II: 25

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 2, Verse 25

 

“Invisible to mortal eyes,

Beyond thought

And beyond change,

Know that the Self is,

And be free from sorrow."

 

Sri Ramakrishna:

 

"The Self remains unaffected by mundane things.  Heat and cold, pleasure and pain, dual states such as these do not have any sway on it.  But the pairs of opposites do affect the person who is identified exclusively with an ego inside a bag of skin."

 

Ram Dass:

 

“Our curriculum requires that we get as close as possible to the things that scare us, in order to reveal our attachments and to experience the serenity that comes with letting go of them.  We must be willing to open to all that the moment contains, including that which seems most threatening.  But how do we do this?  By familiarizing ourselves with our demons and cultivating fearlessness.”

 

[There is a story about the Tibetan saint Milarepa that goes something like this:  One day Milarepa returned to his hut from a firewood-gathering mission only to find his hut crowded with demons making themselves right at home, sweeping the floor, washing the dishes, and mending his clothes.  He was determined to get rid of the pests, so he sat down and expounded on the Dharma and the virtues of loving kindness, compassion and equanimity.  The demons ignored him.  This made him mad, so he picked up one of the sticks of firewood and began swinging it at one demon after another in an effort to shoe them out of his house.  The demons continued to ignore him, deftly ducking out of the way of each and every blow, even when they were facing the other direction.  Finally, Milarepa, anger spent and physically exhausted, plopped himself down in the middle of his one-room hut, sighed, and said to the demons, who sat down in a circle around him, fully attentive at last:  "Well, it's clear that you're not going anywhere, and I'm sure as heck not going anywhere, so I guess we're just gonna have to get along."  One by one, the demons got up and left.  Suppression doesn't work, but like Father Bede says, we can rest in that quiet place inside which is unaffected by all the mind chatter.]

 

[Krishna Jaya]

I wasn't able to include this in the discussion (too many characters?) so I've added it as a comment.

Carl Rogers:

“It is the person who is denying his feelings and his reactions who is the person who tends to come for therapy. He has, often for years, been trying to change, but finds himself fixed in behaviors which he dislikes. It is only as he can become more of himself, can be more of what he has denied in himself, that there is any prospect of change.

A common reaction to this process is that to be what one truly is would mean to be bad, evil, uncontrolled, and destructive. It would mean to unleash some kind of a monster on the world. This is a view which is very well known to me, since I see it in almost every client. 'If I dare to let the feelings flow which are dammed up within me, if by some chance I should live in those feelings, then this would be catastrophic.' This is the attitude, spoken or unspoken, of nearly every client as he moves into the experiencing of the unknown aspects of himself. But the whole course of his experience in therapy contradicts these fears.

He gradually comes to find out that he can be his anger, when anger is his real reaction, but that such accepted or transparent anger is not destructive. He finds that he can be his fear, but that knowingly to be his fear does not dissolve him. He finds that he can be self-pitying and it is not 'bad.' He can feel and be his sexual feelings, or his 'lazy' feelings, or his hostile feelings, and the roof of the world does not fall in. The reason is that the more he is able to permit these feelings to flow and to be in him, the more they take their appropriate place in a total harmony of his feelings.

He discovers that he has other feelings with which these mingle and find a balance. He feels loving and tender and considerate and cooperative, as well as hostile or lustful or angry. He feels interest and zest and curiosity, as well as laziness or apathy. He feels courageous and venturesome, as well as fearful. His feelings, when he lives closely and acceptingly with their complexity, operate in a constructive harmony rather than sweeping him into some uncontrollably evil path.

Sometimes people express their concern by saying that if a person were to be what he truly is, he would be releasing the beast in himself. I feel somewhat amused by this, because I think we might take a closer look at the beasts. The lion is often a symbol of the 'ravening beast.' But what about him? Unless he has been very much warped by contact with humans, he has a number of the qualities I have been describing. To be sure, he kills when he is hungry, but he does not go on wild rampages of killing, nor does he overfeed himself. He keeps his handsome figure better than many of us. He is helpless and dependent in his puppyhood, but he moves from that to independence. He does not cling to dependence. He is selfish and self-centered in infancy, but in adulthood he shows a reasonable degree of cooperativeness, and feeds, cares for, and protects his young. He satisfies his sexual desires, but this does not mean that he goes on wild and lustful orgies. He is, in some basic sense, a constructive and trustworthy member of the species Felis Leo.

What I am trying to suggest is that when one is truly and deeply a unique member of the human species, this is not something which should excite horror. It means instead that one lives fully and openly the complex process of being one of the most widely sensitive, responsive, and creative creatures on this planet. Fully to be one's own uniqueness as a human being, is not, in my experience, a process which would be labeled bad. More appropriate words might be that it is a positive, constructive, and trustworthy process."