Om Namo Narayanaya!
As a few of us know, and appreciate, the superlative message to give in Vedanta, and the main one worth contemplating, is the declaration of the inherent divinity in mankind. Better than this, however, would be the outright declaration that mankind Is God in form, on earth. But how is such a revelation possible to give out and share, given the benighted state of man’s mind in present times?
And so, the seers take a few steps back and default to the method of acting as exemplars for this higher ideal, while authentic teachers strive to help qualify the rare few who have perceived the possibility of such a truth. Thus, a slow version of enlightenment — a principle which should never have been reduced to a process — moves forward gradually.
Kramamukti, this gradual approach to deeper realization, seems to be the well-trodden path of religion in this day and age. Those who profess to be spiritual in religious circles have their feet set firmly upon it, and accept and follow its relative and often laborious tenets. But my teacher, and others whose teachings most attracted me in my youth, were inspired by the ideal of Jivanmukti, a living liberated state wherein the thought of a “post mortem emancipation” was alien and distasteful. The superlative axioms of nonduality and transcendence are all that operate there, in that conditionless condition. As Ramprasad sings, “Meditation cuts time down,” and as Vivekananda states with bravado, stars get “crushed to atoms,” and the universe gets “unhinged” in the process. The nondual state, sometimes called “no mind,” is the mode of existence there.
In order to “lift ourselves up to the “Ideal,” as Vivekananda says, instead of “dragging the Ideal down to our comfort zones,” sincere seekers of the day must ensure true spiritual attainment by courting Jivanmukti. Shankara, too, peppers his scriptures with encouragement around achieving both samadhi and the living-liberated echelon that it allows. A sincere seeker and lover of Truth must therefore think in the mind, “Enlightenment is here and infused into every thought, breath, and moment.” It abides in the Eternal Moment, free of the illusion of time and its linear march, transcendent of space and its apparent myriad of worlds, and even untouched by the cosmic, collective, and individual game of cause and effect that traps the mind into the dream-stream of countless lifetimes in maya, in relativity.
As the ancient Rishi said to his precious family, and I end my message here with similar sentiments: “Then, and then alone, my dears, can I call you my true children, when you awaken from the dream of mental projection and breathe the rarefied Himalayan air of heights that is real Freedom, Jivanmukti, claiming your divine heritage once and for all.”
As it once was, and always is, it should also be again. Peace, Peace, Peace.
Babaji