The Fourth Step in the Spiritual Journey
How, Why, What, and Where is this Experience?
How does experience happen? Noting much is required to be mentioned about how does an experience happens. We all know through the various objects. All kinds of objects, even mental objects; as mentioned earlier, various categories of Mind such as Intellect, Imagination, Ego, Memory & Reflected Consciousness, are also capable of experiences.
आध्यात्मिक यात्रा में चौथा चरण
अनुभव:
यह अनुभव कैसे, क्यों, क्या और कहाँ
है?
अनुभव कैसे होता है? एक अनुभव कैसे होता है, इसके बारे में अधिक उल्लेख करना आवश्यक नहीं है। हम सभी जानते हैं कि विभिन्न वस्तुओं के माध्यम से हमे अनुभव प्राप्त होता है। सभी प्रकार की वस्तुओं, यहां तक कि मानसिक वस्तुओं; जैसा कि पहले उल्लेख किया गया है, मन की विभिन्न श्रेणियां जैसे कि बुद्धि, कल्पना, अहंकार, स्मृति और प्रतिबिंबित चेतना, का भी अनुभव संभव है।
Why Fear?
Question: Right now, I’m in that stage where the moment I become aware - I only sense fear. Hence, to brush that feeling away, I become less aware and get back into my dream world. That’s where today’s exercise concluded. I don’t know if this makes any sense to you.
Thought of giving you a little explanation for your feeling of Fear.
"Being Aware" is the natural state of being.
But we have so caught up in Being Aware of objects that have forgotten our natural state of being.
Awareness is ever-present.
There is a surge of thoughts (like photo frames) with a negligible gap in between, which appears as a movie. In this activity, a story is weaved of self, a personal individual, which is a false identity. This self-personal identity is you, me, he, she, etc.
And the mind is so conditioned with this false self that in "Being Aware," it seems to be missing, hence the feeling of fear. However, the more "Being Aware" starts happening, the self will go to its place where it belongs and will not unnecessarily interfere with the real experience.
This personal self is required only for operational ease in this apparent world. For the movie to appear as continuous without any gap, it is possible only because of the screen. Similarly, our world appears as one continuous universe because of this unchanging Awareness, which is the only thing that is present.
The third step in the Spiritual Journey
What is this ego? It is such a wonder that just thought can create such a powerful illusion, which results in weaving multiple worlds based on this illusionary self. If we dig deep into this topic, we may find many fascinating theories and explaining the ego-self. In this context, I am sure many of us would have come across a popular theory, that there is just one mind - the universal mind and the individual minds are just reflections of that whole.
Side note in the Spiritual Journey
Thousands of books have already been written about the world, mind and body. Therefore, there is not much to say about them here, but mention is necessary.
In the play of Maya, the Spiritual journey is also one of the acts amongst many. But one of the best features of this act is that it shows a way out of this Maya. This game can be played only by Maya's instruments, so it is necessary to know a little about them, but we have to know about these instruments only as much as necessary so that it aids our progression in this journey. Otherwise, the study of these tools is so exciting and fascinating that it can make us fall into a beautiful trap of Maya, which would demand thousands of birth's effort to come out of it.
The second step in the Spiritual Journey
Soon after examining the steps of knowing self, the next step is to contemplate on this Self. If this is not the world, body or mind, what is this?
Before we proceed in contemplating on Self, the foremost and crucial aspect is to nullify the assumption of giving a human image to this Self. Human is one of the varied forms of this Self, so it can be a big spider as well if spiders were to walk in this path of knowing-Self. Maybe that is happening, who knows, anything is possible in this Maya. Many Vedanta scholars may disagree with this; I am not here to bring in a new theory of any sort, my only humble approach is to make it clear that when we mention Self, please do not put a human face to it.
आध्यात्मिक यात्रा में तीसरा चरण
