Let’s be brutally honest here – most of us take ourselves to be just this body and mind. We communicate, express and build relationships through the instrument of this body-mind and therefore it’s natural that we think we are this body mind, that we make it as our only reality, and remain identified with it until death.
But then there are those, intellectually more aware beings, who can sense or intuit a certain Self-reality beyond (or at the background of) this body-mind. It all begins by observing or witnessing how this body and mind operate in a certain way or in accordance with tendency.
On close observation, it is noticed that our body-mind is habitually inclined towards only two things :
1) Desiring objects to experience self-fulfillment, and
2) Indulging in worries to experience tension
Go through just 1 day of your life and you will see that this is exactly what you are doing. Desiring and worrying, often needlessly. And we are doing this over and over again. It’s the in-built mechanism of this body-mind to expand (by desiring) and to contract (by worrying).
This contrasting nature of our body-mind is what creates suffering in us because we like the feeling of expansion that desires bring while we strongly dislike contraction/tension that worries bring.
Religion/spirituality has tried to resolve this by advocating a path of desirelessness and fearlessness. In reality however, we can’t just “will” ourselves to be desireless and fearless since these are in our DNA. We were born out of lust (of our parents) and born into fear (to survive in this world). Both of these tendencies (desire and fear) are therefore etched deeply into our DNA.
Hence trying to project oneself as being desireless and fearless is nothing other than hypocrisy. Yet we continue to look for clergies (of all religion) and spiritual leaders (of different traditions) who could somehow match this unrealistic criteria so that we could put them on a pedestral, probably to compensate for our own weaknesses, fears or guilts – only to discover later (in most cases) that it too was only an deception when a “scam” is unearthed.
The illusion around the “higher being” breaks followed by anger, hatred, disgust and name-calling unleashed on him. But in all honesty, the actual scam was never about lust or desire or being fearful. Instead, it’s in the falseness and false expectation that are projected onto being “religious” or “spiritual.”
In reality, there is no such thing as a higher being since body/mind are bound by the laws of nature to a large extent. There are only aware beings and unaware beings and our level of freedom and bondage is based upon our awareness and lack of awareness thereof.
Freedom is not about taking a position opposite to the ego. It may in fact even be in total allowance of the patterns of the ego, yet remain untouched by the urges of the body-mind due to diligent abidance and identification with the immortal/immutable background witnesser.
The cage can remain while the bird is free to fly in the open sky.
~ Rajiv Kapur
