Maha Yoga, by Who - The Soul #2

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The Soul

 

from Maha Yoga, by Who

 

 

We shall see later on why He is described as Consciousness,

and not as conscious; we shall then see that there is a fundamental difference between the two descriptions. Since the mind has no existence apart from this spurious entity, the ego, it follows that all the creations of the mind, including ignorance and bondage, and the consequent conditioned existence consisting of enjoyment and suffering— which we call ‘life’— are outgrowths of the ego, and partake of its unreality. That ignorance is unreal will be seen later on.That this teaching is correct will be clear to us if we look at the facts without bias. By the most careful analysis of the whole of our past experience we can find no proof of an individual soul other than the ego. The ego itself is just the primary ignorance, the recognition of which is the starting point of our inquiry. It is here shown that it is an imaginary entity being a compound of two uncompoundable elements.Thus the whole of this conditioned existence, which we call life, is founded on this lie, the individual soul. It is natural therefore that life should be full of lies, and therefore full of disappointments. This teaching may be difficult to grasp. But it is the fundamental truth as taught by the ancient lore.There can be no correct understanding of the ancient lore, if this teaching be not accepted. So long as the notion of individuality is retained, all philosophical inquiries are bound to prove useless; for they cannot lead us out of theprimary ignorance. This was clearly taught by the Sage Sankara as follows: “Only so long as there is an identification (effected by the mind) of the real Self

with the intellect is there an appearance of individuality and of conditioned existence

for that Self. But in reality there is no such being as the individual soul, other than

the spurious entity imagined by the intellect. In the study of the Vedanta we do not find(support for the existence of) any conscious entity having an existence of its own, apart from the Supreme Being, who is ever-free and all-knowing; the sacred texts say: ‘There is no seer, hearer, thinker or knower apart from this Being’;‘There is none but He, that sees, hears, thinks or knows’; ‘Thou art That’; ‘I am the Reality’; these and hundreds of other texts are our authorities." The ego is the only source of all our life-experiences;they are what they are because of the ego. We say, ‘I am so-and-so’, ‘I am a doer of actions’, ‘I am happy’, ‘I am miserable’, and so on. In every single thought we can find this ‘I am’. It is in fact the common factor of all thoughts without exception. No thought can arise, which does not contain this ‘I am’. But this ‘I am’ is not a property of the mind; so we learn from the Sage and from Upanishadic Lore. We are told that this ‘I am’ is the Light of the real Self. That Self being infinite and unqualified, this ‘I am’ is not really the little thing we take it to be. And we take it to be limited,imperfect and bound to the wheel of pleasure and pain, only because we do not discriminate and distinguish the element of reality in the ego from that which is false. Hence it ought to be clear to us that what obscures the real Self is simply the acceptance of this ego at its face-value, as our true Self, which it is not, as shown here.This was exactly the essence of the teaching of the Sage known as Gautama Buddha. He was once asked by someone about the immortality of the soul. The Sage replied: “That soul about whose survival you are anxious does not exist even now; it is unreal.” What he meant was that the questioner was assuming the existence of an individual soul, which does not really exist, and hence the question was based on a falsehood;Buddha did not mean to deny the existence of the real Self. The questioner misunderstood the answer; he thought that the Sage had told him that there is no Self at all. He ought to have asked a further question: ‘Is there a real Self, and if there be one,what is its real nature?’He did not do so, but went away; and Buddha discovered that he had unsettled the man’s faith without enlightening him. The fact is worthy of note that when questions are based on a false assumption, it is not possible to answer them by a simple ‘yes’or ‘no’; either answer would be wrong.The individual soul being unreal, it follows that there is no perceiver of the world. This may be surprising; but it need not be so. The seer and his spectacle are inseparable; they are like the two ends of a single stick; as a stick will always have two ends, so every perception involves the two, the seer and his spectacle. The three, namely the seer, the spectacle and the relation of seeing form a triad, of which the essential element is the seeing, which becomes possible by the light of Consciousness; by that light both the seer and the seen are manifested. It is not possible to attribute reality to the seer, while denying it to the spectacle.

 

If we accept the view that the spectacle, namely the world, is unreal in any sense,

then we must also accept the view that the seer of the world is unreal in the same sense and to the same extent. The spectator is in fact an integral part of the world; both in waking and in dream the spectator and the spectacle form one single whole, appearing and vanishing together.

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