Sanity is Sovereignty Over the Matrix of Mind

So the topic is Swaraja. Who knows what Swaraja means?

Student answers that it is sovereignty.

It means Self-rule. Sovereignty is the right to Self-rule, it’s not Self-rule. OK? Yes, you must have self-sovereignty, but then it must be activated through Self-rule. Self-rule requires self-control. Very few people have achieved self-control in their lives, let alone the ability to rule over their lives. Most people’s lives are being ruled by their egos. So the question is: Are you in Self-rule or ego-rule?

The ego has no right to rule your life—it’s an illegitimate pseudo entity that has no intelligence of its own, and whatever ideas it has have been borrowed from other egos who were clueless and were not in a state of Self-rule. So if you’re in a state of ego-control then your life is being governed by a very poor decision-making executive power, and it’s a very unwise strategy to leave the ego in control of your life. In the same way that you probably wouldn’t let a five year old drive your car, because the ego, at best, is a five year old—most  of it is a total infant that can’t even reach the brake or the gas pedal—but it doesn’t know what it’s doing and it doesn’t understand reality in a very accurate way, and it cannot resist its impulses—it will do what is not in its own best interests because of the giving in to immediate drives for gratification that will overcome its ability to discern whether it’s such a good idea to do that.

So it’s a very famous cliché, you know: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Famous last words of those who are being controlled by their egos, but we are trained to be in control of the ego because the system is run by egos—this is the problem we have today.

Egos from a technical viewpoint, even within relativistic reality, egos are insane. And this is the difficulty why the psychiatric establishment is every few years having to increase the size of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM, they’re in five or six by now—I don’t keep up anymore, but it gets bigger and bigger, more and more mental illnesses. And of course some of them have been removed because they become so normal you can no longer consider them to be abnormal, you know? And certain abnormalities have such political power that they can remove themselves from any diagnostic manual. So you can buy your way out of it or you can get a sufficient amount of subnormal people to force the establishment to accept normality at a lower and lower level, so the bar has gone pretty low.

But the problems is that because of that relativism there really is no credible authority to determine what is a mental illness anymore, because the people determining it are just as mentally ill as the ones they’re trying to diagnose, because the ego itself, we understand, is a mental illness. It’s an obsolete mental structure that has not been overcome by maturity, because the society does not provide a rite of passage into true adulthood.

And true adulthood, in traditional societies, was always ego death. That’s what it meant! And that’s why you’d go on a vision quest, you’d get a new name, either from a guru who had gone beyond the ego or from God in some vision that you would receive while fasting out in the desert or the jungle, or the mountain top, and be in an altered state of consciousness that hopefully would remain because you were wanting to get possessed by God. And then in that possession you would know who you are.

But if that possession is only temporary—which eventually came to be the case, you know, on certain ceremonial occasions people would rise to that level, or be possessed in drumming ceremonies or other kinds of religious frenzies—but in other kinds of ordinary conditions except for a few shamans there wouldn’t be anyone in God-consciousness in the whole group. So there became a professional class, or a, let’s say, institution, that was to be focused on remaining always in God-consciousness. But then they became corrupted, as we know. How many people would really go to your neighborhood minister or rabbi or lama or mullah to find someone in God-consciousness who would help you recalibrate? You know most people would actually make sure their kid was protected from those people these days—from those people, not by them.

So the situation has become unfixable within the constructs of the society today. In the same way that in politics you may want to drain the swamp of corruption, but can you do that if you yourself are corrupt? You know? Or can you offer change you can believe in if you yourself have not changed from that old paradigm? And the paradigm is to lie, and dumb-downed people in ego-consciousness are supposed to believe the lies! And then the system can continue; or they do believe the lies. But you can’t end corruption, that’s what every politician who tries to run a country uses as their campaign slogan, in one way or another, and they all turn out to be even more corrupt than the last ones. Or they’re shot and eliminated in some other way, or impeached, but they’re not allowed to end the rule of the corrupt ego, it’s too strong.

So we have a system then that is sick, therefore it’s not wise to be well adapted to that system, because it means if you want to fit in you’ve got to be just as sick and mentally ill as they are, or else you’re going to be miserable your whole life. So then the question is, you know: do you have the authorization to go your own way in life? If you are in a state of Swaraja that means you can think for yourself; you’re not a member of the herd. But you can’t just leave the herd by physically going off on another direction—then you become a stray—you don’t become a leader of something new at a higher level of sanity. So this is the problem—you can’t just decide on an ego level that “I don’t like this system, I’m outta here”—because you’ll end up in something worse or doing something worse.

But if you can get to a place of Swaraja where you can think your way out of the paper bags that have put all over your consciousness, then you will be able to think for yourself, literally probably for the first time, because you can think from your Self (with a capital S). And then you can make decisions like every adult should be able to make, but no one reaches real adulthood—they reach biological adulthood of the body but they don’t reach adulthood psychologically anymore. In effect that’s not allowed by the society, this is not meant to be a society of adults anymore, out there.

This one is, yes, and that’s why with very great temerity face the prospect of one day inviting children here—it’s hard enough to raise the inner child but we better have a lot of raised inner children before we invite a lot of outer children here, because who’s going to raise who? You know, so we’ll end up with an intolerable chaos! But we don’t have societies that, anymore, have adults who can then raise people who didn’t become, successfully, adults through the childhood system of raising, because there is none! You know, there is no finishing school any longer, there isn’t even a starting school anymore.

So the situation is very difficult to attain Swaraja, and yet everyone is told, “You should be autonomous, you should think for yourself, don’t listen to other people”—and in general it’s right. Why listen to somebody else when they’re probably as mentally ill as you are! And if you’re mentally ill can you really adequately discern someone who’s not? You know, so that’s why you can get trapped in a situation where you’re following advice of people you think are wise but they turn out not to be, or they turn out to be in part so, but not in other parts. So it becomes essential that you are able to think for yourself, and then the question is: how do you get there? How do you do it? How do you gain a capacity for authentic discernment so that you make accurate decisions? And you can only do that if you have transcended the tendencies to self-distort your perceptions, and to accept distorted ideas and disinformation from external sources. Make sense so far?

So a lot of people make this choice based on tradition, but the traditions no longer function. It used to be that yes, you could follow traditional patterns of dharma, or of behavior, and they would work, they would be sufficient to enable you to lead your life. And there were two essential life-forms that were encouraged: hedonism and asceticism. And for a lot of people that’s it: it’s between one of the two or you alternate between them, after you’ve had your binge and your hangover then, you know, you fast or go on a fruit diet for a while, or do something else, and then you binge again, and you yo-yo back and forth. Or some people are very strict in one way or another—strict in hedonism—you can be strict in that way too and never turn down a feast, a joint, or whatever it is that’s one’s pleasure.

And then there’s this other group created by a philosopher called Epicurus. And I know that Epicurus has become like a dirty word in some religions—I know among the Ashkenazi Jews they pronounce it “Apekoirus”—the worst thing you can be called is an Apekoirus, actually, right, in traditional Shtetl among the Hasidim, or the very Orthodox Jews. Why?

Epicurus was a very interesting philosopher in ancient Greece, and he said you should live totally according to pleasure. OK? So you would think he was in the hedonist category—he should say you should only do what brings maximum pleasure. But in the fine print he added, however: you will soon discover that many pleasures lead to pain. And a pleasure that leads to pain is not truly a pleasure. The pain is what you will be left with, so that when you actually begin to refine your taste for pleasure, and you want a pleasure that never ends and that can’t be topped by anything, it turns out that it’s the state of samadhi, in deep meditation where you transcend ego-mind entirely and you’re in this absolutely blissful state and you don’t want anything.

So Epicurus said if you really observe the results of experimenting with lower forms of pleasure, you’ll discover they’re not really pleasurable, right? He discovered jouissance long before the term was invented, and he recognized that the only pleasures really were the pleasures of meditation. And so, he lived a very meditative and austere life. One would think his life was ascetic, if you read him you’d think he was hedonist, but actually he was a man who could think for himself, and so he empirically rediscovered the wheel of dharma and that the only way to live without suffering was to live, actually, a yogic life.

So then why are the Orthodox Jews going to be so unhappy with this guy? You know, because you know he made the right decisions in the same way you’d think they would have, and their objection was this: he did it out of his own choice, he didn’t do it out of a mitzva, you see. He didn’t do it because God commanded him to live that way, he did it on his own, and therefore he could change his mind. And if he could change his mind then he would again be a demon—you know that’s the way they would argue it in a Talmudic Yeshiva in Eastern Europe.

But the point is that the only way today that you can actually come to a way of life is one that you work out for yourself—not one that I’m trying to convince you of because I’m really not; I want everyone to experiment. But what I say is: take it to the edge. Don’t take it to some irrevocable situation where you may get into some kind of a danger or a commitment or a process that you can’t back out of, you see? So if you take it too far and get some disease or pregnancy or something else, your experiments with jouissance can lead to some very dangerous and unhappy results. But I think that you can’t just whip the horse into giving up its desire for water, and you have to convince it that there are better forms of water out there than scotch or gin or whatever else they were drinking on an ego level.

So this becomes, I think, the only way that one can proceed. But if you’re living in a community those kinds of experiments also have to be very well regulated in accord with a paradigm of at least someone who is not falling apart or crashing, or at least as close enough into a state of Swaraja that you can be guided into knowing when to stop or to change direction, or course-correct, or in some way deal more intelligently with those impulses. But if you try to go cold turkey with a lot of things it isn’t going to work, because you don’t have self-control. So therefore, the highest and most urgent need is to gain self-control through gaining the wisdom and the disidentification from the ego, so that you don’t have to deal with the resistances of an unhappy infant who wants mommy’s milk in some form that has become poison.

So this is I think why having a mentor, a guru, and/or a community of dharma as a structure, during that period in which you are learning to gain self-control and the wisdom of Self-rule and Self-sovereignty, and you do it through the realization that the only sanity is God-consciousness—OK? In the relative world there is no longer any criterion for deciding what is sane and what is insane, because we have a society that itself is insane, and antisocial, and psychopathic. So what God-consciousness must mean is that state of sanity that knows how to make accurate, wise, decisions, that can be objectively determined to be such, and that enable then trust, and growth, and maturation, and discernment, to increase in a community that is in that kind of an energy field, and a frequency, so that people learn to think for themselves, and then don’t require the superstructure any longer, and everything in terms of God-consciousness has been internalized as Self-realization.

Audio File: Sanity is Sovereignty Over the Matrix of Mind – Audio File.MP3