The Catch-22 That Catches Every Soul
Summary: Has your consciousness been hooked like a fish by the illusory lure of desire, penetrated by the point of fear, and trapped by the barb of belief in the ego’s reality? If you have arrived at such a rebarbative condition of pseudo-existence, then it may be time to start practicing a form of yoga that will release you from the delusional capture in this dream field. But be prepared to face the truth that you have been caught by your Self, and only your Self can release you.
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So I thought it would be useful tonight to return to basics.
Sat Mind Beginner’s Mind.
And that calls for some definitions that you probably all know. We’ll start with these two.
Sat. What is Sat? Why do we want yoga with Sat? Anyone?
Student: The Real.
Who said it?
Student: The Real.
The Real. Which Real?
Student: Supreme Real.
The Supreme Real, which includes all the others, because the ego’s Real, Real One, which is the Real of Trauma, is caused by falling into delusion, of thinking that you have come into a world in which there are oppressive others and bad karma and situations of no love. And so the Real of the ego that it always wants to stay away from and therefore goes into the imaginary, and creates narratives of either denial or of sustaining the agony of the unreal that is the reason for the trauma. But what causes the trauma to persist is the very defense against it, of going into the imaginary. That’s the paradox in the catch-22. And when you are willing and able to observe it but not identify with it, then the imaginary dissolves and Real Two appears, and then there is love. Love without a subject and without an object, just love in its purity, which is the emanation of the energy of God, and we could say the motivation for the creation of the illusion in order to know God through loving that Real which is oneself that one had temporarily forgotten but never lost the yearning to return to.
That’s the souls level of the Real, and then, of course, Real Three is Sat. And the Real, which is the Supreme Self, the one Self, is not located in time or space, but is eternal, is presence, but without being present because to the ego, the Supreme Real is absent because it is unmanifest, and the ego, that is a mind split into subject-object perception, can never see or find the Real, the Sat, the Self, because the Self never becomes an object. The Self is the absolute Knower, but the Knower who is never different from the Known. This is nonduality. The Unmanifest and the manifest are not two. Nirvana is not different from samsara. The difference is caused by the fall into the imaginary construct which comes about through the chit jada granthi—remember the famous term of Ramana. Granthi means a knot, the consciousness by identifying with the inert body, the jada, which is a corpse when the consciousness leaves, it’s just material, and it is brought to life by the presence of consciousness—but once the consciousness is knotted to it with an identification, then the realization of the Supreme Real is no longer accessible. And the untying of that knot is what Sat Yoga is about.
So Sat is the Absolute Real. Yoga is the release of all defenses against being reabsorbed into Sat. That’s all it is. The word is often defined as “union”, but there can be no union because there was never duality in the first place. That’s the illusion. And so it’s the release of the defenses that prevent the obscuration of the truth of nonduality that one never left. It never really happened. The ignorance is only in a dream. It’s not Real. The world is a dreamfield and has no essence, no reality, except that it is pervaded by the Supreme Intelligence, the one consciousness that is all-encompassing and all-pervading. But when there is identification, the knot with a particular individual bodily entity, then that is obscured. It’s never lost, because nonduality never becomes duality, but it is distanced from consciousness, and then the ego that is knotted to the body out of its fear of death, because then God, the Real, means the death of its identity and its life and its addiction to jouissance, to trying to find some gratification to compensate for all the suffering and all the trauma, lead to a constant wheel of repetition of traumas punctuated by moments of gratification, after which there is usually disappointment, or guilt or shame, or all of the above, and a sense of, “No, that wasn’t what I was looking for”, and then onward into deeper lostness in the labyrinth of one’s own mind.
So to get out of this trap we have to release those defenses against freedom—because the ego is terrified of freedom, terrified of the infinite, terrified of the madness of the deep, terrified of not knowing who it is, terrified of losing touch with the figures of attachment that give it the illusion of security. All of that and more make up the defenses of the ego against its own liberation.
So the way to get there has to begin with the seeking of peace, because the ego is in a state of agitation, and it’s in a state of constant mental chatter. There’s never any inner peace. So the key concept for us is shanti. Now, shanti means peace, yes, inner peace, but it also means more than that. It means silence, inner silence, the end of narratives, a mind free of thoughts. And again, the ego becomes extremely anxious when one has stayed in a thought-free state too long—unless one’s in deep sleep, that’s the only time one can tolerate being without thoughts—and even then, deep sleep is interrupted by dream thoughts.
So the real question is: can you tolerate shanti? Peace? Can you even tolerate relaxation in your body? Because it means letting go of certain contractions that are also often suppressing somatized traumatic memories that you never want to see. They’re too unbearable—never want to know are there, never want to process—and you prefer bodily symptoms to having to face unbearable emotions.
And so this is the reason why shanti itself, which you would think is a state so easy to reach, it’s the way to get to liberation—but no, even shanti requires—well, it requires first going through and completing what we quaintly call “ego death”. Now, there’s not really any such thing as ego death because the ego was never alive. It’s a program, it’s a self-image, it’s a set of belief systems that algorithmically get projected upon the dreamfield, and it is a set of subconscious, usually, fantasies, that want to get acted out—and it’s a set of internal figures, inner child, superegos, often various other fragments. None of it is real, none of it. There’s no inner child. You could do an autopsy on your body and you’d find there was never any inner child there, nor a superego. It’s a delusion. It’s your own mind creating its hell realm because it enjoys it, it’s attached to it. It doesn’t want to let go into the silence and the Emptiness and the freedom. It wants to hold on, because if it doesn’t hold on to all of that, it can’t hold on to a sense of really existing in the world. And that leads to a kind of depersonalization—if I start to feel I don’t really exist, then if you’re in the ego mind one begins to feel like we’re in a very surreal—more than twilight zone kind of situation—that becomes also unbearable because the subconscious traumatic elements show up as parts of the world. The dreamfield itself becomes a nightmare, or that’s what at least one is afraid of. Actually the nightmare will end in the state of shanti, but the fear is, “No, it will then never end, because I can never get back once I’ve let go.” So letting go is the last thing the ego will allow itself to do. So shanti itself is problematic.
So I’m sure all of you remember the stages of facing death listed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross long ago, right?