Passage meditation and Upanishads open up a whole vista of knowledge and words of wisdom and while I have picked up these words from a passage called Razor's Edge from the Katha Upanishad. It is indeed a very loaded sentence depicting the burning of the ego which is the cause of all the misery we face as the ignorant limited humans existing.The Upanishads have been a repository of wisdom and this verse is beautiful and worth sharing. The verse is quoted below for us to fathom its true meaning and import.
In the secret cave of the heart, two are
Seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego
Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,
Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,
While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter
Neither liking this nor disliking that.
The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self
Lives in light. So declare the illumined sages,
And the householders who worship
The sacred fire in the name of the Lord.
May we light the fire of Nachiketa
That burns out the ego, and enables us
To pass from fearful fragmentation
To fearless fullness in the changeless Whole.
Egocentric life leads to Fearful Fragmentation
I will try my best to interpret and understand this verse and the phrase in the context of the ego. There is a small i which is the small self as we know ourselves in this world. In my day to day mundane existence I am a human being, born to a family of Parsi parents, middle class upbringing father a lawyer and a past district magistrate, mother a homemaker educated who wanted to be a doctor but trained herself and became a teacher. I was a member of the religious minority Parsi community. Like the herd who tread the beaten path, I became a good student then like all attended college became a doctor and Orthopedic surgeon. All this and some more forged an identity with which i became attached and intertwined. This attachment is the most important component of my existence and so important it became that any deviation from it caused a problem. The dualities of life swung me like a pendulum from one extreme to another. So when I got what I wanted I was overjoyed and when I lost something I possessed I was struck with grief. I was bombarded with sense objects which dazzled me and made me so attached to them that I became obsessed by getting pleasure and pain, victory and defeat, profit and loss. While this description of mine is not entirely accurate, it reflects a good part of my existence and without becoming judgemental maybe how a majority of us exist. A disclaimer: Any reader may disagree and say he is otherwise. So a life based on identification with the body mind apparatus leads to an existence which is full of a constant insatiable desire to acquire what they do not possess and an unexplained fear of losing what they possess. This is called the ladder of Fall because of fearful fragmented lives. As with an individual so with families, relationships, communities, genders, countries all of them are part of this fragmentation on account of pandering to the ego. As children we cling to our toys and trinkets as though our life depends on it. Then as teenagers we become infatuated with attractions of the body and our hormones make us obsessed with physical relationships so the phrase goes we fall in love. Then we chase wealth and with it name, fame and popularity. Finally then we worry about the past and our anxious about the future of our loved ones. Life remains a fragmented bundle of contradictions enveloped by fear leading to the now common slang FOMO (Fear of missing out). Is there a way out? We need to gradually progress from fearful fragmentation to fearless fullness.
Fearless Fullness comes from practicing Jnana yoga Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga
If there is one single verse which talks of fearless fullness it is the first verse of the Isa Upanishad. It goes as follows.
The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all.
The Lord is the supreme reality.Rejoice in him through renunciation.Covet nothing. All belongs to the Lord.Thus working may you live a hundred years.Thus alone can you work in full freedom.
Our father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi who I revere believed that this one verse encompasses all that needs to be known in this world to attain freedom from the fearful fragmentation that affects all of us. which I think creates a perspective where the realization of the true permanent consciousness changes Once we know that the Lord, Self, Brahman, Aatman, Soul,Truth all synonymous words we come to know that underlying all these fragmentation there is one fullness. So there is an elegant way to understand this as we think of the world as we see it today. We live our daily lives broadly in three states of consciousness and they are the waking, dream and deep sleep states. Then, the individual operates through the four functions of mind which are called manas (mind with memory), Chitta (mind without memory) ahamkara or ego, and buddhi or intelligence. Those four operate through the five vayus (prana, apana, samana, udana, and vyana) translated as breath in, breath out, digestion, energy of head neck and circulation. The five action organs or indriyas (karmendriyas of eliminating, procreating, moving, grasping, and speaking), and the five cognitive senses (jnanendriyas of smelling, tasting, seeing, touching, and hearing). All of these are present in our waking state and equally present in our dream state and in each of these states we accept them as our true fragmented existences. In the deep sleep state too we are unaware of these 19 aspects of consciousness but they seem to exist. In the universe the elements of earth, water, fire, air and space represent the manifest consciousness. These are progressive from gross to the subtle to the causal as from earth to space and from waking to dreaming to deep sleep. But underlying all these is the Self the reality of the single Self which is Full. Now the problem that all these are the manifestations of the universe which are temporary and therefore false. When we realise this we progress from fearful fragmentation to fearless fullness and our every action is then done with this awareness. This does not happen all the time but we need to go on at it and living with consciousness means living in this world and acting without attachment. This is gradually progressing from the selfish egocentric actions which are purely for fulfilling desires to unselfish actions for the welfare of those around us to finally actions for the welfare of the universe which are classifies as selfless actions. A simple touchstone for this is based on an answer to the question. Is my action ethical? Does it seem to follow one's swadharma? The second question is Is my action directed towards sustaining the earth and the environment? And the last question to ponder is about how the action performed is contributing to progress from fearful fragmentation to fearless fullness and consequently empowering me to reach my goal in life which is Self Realisation.
Changeless Whole comes from Self Realisation
The stage when we realize that there is only one Self the underlying source and substance of creation which subsumes everything manifest, unmanifest gross, subtle and causal. Are we ready for this and is Self realization possible or is it an illusion? If you ask me I do not know for sure as I feel there are people who are inspirational who seem to live wholesome lives dedicated to serve all of humanity and even the universe and who fulfill the description of Sat Chitta Ananda (existence, consciousness and bliss). However, many of them still are not completely free and when I look back at the description of the last 19 verses of chapter 2 of the Gita of a Sthita pragnya it seems that such persons are very tough to find indeed.
The journey is slow and steady and even though I am painfully aware of my limitations I will be trying to reach that goal and reduce the quantum of fearful fragmentation and increasing fearless fullness and to realize the changeless whole.
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