just before his birthday, he asked why I was that old and not married. In my age in India most women were already grand-mothers and I was just about forty years old and he said I should not worry, he would take care and he said a name to put my focus on.
He took the worry away, he put someone in my focus and he told me in that way that my life’s organization didn’t work until now, but he will take good care of it and that felt great and I guess I was in a state of worry and pain, my last boyfriend I lost when I went to him, he was with TM and gone and as he said, it was very difficult to understand. Knowing that it had to be understood, because Baba said ‘very difficult to understand’ it meant it has to be understood somehow and however long it takes, that was also painful. It was not really possible to relax and probably also therefore, I was in the ashram as long as I could, just to get an answer, but it seemed all in vain.
It was an awful feeling resulting from that ‘everything gone’, whatever had been my life before. I had my work, my duty, a boyfriend and my destiny with meditation and that had just like evaporated, just like that, it broke into thin air and only pieces were left.
I didn’t know how to live with those pieces, they had turned into enemies what just told me that they had been friends once before and what a nasty way getting aware of it and the master, the hand who has made the puppets on a string was not there and all that ended in a black hole in my meditation.
And that black hole means a ‘replacement partner’, what was the national leader, thinking that he went for right action and that he would be controlled by the master enough to make it right action. The one who was behind the experience of ‘pure love’ was the yogi and that broke in pieces, not a nice experience at all, it is actually nicer to get the experience of ‘pure love’ or the higher self than to get aware of everything breaking into pieces and nobody telling us why and how that was possible.
So first it felt like all we want and there was that experience of ‘pure love’ we knew it was right action and therefore the right direction to go, but the master was not there and as he was not there, it was the mind only and on the mind level we cannot get any answers, it was just a dark hole and that is usually the sign of a replacement partner, so the friend was the replacement partner, the real friend was the yogi and that was mirrored by the criminal in the air, because I thought that the friend was actually a friend and it was all wrong, it means no friend and not master, just a black hole. Kind of difficult to describe that experience and an awful thing to get aware of. Not something I did, it was about a not right path, but the result was suffering, for sure no joy. The result was time waste and no more boyfriend and no time left after all, we had been in that relationship for four years, I had met him I was 31 and I went to Baba I was 35 and nothing was left of it, not the trace of it.
It was an awful experience and somehow I was not aware of it in Baba’s presence how awful it really was. I had wasted my time with something and that was just awkward. There was nothing to do about it and every time I went back to my country, with all that bliss and joy and happiness in the background, I felt totally awful, trapped, no way out and empty, it was not a spiritual experience, it was totally hell what I experienced after that TM thing turned into the opposite. A hell nobody can really imagine if they didn’t have that experience, the hell of time waste of being nowhere in that age of having to being all new again and no more time left, looking back only at pieces left, I guess that was probably the worst experience I ever have met.
In Baba’s presence I just didn’t feel it that much.
It was very painful and seemed impossible to understand it and to accept it as Karma was also not right.
Why should it have been my Karma? It was not about Karma, but about a not right path.
All that created pain and it made come up the body-mind complex. I thought I went in the right direction, because there had been ‘pure love’ and that pure love was there because we have to accept truth and that has to do with the higher self, it is unaffected and beyond the body, so it resulted in right action and that was meditation, to purify the body and to go beyond it, to transcend it and to teach it to others, that was all about right action, most of all the teaching part.
Things get mirrored in the Atma and that was the problem, the mirror said that things were not quite right and different from how it looked. It was the teaching of it which broke into pieces and as long as it was not understood it remained a problem and it took time to get clear.

The sense of me and mine and the emotions of lust and anger originate in the body-mind complex.

The study circle was not as good as it was before. It felt like a kind of brain-storming and there was no satisfaction in that. The good experience we shared before was not there, instead the other who had criticized it before, she took over and ended it in telling that it is seven o’clock and that we should stop it. There are always some people making rules and they decided that it can last only an hour and that is nowhere written. So her husband came in and we had a half an hour sitting until Bhajans and other singers came, but there is nowhere written that it has to be a half an hour before Bhajans.
So I let go of it and thought, what do I care, we ended it, but I had the feeling I would have like to leave on the spot, it was somehow spoiled and it is ridiculous that someone comes and tells we have an agreement and we stop at seven, nobody has made such an agreement and we have to go by it, because someone is telling it. So I just went by it and next time I will end it myself at seven. If we have to stop at seven because of that reason, even if it seems ridiculous, as it had been nowhere limited by time really, they can stress on it and so the joy of it got lost. The guy does it in purpose because he was the person who wanted me to carry bottles and I told him that I am not participating, he interrupted the study circle and he began to talk and tell people what to do and in my dream was Baba and he said, it is passion, stay alone. The way they behave and make rules, it is no possible to stay alone, so I didn’t go and since we are no more friends, we had been before, but I had always an empty feeling when I came back from those ‘meetings’. Once he said to me, ‘you don’t have to always be right’ and that in front of everybody and from there on we had a problem, even if it was never about being ‘right’. I always have been missing the feeling of pure love and the job we had during that meditation teacher time, it has never been the same again. It broke in pieces and it was still painful that I couldn’t find it again.
So that love coming out of nowhere in the ashram last time in Prasanthi is on that level and it had been twice just love.
And for now we just ended it at seven and that’s it. Every time, I have to do something with those two I come back with a headache and even if the singing was great afterwards, the headache was there when coming back and I had to do something completely different to get back to myself again and to feel normal again to get out of that spiritual experience which turned into the opposite.
I always go down with the elevator, twice I fell down the steps coming from such a meeting. I felt that irritated by it that I missed a step and after Bhajans I am often still not really present anymore and half with my thought in the experience somewhere, I always take the elevator.
But there was some good as well, she said that we are not that body-mind complex and not all that pain and irritation and all those desires coming out of the body-mind complex and I told her that was right and if we identify ourselves with it, we are in it, if we know we are not that, we are not in it. We are what we think we are.
The pain and the emptiness resulting from the fact that it was not as easy and bitter and that it needs thirty years to get to the experience of pure love, what we had before in three years time only, that is painful or bitter.
When I arrived in the ashram and I was sitting in Darshan listening to my first Baba speech it was all in the beginning it was in the air that it would be bitter.
I had no idea in what I went into.
If I look at the reality of it and how difficult it was, I feel still exhausted. It is just the time involved and how difficult it was to get some answers.
Before we had learnt it by heart and I was often sitting in those Darshans constantly wondering what was happening here in that sight of truth and how I could see it in my old experience and I had no idea how to relate it or to find the connecting link to it. We had practiced meditation as technique only and were totally unaware that on that transcendental level things get mirrored into images and that I was dealing with those images mirrored by that unchanging and always the same unlimited level of Atman.  
After all I came back from an intensive Bhajan session and the feeling felt full, but the head was as so often in a headache and that happens very often here when I get in touch or too close touch with those people who want do control it somehow probably, but of course not in the open and if we would tells something, they would be the first ones backing of telling that it is not meant like that, but they are always disturbing and never a good experience.
As great as the singing was, nevertheless there was that headache and it felt like brain storming and I am sure that is not what it should be in the study circle, everybody giving his input and everything telling what he thinks about it, but no real conclusion and insight.
In the end I said that nothing is coming in my head and I passed my turn. I had enough and it was just not possible, rules and regulations and the sharing of wisdom is not possible on that level. It is always the same as it had been for the last twenty years or so since we are here, coming back here ends with a headache.
So that disturbance on the meditation level and when things broke in pieces were a catastrophe and that was above my father’s head already when I went in direction of the national leader and I thought it was the highest first, what was not the right motivation, but we had learnt to go for the highest first and after a few years and with all that time I didn’t have to waste, I had to begin all new again, it was actually that painful, I was like not existent anymore, I went back and from there I went back to Baba again. You go in direction of ‘pure love’ and think it is the right thing to do, everybody tells so and what do we  get, a bad experience and the whole thing breaks into pieces. It was really the worst experience I have ever made.
It has been the reason for pain for the past thirty years and that pain we could not relate to the body-mind complex and that is why we had to get answers, so when I met my ex and he said that I belonged to him and he knew that I was the wife Baba sent him, I went for it, probably I didn’t care that he took only advantage of it, I was glad because it looked like the way out of the dilemma of my story with TM and that things get mirrored in images and that we have to get aware of it, that would come later on, only it came earlier than I thought and it put my life upside down again, because we didn’t listen and we had to get a divorce. And he doesn’t listen still today, so it was not possible with him to get a right answer and it would not be possible still today. We went ahead and hoped for a miracle as Baba is full of miracles.

Only when this complex is conquered and outgrown can true virtue emanate and manifest. The sense of ‘doer’ and ‘enjoyer’, of ‘agentship’, might appear to affect the Atma, but they are not part of the genuine nature of the Atma. Things get mirrored and produce images, but the mirror is not tarnished or even affected thereby. It remains as clear as it was. So too, a virtuous person might be subjected to some contaminating activities due to a backlog of acts in previous lives, but they cannot obstruct the person’s present nature or activities. The virtuous person has these genuine, basic attributes: purity, serenity, joy and is ever cheerful.

Only when the body-mind complex is conquered and outgrown, the created relative level is just good for purification Baba said not long ago, so that is why we meditate, to outgrow it. Purification means everything is done for that purpose and that was also the same with a meditation teacher. I wanted to initiate other into meditation because I knew it was the right thing to do, right action and truth is that the relative world is just for purification and if that mind is pure it can be on the level of the heart and that is what Baba said the day before, it is radiating bliss only if the pure mind is the same as the heart.

The sense of ‘doer’ and ‘enjoyer’, of ‘agentship’, might appear to affect the Atma, but they are not part of the genuine nature of the Atma.

That understanding of it and that the world or mind should be purified to get to world peace or to get anywhere, that is self-motivation, self-confidence and not based on the mind, it was based on pure love and that is the level of Atma.
What is the doer and enjoyer and ‘agentship’?
It might appear to affect the Atma, but as the atma never changes and is always the same and always non-conceptual and beyond the body, it cannot affect the Atma. It is not part of the Atma. The most extreme example we know is the Christ, he was not affected by the crucifying, he said, ‘forgive them oh Lord, they don’t know what they are doing’, even if his body was crucified, he didn’t curse them.
And he said it was all God’s will and nobody understood how the father could do that to him and that is how a new religion was born. His divine love was able to go beyond the pain of the body and even if they killed him.

Things get mirrored and produce images, but the mirror is not tarnished or even affected thereby. It remains as clear as it was. So too, a virtuous person might be subjected to some contaminating activities due to a backlog of acts in previous lives, but they cannot obstruct the person’s present nature or activities. The virtuous person has these genuine, basic attributes: purity, serenity, joy and is ever cheerful.

That is what happened, things got mirrored and produced images and I came to Baba in the hope he would tell me why there were those images and why they looked like that. And later it was the same, things get mirrored and produce images and the result was that Baba was in the dream with two faces, with vampire teeth and with a very long nose, because I saw it as Baba Lila so he looked like that, it was the result of the relationship and in my dream I was a homeless beggar woman on the streets and that was not a good dream, but it took time to realize that it was not a dream, but an insight and things get mirrored and that was the mirror of how I felt in that relationship.
And when Baba said to me in his dream afterwards, that I should go back to my lovely husband it was about truth and right action. If he would have been a lovely husband, but in that vampire face of Baba was nothing lovely and also not in the long nose, fooling everybody about what he was, it was important that meditation and he said that he meditated, when in reality he never did it and I am quite sure he is still going on telling that he is meditating, because he knows now that it matters. His sister told him that he should not only meditate and go to Baba and not take care of his daughter, he should go and see her and he didn’t do it. My daughter said he is listening to music, he goes home from work and is lying down listening to music and that he calls meditation.
He is still the same, pretending of doing it, but in reality he doesn’t do it. If he is listening to music, he is listening to music and it is not meditation.

So too, a virtuous person might be subjected to some contaminating activities due to a backlog of acts in previous lives, but they cannot obstruct the person’s present nature or activities. The virtuous person has these genuine, basic attributes: purity, serenity, joy and is ever cheerful.

A virtuous person might be subjected to come contaminating activities? What are contaminating activities? Something we have to purify afterwards again. Baba calls it a backlog of acts of previous lives and about that we don’t know anything.
We call it Karma, but what he is really telling us is that the backlog cannot obstruct a person’s present nature of activity.
The basic attributes are, ‘purity, serenity, joy and ever cheerful’.
Purity if we purify the mind and serenity is holding on to it no matter what obstacles and contaminating activities are coming up, joy is the result if we are aware what is real and what not and cheerful, because we know that it is all just passing by and things are mirrored in the mirror of Atma.

As things get mirrored last night in my dream was the devil and I am not really happy about that image because of that thing behind, the question is what is that thing what is mirrored in that image? Yes, I had the devil in my dream, he was red, with horns and behind me, and he came from behind.

Not such a nice insight, isn’t it, but I am not enough seeing my whole life out of distance to realize what it means now, but in some time it will be different and we will know why it was the devil and what the devil means.
Follow the master, fight the devil, fight to the end, and finish the game.
Not exactly the type of thing we like to see in the mirror, because it reflects somehow things … and the question is now what it is.

No comments: