How Much Purity Can You Handle?
Our destiny depends on two related aspects of our sadhana. They are related, but semi-independent.
The first consideration is: How much truth can you handle? How much can you integrate? How much can you retain? How much do you realize?
And the second is: How much purification are you able to achieve?
The purification has to do with the sanskaras, and the vasanas, and the vrittis. The sanskaras, we could consider to be, like the riverbed, in which thought flows. And the vasanas comprise the river itself. And the vritti are the particular currents that occur in the river—the signature types of thoughts that produce the illusion of the ego: particular whirlpools, and rapids, the particular currents that create the vicissitudes of one’s existence.
And only when all of this has been purified and the river no longer flows into duality, into thought, but remains in the purity of presence, of the absolute unprecipitated Self, that never liquifies itself into emotion, or hardens into action based on aggression, or conflict, but remains always in the ether of absolute compassion and understanding, from the perspective of that all-encompassing, nondual atmosphere that surrounds the phenomenal plane, and saturates it with its mystery.
But the Real, the Real that one must grasp, the truth, that purity enables one to embody, to manifest, to apply, is very difficult to attain because of the resistances that are produced precisely by that river of thought. And so, for example, Sri Ramana rarely taught the real truth, the highest truth, because no one could take it. He taught intermediate levels of truth. But to those closest disciples who could handle the Real, he revealed what has come down as the Ajatavada teaching—a teaching that the ego-mind cannot handle. The ego-mind cannot handle even the truth of its own subconscious, of its own fantasies, and lack of being. It can’t recognize that it is a fabrication, a fiction, a delusion. It cannot afford to awaken from the lie of its illusory existence, let alone handle the truth of the soul and all of the past lives, and the karmic background that set the stage for this final birth.
But the Supreme Real, the Ajatavada, is the teaching that there is no birth, no creation, no world. All of it is just imagination. But it is only that level of the truth that leads to liberation. And that truth, the Supreme Real, can only be grokked when the mind has been completely transcended, when dualistic thought no longer interferes with one’s apperception of presence. And the presence that is the Self, is absolute luminosity, without differentiation, without externalization, without projection. And thus, no world appears. All appearance is simply the manifestation of the Self, not of anything external. There is nothing outside of consciousness, and even the consciousness, when it is impure and filled with dreams, and filled with fantasies that produce the illusion of a world, cannot grasp itself, the consciousness remains paradoxically unconscious of its own being, its own essential nature.
And so the awakening to that truth of what lies beyond the impure consciousness that is always reacting, emoting, projecting, blaming, judging, worrying—all of those emotional melodramatic situations that the ego is obsessed with, and self-justifies its illusory existence with—all of that must fall away before the Real can even emerge in consciousness. And when it does, when the awakening is complete, there is illumination. And the illumination brings the consciousness through the eye of the needle of the emptiness of the ego, into the fullness of the Real.
Audio File: How Much Purity Can You Handle? – Audio File.mp3