Withdraw from the Unreal into the Real
So some of you are new to this field (including myself), so we should define terms. We often begin a seminar like this with the ancient Upanishadic prayer, the first line of which is Asatoma Satgamaya—which is usually translated “lead me from the unreal to the Real”—so lead me from asat to Sat, from the unreal to the Real.
So the definition of Sat is “the Real”. I think we can start with that. It’s sometimes translated as Being, but for the Indians that means the Supreme Being or Beingness, but I think it’s useful for us to say we are in the process of rediscovering what is Real and what is unreal.
Yoga, that’s a term everyone should know—what does yoga mean? Union. Everyone gets that? Because nowadays when people say they’re doing yoga, they mean exercises of some kind, and there is not so much of a sense of the goal of all of that being union, but here we’re talking about union with the Real.
So it’s an important question at the very beginning: what is it that unites with the Real? Can the unreal really unite with the Real? Or by union do we mean simply the love of the Real because union is the consummation of love, and love of the Real is what enables the Real to manifest in all of its glory, and the glory of Sat, what comes along with it when the Real is fully emerged, which is often referred to in the Indian philosophy as Sat Chit Ananda.
Chit means intelligence, but it’s the infinite intelligence of the Supreme Real, the Supreme Being, if you will—and the blissful nature of that intelligent power. The power which is the source of the universe, of the manifestation of the world, and the source of not only its manifestation but its sustenance and ultimately its end. And it has an end. The world has an end. The Sat does not have an end nor a beginning. And the sages of India say we are now near the time of the end, the end of what is called Kali Yuga, the dark age—the age of the lowest level of the human species which has become bestial and savage toward other members of the same species and toward nature, etc., and the collapse of civilization which we are in the midst of. But Sat does not, so this is what is important—only the unreal dies which is why it may be of great urgency to be lead to the Real before that event seems to occur so you won’t be fooled into thinking that death pertains to you, or destruction.
There are two words they use for the end in India: Vinash and Sampara. Now, Vinash is generally translated as “destruction”, which is why they call Shiva “The Destroyer” because He comes at the end; He’s that final force, divine force. But in the Kashmiri philosophy of this whole process of the creation, sustenance, and the end— the term used is Sampara which does not mean destruction, it means “withdrawal”, so what it says is that at the end Shiva, or Sat—but Sat in way personified—withdraws the world, withdraws the energy from the illusion, from the unreal—and returns it all to the Real.
That withdrawal is in quantum physics terms a “de-collapse of the quantum wave function” which makes the human level of consciousness think that there are objects and people and things instead of just simply an infinite mass of divine light. But once the wave function is de-collapsed, is freed, then the particles return to the waves, and the waves to the ocean, the unified field, and there is only light and awareness, Prikasha and Vimarsha that is the return, the Samhara. And it is that final act of the withdrawal of the illusion so that the Real is realized by everyone and everything, because all of us are manifestations of the Real, all of us are that right now, here and now. There’s nothing you need to do but if you want to realize the bliss of that, instead of suffering with the illusion of the paranoia that comes with being ignorant of that truth, then that bliss comes from the intense union with the Real that eliminates the traces of belief in the unreal, OK?
So Real and unreal, but instead of unreal we’ll use a Lacanian term and say the imaginary. From the ego’s perspective the world is made of images—whether they’re visual images or sonic images or images of any of the senses—all of the senses produce a kind of an image, an impression on the mind.
So the world is made up of the variety of the five sense images that we get, and the information that we get between the lines from intuition and from memory and often from teleological understanding that comes from the future, that can come precognitively to us. So, there are different sources of information, but what we are getting at the level of the senses is an imaginary view of the world, like the icons on a computer screen—that’s the images—but the program that creates the images, you don’t see or understand their logic necessarily. And so we are dealing with only the effects of processes that are invisible, imperceptible to the mind that operates in the imaginary.
In other words, if the consciousness falls to the level where it identifies with one of those images that it calls its body, and then it believes that it’s an actual empirical sentient being in a world, and that that world is real, then it has fallen into the imaginary, and it has flipped. And once you’re in the imaginary, you will tend to think that the Real is only imaginary. And in the twentieth century in particular, the locus of consciousness became much more decidedly centered in the ego, and so all notions of a transcendent Real—whether in the form of God or Buddha Nature or whatever—were for the most part eliminated from scientific and philosophical logic, but that logic could not understand the levels of consciousness and intelligence that transcend the ego. And so, from the ego-mind which operates in two-valued logic (that something is either true or false, black or white), it cannot grasp the full spectrum and nuances of understanding that are present in the infinite intelligence, in the Chit.
So moving from the imaginary to the Real is also moving from a restricted level of intelligence, that in Sanskrit would be the chitta, to the chitti, which is the unrestricted, unlimited intelligence of that Supreme Being. So if you want to become more intelligent, the way you do that is to disidentify from the belief—which is a false belief—that you are a physical entity, that you are a bodily being and to realize that, no, you may have images of the body and you may have images of who you are to other people that you got from projections by your parents in childhood or from the social order or the internet or whatever, but they are self-images and you need to understand the difference between the self-image and the Self—they’re very different. So we want to move to all of those.
Now, in between the imaginary is the symbolic dimension—and that’s our capacity to use reason, thought, gyana, knowledge, understanding to deconstruct the ego which is the basic imaginary construct and to transcend all of the false beliefs, the distortions, the projections, the egocentric biases and prejudices of the imaginary in order to discover the Real and to unite with it till you realize that is the truth and thus be liberated, freed from not just illusion and ignorance but from the limitation of your own intelligence and therefore your power and from fear from desire from the entrapments in the imaginary dimension that cause all of our suffering so it’s a path of freedom from suffering which comes from freedom from ignorance and illusion.
So if we’re led from the unreal to the Real, as the prayer says, we’re also led from the tamasic to the jyotir, the jyoti bindu. So that’s the second line: Tamasoma jyotir gamaya—tamas, or the tamasic level of consciousness, can mean a level that is impure, corrupt, inert, stuck, a level that has stopped growing, that is fixed and fixated, obsessed with a certain set of desires and fears and identifications etc., to the purity of luminous presence, the purity of mind that is filled with light, purity, a brightness, shining with intelligence, with wisdom and the final line is mrytyor ma Amrita gamaya, meaning lead me from the Realm of death to immortality. Why? Because the Real is not born.
What is real in you was not born; it existed before your body did. Your consciousness came into the body at a certain point when the body was still in the prenatal interim state, but your consciousness was never born itself. It identified, it projected itself to the body, and maybe it still is doing that, but it’s not actually in the body physically, and it doesn’t die at the death of the body. We know that from now many near death experiences that happen in emergency rooms and hospitals all the time that people can flatline, go through brain death or heart death, and yet they’ll come back with very clear experiences, not only of the higher dimension of life but also of being out of body on this plane and have accurate memories that were not simply fantasies so the reality of that unborn and undying immortal Self that is real, that you are—is you—and therefore cannot be difficult to reach who you really are if you’re willing to let go of who you’re not, but that your ego believes it is. So I hope that’s all clear.
Now, what’s the problem? OK? Why is it that this knowledge has been around for thousands of years, probably all of you have read some book of Advaita or Kashmir Shaivism or even mystical Christianity or alchemy or Taoism or any of the nondual traditions; you’ve probably all been steeped in books of that kind, and yet perhaps you would say, “I’m still not yet liberated into the Real.” Why? OK, that’s what we want to understand because it can’t be difficult, right? It really is a simple choice. Why don’t we make that choice?