How is it to live in this clarity? I think I do but I am not sure?
Question:
How is it to live in this clarity? I think I do but I am not sure?
Nukunu:
In one of the old Upanishads there is a very beautiful picture-analogy of how it is to be a Jivan Mukti (meaning “free while living in a body”). Imagine a dog being carved out of a stone. You look, and yes it is a stone dog. This is an analogy of how the formless reality appear as forms. If you are totally deluded you only see the dog and you may even be so deluded that you believe it is alive. If you are starting to come into your clarity you will see both the dog and that is made of a stone. That is the beginning of Spiritual discrimination. You have an experience-form and name (a dog) but you “know” that is an appearance of the truth; it feels as if your true nature (the stone) is permeating what you are experiencing and it is extremely delightful. You sense, know the stone and not just the dog.
Now could you allow yourself to see that the dog in the stone is just a way the stone appears, the stone could also appear as a human or cow then there is only the stone that is real! The same with experiences they are also just how the real you appears in this moment.
When you let go of experiences and just relax into the real, you come into a deep, deep absorption, very fulfilling, that is in Advaita called “Sahaja Samadhi”- the Natural State. Here your breath stops for long moments because when you are not thinking you also do not need the breathing. In ‘Sahaja Samadhi’ you are just the stone, to stay in the analogy.
Most people only see the “dog” they are living in appearances and they even believe that the “dog” is real! They think that the life they experience through the senses are real! This is pain and delusion.
In this journey through life we are first totally identified with the movie, and yes it comes from the word “moving”. The movie of life is all our thoughts and experiences (the dog) then we may suddenly stumble over something deep in us that is not moving- a feeling of being. Oh, what is this? We are so used to ‘doing’ that ‘being’ is nearly forgotten. The feeling of ‘being’ is the stone in the analogy. Most people become aware of ‘being’ when they start to meditate.
When you know that “you” are the real in every experience that is what I call clarity. But the ‘you’ that you feel is not the ego-personality it is a living presence of the divine and you are that.