Jiva to Atma

Right now Meher Baba’s Discourses is on my bedside table. And every night before going to sleep, I try and read a chapter. I say ‘try’ because the concepts are seemingly heavy in my perception. Something tells me that they really are not…but my level of understanding right now is such that it limits clearer understanding, and hence, seems complicated. But one chapter that I read last night, had me really gripped. And from start to finish…I felt as though the veil of limited understanding had been lifted from my eyes, and I was able to just get the words I read. The chapter had a very interesting title…The search for God…something that a lot of us would be intrigued by. So, this post is an effort to put down some of the key points which hit me in this chapter and I have copied excerpts from the book…

In the people of the world, there are different categories of people…

1. MOST persons do not even suspect the existence of God and naturally they are not very keen about God.

2. There are others who, through the influence of tradition, belong to some faith or another and catch the belief in the existence of God from their surroundings. They are limited to certain rituals and ceremonies and rarely possess the vitality to transform their lives.

3. There are still others who are philosophically minded and have an inclination to believe in the existence of God either because of their own speculations or because of others’ beliefs. For them, God is at best an hypothesis or an intellectual idea. Such lukewarm belief is not sufficient for launching upon a serious search for God. Such persons do not know of God from personal knowledge, and for them God is not an object of intense desire or endeavour.

4. A true aspirant is not content with knowledge of spiritual realities based on hearsay, nor is he satisfied with pure inferential knowledge. For him the spiritual realities are not the object of idle thinking, and the acceptance or rejection of these realities is fraught with momentous implications for his inner life. Hence he naturally insists upon direct knowledge about them.

• But even if he has no direct knowledge about them, he still has a very open mind. He does not close his mind to the possibility that there could be spiritual realities which has not come within his experience.
• Man does not usually turn to a real search for God as a matter of voluntary and joyous enterprise. He has to be driven to this search by disillusionment with those worldly things which allure him and from which he cannot deflect his mind.
• Eat, drink, and be merry…is his general philosophy. But then he undergoes the ups and downs of life and finally reaches a point where he asks himself…What is the end of all this?
• The difficult circumstances in life may drive man to a point of desperation, which is of two kinds : Unharnessed desperateness and Divine desperateness. For instance, when such a desperation is aligned with thoughtlessness, i.e., when a person gives way to his impulses, such a desperation can be destructive and lead him to things like mental derangement and suicide. On the other hand, when the desperation belongs to that of a thoughtful person, the energy which it releases is intelligently harnessed and directed towards a purpose. In the moment of such divine desperateness a man makes the important decision to discover and realise the aim of life. Henceforth the burning query which refuses to be silenced is, “What does it all lead to?”
• When the psychic energy of a man is thus centred upon discovering the goal of life, he can no longer be content with the fleeting things of this life and he is thoroughly sceptical about the ordinary values which he had so far accepted without doubt. Divine desperateness is the beginning of spiritual awakening because it gives rise to aspiration for God-realisation.
• Now, once the aspriation has been born, how do we find God? Well..now since there is no direct way of finding God, he goes back to his usual experiences to see if it would shed some light on the Path. In other words, looking at everything from a new angle of vision and re-interpreting each experience for its spiritual significance.
• Revaluation of an experience amounts to a new bit of wisdom, and each addition to spiritual wisdom necessarily brings about a modification of one’s general attitude towards life.
• The more he carries on this intelligent and purposive experimentation with his own life, the deeper becomes his comprehension of the true meaning of life, until finally he discovers that as he is undergoing a complete transformation of his psychic being, he is arriving at a true perception of the real significance of life as it is.

 Now, this is the part that is absolutely reverberating for me, in terms of clarity and beauty. Read on…

• With a clear and tranquil vision, he realises that God Whom he has been so desperately seeking is no stranger nor hidden and foreign entity. He is Reality itself and not a hypothesis. He is Reality seen with undimmed vision—that very Reality of which he is a part and in which he has had his entire being and with which he is in fact identical. So, though he begins by seeking something utterly new, he really arrives at a new understanding of an ancient thing. The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he was not. It consists in the dissipation of his ignorance concerning himself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s own Self.

 I think a one time read is not enough to get a glimpse of this idea. It will take several readings in this lifetime, and several lifetimes of existence to come to one’s own self.

I have always, always, always, always wondered intensely about why we are all in this whole process of life. Where are our spiritual beginnings? Where did it start? Who was there at the beginning? Why was there this multipilication and division of one Infinite Soul into so many countless souls…all hankering, in our own ways to go back to our Source.

Today I read something, that I know I will read many many times over, in an effort to understand. Today I read something, that might just answer some of those questions, while stirring in me a 100 questions more. Here it is…a highly condensed version of the Divine Theme, by Meher Baba, in his work..God Speaks.

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A soul becomes perfect after passing through evolution, reincarnation, and the process of realization. To gain full consciousness, it gets increasing sanskaras in the process of evolution, till in the human form, it gets full consciousness as well as all the gross sanskaras.

In the process of reincarnation, this soul retains its full consciousness and exchanges (i.e., alternatingly experiences) the diverse sanskaras in itself; and in the process of realization, this soul retains its full consciouness, but its sanskaras become fainter and fainter till they all disappear and only consciousness remains. While becoming faint, gross sanskaras become subtle sanskaras, subtle sanskaras become mental sanskaras; and finally they all disappear.

Up to the human form, the winding process of sanskaras becomes stronger and stronger in the process of evolution. In the human form, in the process of reincarnation, the winding retains its full strength; but in the process of realization, the sanskaras gradually unwind themselves, till in the God-state, they are completely unwound.

God, the Over-Soul, alone is real. Nothing exists but God. The different souls are in the Over-Soul and one with it. The processes of evolution, reincarnation, and realization are all necessary in order to enable the soul to gain self-consciousness. In the process of winding, sanskaras become instrumental for the evolution of consciousness though they also give sanskaric bindings; and in the process of unwinding, sanskaric attachments are annihilated, though the consciousness which has been gained is fully retained.

In the process of the winding of sanskaras, the soul goes through seven stages of descent; and in the process of unwinding, the soul goes through seven stages of ascent. But the phenomena of descent as well as ascent are both illusory. The soul is everywhere and indivisibly infinite; and it does not move or descend or ascend.

The souls of all men and women, of all nationalities, castes, and creeds, are really one; and their experiences of good and evil, of fighting and helping, of waging wars and living in peace are all a part of illusion and delusion, because all these experiences are gained through bodies and minds, which in themselves are nothing.

Before the world of forms and duality came into existence, there was nothing but God, i.e., an indivisible and boundless ocean of Power, Knowledge, and Bliss. But this ocean was unconscious of itself. Picture to yourself this ocean as absolutely still and calm, unconscious of its Power, Knowledge, and Bliss, and unconscious that it is the ocean. The billions of drops which are in the ocean do not have any consciousness; they do not know that they are drops nor that they are in the ocean nor that they are a part of the ocean. This represents the original state of Reality.

This original state of Reality comes to be disturbed by an urge to know itself. This urge was always latent in the ocean; and when it begins to express itself, it endows the drops with individuality. When this urge makes the still water move, there immediately spring up numerous bubbles or forms around the drops; and it is these bubbles which give individuality to the drops. The bubbles do not and cannot actually divide the indivisible ocean; they cannot separate the drop from the ocean; they merely give to these drops a feeling of separateness or limited individuality.

Now let us study the life of one drop-soul through its different stages. Owing to the arising of the bubble, the drop-soul which was completely unconscious is invested with individuality (or a feeling of separateness) as well as with very slight consciousness. This consciousness, which has sprung up in the drop-soul, is not of itself nor of the ocean; but it is of the bubble or the form, which in itself is nothing. This imperfect bubble at this stage is represented by the form of a stone. After some time, this bubble or form bursts and there springs up in its place another bubble or form. Now, when a bubble bursts, two things happen: (1) there is an increase in consciousness, and (2) there is a twist or consolidation of impressions or sanskaras accumulated during the life of the previous bubble. The consciousness of the drop-soul has now slightly increased; but the drop-soul is still conscious only of this new bubble or form and not of itself nor of the ocean. This new bubble is represented by the form of the metal. This new bubble or form also bursts in due course of time; and simultaneously there is a further increase in consciousness and a fresh twist or consolidation of sanskaras, which gives rise to the emergence of another type of bubble or form.

This process continues right through the course of evolution, which covers the stages of stones, metals, vegetables, worms, fishes, birds, and animals. Every time that the previous bubble or form bursts, it gains more consciousness and adds one twist to the already accumulated sanskaras, until it reaches the human bubble or form, in which the ever-increasing consciousness becomes full and complete. The process of the winding up of sanskaras consists of these regular twists; and it is these twists which keep the consciousness, gained by the drop-soul, directed and fixed towards the bubble or the form instead of towards its real Self, even when consciousness is fully developed in the human form.

On gaining the human form, the second process begins; this process is that of reincarnation. At this point, the process of the winding up of sanskaras comes to an end. The drop-soul takes numerous human forms one by one; and these forms are exactly eighty-four lakhs in number. These human forms are sometimes those of man and sometimes those of woman; and they change nationalities, appearance, color, and creed. The drop-soul through human incarnations experiences itself sometimes as a beggar and sometimes as a king, and thus gathers experiences of the opposities of happiness or misery according to its good or bad sanskaras. In reincarnation (i.e., in its successive and several human forms) the drop-soul retains its full consciousness but continues to have alternating experiences of opposite sanskaras, till the process of realization begins. And during this process of realization the sanskaras get unwound. In reincarnations, there is a spending up of sanskaras; but this spending up is quite different from the unwinding of the sanskaras, which takes place during the process of realization. The spending up of sanskaras itself creates new sanskaras, which bind the soul; but the unwinding of sanskaras does not itself create fresh sanskaras; and it is intended to undo the very strong grip of sanskaras, in which the drop-soul is caught.

Up to the human form, the winding up of sanskaras becomes stronger and stronger during the process of evolution. In the human forms of reincarnation, the winding continues to operate as a limiting factor; but with every change of the human bubble or form, the tight twists, gained during the process of winding, get loosened through eighty-four lakhs of shakings, before they are ready to unwind in the process of realization.

Now begins the third process of realization, which is a process of ascent. Here, the drop-soul undergoes the gradual unwinding of the sanskaras. During this process of unwinding, the sanskaras become fainter and fainter; and at the same time, the consciousness of the drop-soul gets directed more and more towards itself; and thus, the drop-soul passes through the subtle and mental planes till all the sanskaras disappear completely, enabling it to become conscious of itself as the ocean.

In the infinite ocean of the Over-Soul, you are the drop or the soul. You are the soul in the ordinary state; and you use your consciousness in seeing and experiencing the bubble or the form. Through the gross layer of the bubble, you experience that part of the huge gross bubble which is the earth. You are eternally lodged and indivisibly one with the Over-Soul; but you do not experience it. In the advanced stage, up through the third plane, you use your consciousness in seeing and experiencing the huge subtle bubble called the subtle world, through the subtle bubble or form called the subtle body; but you do not see and experience the Over-Soul which you are in, since your consciousness is not now directed towards the Over-Soul. In the advanced stage from the fourth through the sixth plane, you use your consciousness in seeing and experiencing the huge mental bubble, which is called the mental world, through the mental bubble or form which is called the mental body, but even now you do not experience the Over-Soul. But in the God-realized state, you continually use your consciousness for seeing and experiencing the Over-Soul; and then all the forms are known as being nothing but bubbles.

So, now, picture yourself as the soul-drop, lodged in the Over-Soul, behind five layers after the gross body. You, the soul-drop, are now looking at the gross body and through it at the gross world. When you look at the second layer and through it, the first layer will appear to you as nothing but a layer only, and thus, looking behind each layer, you will find all these layers as only your shadow covers; and finally, when you (i.e., the soul-drop) look at and get merged in the Over-Soul, you realize that only you were real and all that you were seeing and experiencing till now was your own shadow and nothing else.