Many Buddhists believe what they call the Doctrine of Impermanence. So there’s a question that arises: is impermanence really permanent? Is impermanence a permanent condition? Because if it is a permanent condition, then the doctrine is wrong, because there’s something permanent. But if there isn’t anything permanent, then the doctrine can’t really be verified, because you’d have to have a permanent observer to know that impermanence was a true reality. And if there isn’t such, then again, the doctrine can’t be right. So if indeed impermanence is permanent, then the doctrine is true, but therefore it’s false. And if it’s false, it’s true.
So the categories of true and false cannot really be used very well in trying to understand reality, because the more you explore what is Real, you discover that it’s paradoxical, and can never be captured in a concept.
So in a way, every doctrine is not only about ideologies, dogmas, and belief systems, but it includes any concept, because every concept is embedded in a web of other complementary concepts, or contradictory ones, but there’s always a network. No concept appears without other, different concepts that give it its identity. In the same way that the great linguist Ferdinand de Saussure discovered that language, or the signifiers, the phonemes of language, have no fixed identity. A signifier is simply a difference from another signifier.
And so when you learn a language, all you are actually learning is a pattern of differences. And then you can imaginarily project a meaning, or an image, or a concept, or an attitude toward whatever that concept seemed to mean—but its meaning is always within an ocean of waves that create different shades of meaning, so that the same signifier set among a different set of waves will produce a different meaning. So meaning is not contained within language, it’s projected into it.
So, interestingly, the Yogacara Buddhists, the Yogacara School of Buddhism, claims that we have three natures, or that there are three natures. One is the Imaginary Nature, which tallies very well with Lacan’s idea of the three registers. And the second is the Other-Dependent Nature, which also tallies well with Lacan’s understanding of the symbolic. And then what the Yogacharans call the Perfect Nature, but I would rather refer to it as Sovereign Nature, because there is no dependency.
So if you’re in the imaginary nature as it implies, the signifier implies, you’re living in a fantasy world, a world of wishful thinking, a world of nostalgia, a world of false beliefs, a world of whitewashing what you don’t want to see, of censoring certain repressed unbearable information, or following rules of being forbidden to know certain things and living a life on the surface of one’s existential being, in a facade, an artificial, fabricated facade of identity, that was really imposed and interjected by the desires and demands of the Other—but that too is repressed.
And so the imaginary one who is in the imaginary nature believes they are free, or sovereign, while being entirely enslaved to delusions, but not being able to know that.
And development of one’s sadhana, of one’s awareness, and coherence, gradually will make one aware of all of the imaginary ideas, beliefs, projections, and preconceptions, and predispositions imposed on, superimposed on, a current reality based on fantasies and drives from the past, that have never been released, but that are not in sync with the current reality, and therefore there is always some kind of a karmic glitch, or out of sync situation in which there is no rapport with the other, because they do not match your projections. And this is one of the causes of karma.
If you break through the imaginary, either gradually or immediately, by recognizing you were in it, you still then have to deal with the conscious Other-dependent nature. Right? Now you’ll be aware that you’re dependent on the Other, you’re in bondage to the Other, but it still may take a while to recognize that your own ego itself is the Other—because your ego was not your own Real nature—it was constructed, fabricated, at a time when your body was very helpless and it was dependent on the other. And even though you’re now an adult who is, at least relatively speaking independent, and certainly not dependent on the recognition and approval of the Other, one has a greater degree of freedom. But as long as there is still identification with the ego complex, which is the internalized Other, which is internalized as a superego—usually a superego or even a set of superegos from mother, father, and the family system, that may be represented by siblings, may be represented both as an ideal and a demonic version—”Do as I say, not as I do”, or, “Do as I do, not as I say”—and therefore a web of conflicting demands by internal others who control your own desire, because of a sense of needing their desire for your desire to be fulfilled, and your own desire for their desire to make you feel whole, and to make you feel free of the weakness, the impotence, the castration, if you want to use the psychoanalytic term, of the needy one in relation to the one that seems to have the power, or the ones who seem to know, and to have “it”, and who are “it”, and that you are lacking that.
And so that sense of Other-dependence is a bondage that creates an ongoing sense of lack and need, which is often then translated and compensated for as an avoidance, or a domineering bullying attitude, or one that is using a kind of bravado to overcome its sense of failure and of self-betrayal.
So the ego then, in either of the imaginary or the other-dependent natures or states, is suffering. It denies its suffering in the imaginary—it wants to believe that it has rapport, and wholeness, and it’s made the best possible choices in life, and it’s doing it its own way, etc., etc.—but really it’s lost, and completely incoherent to itself, but it’s also in avoidance of knowledge of that fact.
So the perfect nature, as they call it, which I would, as I say, modify and call the sovereign nature, is one where there’s no dependence on either an external other or an internalized superego other, or on a self-image of an ego still stuck in an infantile needy state of need of approval by the Other, or needing the other’s love in order to feel whole, or needing to have something outside of itself that gives it validity, or capacity to be able to recognize the Dao, for example, recognize what is accurate, what is good, what is, what is growth-ful, what is healthy. There’s a sense of not being able to retain the wisdom that enables one to live in a state that is independent, not only of other people, but of changing conditions.
And of course, the ego is an other, and the bodily vehicle is an other. And so if you want to avoid Other-dependency you also need to be free of either identification with the bodily vehicle, or with any desire to cling to its life, to its existence. Because sovereignty is beyond the illusion of the duality of life and death, and every other duality.
So the Sovereign state, we could say, is also the Liberated state. Sovereignty means freedom, and freedom and independence and full empowerment, the fullness of the Real that is deathless and unborn, uncreated, that realization of That as your true nature, that you live constantly—that’s Jivan Mukti, that’s Sahaja Samadhi—you can give it any name you want—it’s your Buddha Nature, it’s your Christ-Consciousness, the term doesn’t matter because it’s freedom from terminology, it’s freedom from needing to conceptualize who or what you are, because you are inconceivable—and you realize in the highest state of freedom from Other-dependency, that language itself is Other. And the freedom from addiction to language, to thought, to narratives, is what is the final letting go that brings the realization that the world is made of words. Word and world are not other. And so, as Sri Ramana often says, in that state of the final truth, the Ajata Vada, in that state of being unborn, there is no world, there is only I, Aham.
And the apparent duality of subject-object is simply Aham Aham. Self and its own reflection in union, the Unmanifest and the manifest as not different, not other, not anything, but the Mind itself, the Mind of the Real, the Supreme Infinite Intelligent Consciousness, that is what you are, but can only know when you are no longer anchored to a signifier.
Does this make sense? OK, but if you really want sovereignty, then even this doctrine of three natures is a limitation.
