YOUR REAL SELF IS FOREVER PLAYING IN FREEDOM
Every person is a liberated person. Everyone on all planets throughout the universe is liberated, and we feel we are bound. Let us ask the question, who is bound? Am I really in bondage? Which part of me is in bondage, and what are the conditions that produce the bondage which I think to be bondage? And if I am bound, why am I bound? Which part of me is bound, and which part is free?
In essence, in the spiritual self of man, everyone is a liberated being, for the spirit is beyond all kinds of bondage, and you are none else than the spirit itself.
So, the whole idea of bondage is a fallacy. It is a fallacy because bondage is a superimposition upon liberation. This superimposition comes from what we call the mind. So, here we stand in the position to say that the mind is in bondage. The mind, which constitutes the ego self of man, is in bondage and forever will remain in bondage. You cannot free the mind from its boundaries because the mind has its peculiarities and limitations. A limited mind can never be limitless. So, we are just swimming on the surface of the ocean where all the waves are, and those waves are tossing the little self around here, there and everywhere. The ocean currents control your mind, and who has produced the currents in this ocean? The mind itself. So, whatever bondage you assume to be in is a creation of yourself, for your authentic self, your actual self is forever playing in freedom.
THE SCIENTIST EXPERIMENTS, THE PHILOSOPHER USE LOGIC, THE MYSTIC EXPERIENCE
There is only one problem: that this freedom, this liberation, cannot be communicated. It cannot be transmitted to another because the mind plays, and the communication would be from mind to mind. But it can be shown by communion.
There is a difference between communication and communion. In communion, the heart speaks to the heart. If you could understand my heart, see my heart, and feel the communication with my heart, then your heart would feel what liberation is all about.
In all these various philosophies of the world, they base all their philosophies on logic. The scientist experiments with things outside him and can only reach a certain point dealing with exterior substances. He wants to capture Divinity in a test tube, yet the very test tube is made of that subtle energy which is Divine. So, he is trying to capture Divinity with something Divine. For scientists, dealing only with external matter through experiments could never be done. The philosopher does not experiment; he uses logic systematically, from point A to point B to point C to point D; he wants to work it out logically, and his tool is only the mind. But for the mystic, he throws away logic, he throws away experiments, and he talks of experience.
So, here you have an experiment, you have logic, and you have experience. The mind can never communicate expertise. You have something very nice to eat; you could never logically communicate what that niceness is all about. You can talk about it but not show what it is. So, we require communion to know what liberation is all about: the genuine guru-chela relationship that goes beyond the mind level. However, the mind is necessary for certain kinds of explanations, for the mind, too, wants to be pleased. But the actual effect is in communication, in that spark where heart meets heart. It is a love affair, and then the experience of this universal orgasm occurs. That is the experience of liberation.
THE EXPERIENCE OF KNOWLEDGE, BLISS AND EXISTENCE IS A MENTAL EXPERIENCE
What is this experience of liberation? It is no experience. It is a process. But we can talk about the results of the process, where life is joyous, where you are divided into two. You live in the relative, yet you live in the Absolute. The Absolute provides the impetus. The Absolute provides the joy that is there, and yet, in self-realization or liberation, joy is just but a secondary, more grossified aspect. So, in the experience of liberation, which is no experience, no experience condenses itself through some form, where the mind is needed, and joy is experienced. Do you see the process that because of the superimposition of the mind, the no experience is somewhat glimpsed at as an experience, and that experience is joy and bliss?
The Vedantist tries to qualify Brahman or Divinity as absolute existence, absolute bliss, and absolute knowledge, and I tell the Vedantists that this is a contradiction of terms. They have reached a far way. Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, has reached a specific limitation. They have not reached the limitless. By saying Divinity is absolute bliss, existence, and knowledge, we automatically qualify for it. IT: capital I, capital T. This qualification brings limitations, for limitless people cannot be qualified. Therefore, the experience of knowledge, bliss, and existence is still a mental experience at the finest level.
TO EXPERIENCE LIBERATION, WE HAVE TO REACH THE SUPERCONSCIOUS STATE OF MIND
Our teachings go beyond Vedanta, and here is precisely where we go beyond. Because bliss, knowledge, and existence are only expressions, they are only outward manifestations of the unmanifest, and when you merge into the unmanifest, all qualifications cease. How can you qualify or quantify that which is limitless? Yet the human mind can only reach that state of knowledge, bliss and existence. It is not just an ordinary cognition but a total assimilation, a total realization of that in its subtlest form, which is experienced by the mind, making life joyous. Although the mind is a superimposition and limited in its power, it still covers the entirety of Divinity, and therefore we call it manifestation. Consequently, we also call the mind limitless in that aspect. However, its very limitation lies in superimposition, and anything superimposed is inaccurate.
So, all our experiences are seemingly real and not genuine. They are not actual, for any kind of experience could never be a total experience. Because the constituents of that very experience have to be compounded, it has to be made up of various factors, and therefore, it is not a pure experience. It is a composition of multiple experiences that the mind has gone through. According to our perceptions and conceptions, what we see in so-called reality is but a concoction of various factors. So, where is the validity of that experience? Firstly, it is quantified, and it is qualified. The very same circumstances could produce an entirely different experience in a different mind or to a different person. Therefore, the very result of the concoction becomes untrue. You give six women the same ingredients to cook the same kind of meal, yet everyone will taste different. It will not be the same, although the ingredients, quantities, and various mixtures and methods might be the same. They all follow the same recipe, and yet the food will taste different.
Where does the flaw come from? Why should it be so? It is because of conditioning. Conditioning the mind in various ways, and all trying to have the same experience, is impossible. So, true liberation in its purest simple form, in its purest unmixed form, is no experience. So, what experiences are the mind? The mind can be led to the personalized expression of Divinity and not the impersonal. That is an area unto itself because the object disappears, the subject disappears, so who is there to experience? No one. No one. Therefore, the impersonal Divinity is a process unto itself. When the subject and object disappear, the process carries on, and you become the process. And no process can experience itself without creating a result. Do you get me? No process can experience itself without creating a result. So, the result is experienced by the mind and not the process itself.
So, to experience liberation within human limits, we have to reach the superconscious stage of the mind or reach the finest relative, which is the furthest man can get. No man has walked on this Earth beyond the personal God.
THE PERSONAL GOD IS THE SUM TOTAL OF THIS PRESENT CYCLE OF THE UNIVERSE
The personal God is the sum of all the energies that are emanated from the universe. Let us look at it arithmetically: two and two make four, and four and four make eight. Like that, you keep on adding up the entirety of the universe, and the total leads to a hundred. That hundred is the personalized God. In the first primal manifestation of the present cycle of the universe, the impersonal energy, totally neutral, without attributes or qualities, without the conceptions of bliss and existence and what have you, totally neutral of those qualities, having its very nature of emanation, like heat emanating from fire, there starts the grossification of the impersonal. There starts the grossification of the impersonal into the personal God, which, to repeat, is the sum totality of this present cycle of this universe.
It starts as a vibratory sound, which is vibration and would naturally have motion. This motion produces interactions within itself to create different names and forms, which we later classify into objects and subjects. This is how, through various gradations of the grossification of this primal energy, that becomes the personal God, which diversifies itself and expands itself in multiple forms of creation but just to draw all the forms of creation back into itself. Therefore, the Hindu concept of Brahma, the Creator. The process has to last for a while; this, too, is a process. It is a process of the primal process. Therefore, the process takes time. We measure our dimensions by time. And that is Vishnu, who preserves it for a period. And then Shiva, of course, the dissolver, when all that is drawn back again into that first primal manifestation.
All this can be experienced when we take the mind through spiritual practices to its subtlest level, where we become one with the personal God. But that is not the final mergence. It is like a man and woman copulating, but that is not the total mergence. That is just a togetherness, an interpenetration of two people with each other. But that is not the final mergence; it is just togetherness. Final mergence comes in that vast orgasm where the personal God melts away into the impersonal, and the subject and the object are lost. Only the process, the orgasm, remains. So, liberation, or what man is capable of and what he calls liberation, is also limited.
Language, being so structured or limited, has to use words to describe something. But that is not total liberation. It is a form of liberation or the highest aspect of liberation, and as long as man can reach there, he has fulfilled his entire mission as a man; he has reached his goal as a man and not as the personal God.
THE PERSONAL GOD CAN BE QUALIFIED, BUT NOT THE IMPERSONAL GOD
So, the highest aspiration man could have is to reach that area of absolute knowledge, which means knowingness of everything. Absolute bliss, which means being joyful. And existence, recognizing that I exist. For I am all existence as far as the universe is concerned, as far as the personal God is concerned. So, every man can become a personal god. Having this all-knowingness, we call it intuitive knowingness; we call it wisdom, not acquired knowledge, but wisdom. You just know. Whatever you do, you just do. You just are. That is being. But yet, it has its limitations. It is not the totality. For the universe itself is not the totality of all that which exists. That is the wrong word, too. Because existence itself implies limitation, and to call it absolute existence could only mean that you have reached the finest totality of that particular existence. But there is something still beyond that. Beyond the personal God, there is the impersonal God. The personal God can be qualified, but not the impersonal.
While on Earth, you can never be only the personal God. At the highest level, you have to be a man-god, for you have to combine the so-called Absolute with the so-called relative, and by having the combination of the two, you can just not be God alone. You can be man-god. So, here in this process of the process, like our soup of the soup of the soup, the man experiences the personal God with the subtlest levels of his mind. And it gives him intense joy and ecstasy within him, as far as the finest relative or the finest broadest limitation is concerned. And being there, standing there, having the panoramic view of life, he allows the relative self to function. He allows the grosser mind, conscious and subconscious, to function knowingly.
The only way to find liberation in this lifetime is to reach that finest subtlest level of the mind, the superconscious state, which is the primal manifestation of the Manifestor or the primal manifestation of the Unmanifest: the impersonal God that no man can reach while in a body.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1980 – 27
