What Is Your Discovery Without Needing Any Tool Whatsoever? - 18th September 2020
Saar (Essence)
Ananta guides the seeker to move beyond intellectual language games and the relative truths of the mind. He points toward a pristine self-discovery that is independent of attention, perception, and all conceptual constructs.
Truth in Vedanta is non-relative; it does not change, come, or go.
Self-knowledge is independent of where attention is; it is a discovery without any tools or effort.
The minute we say attention is on the Self, we have objectified it.
contemplative
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.
Now, and Father, what I also have noticed is this, you know, this disposition and this disposition towards the mind or intellect. You know, like again and again, again and again you try to see the world through that. You know, like what you say, 'don't play in the mental playground.' That example that you give, you know, that intellectual disposition again and again, like you know, you try to see from that point of view or you try to see from that sufferer point of view, you know. So like a habit, like a habit, you know. So that's also invisible.
Try and look at everything through the lens of the intellect, you see, so that it can be assimilated, we feel like, in a digestible way by defining it in certain boundaries and constructs. But the minute I ask you, 'Tell me something which is true,' then, because you've been in Satsang, you will see that you cannot answer that question through the same intellectual box at all. And yet all the representatives are proposing what they are saying is true. So because there is no absolute truth there, because there are always theses and hypotheses, you have anti-thesis for everything. So it can play only into extremes, either this way or that way, or maybe in between, but it cannot play beyond that. And all those spectrums are relative. You can say they are relatively true, but perhaps there is no truth in them. It's just a way of looking at things.
We can never say something is relatively true, you see, at least from the paradigm of speaking that we share in Satsang here. Because if it's relative, it's relative. Because in Advaita Vedanta we define true as non-relative, no? It does not change, it does not come and go. So 'relatively true' is a contradiction in terms. And yet we have to use these terms to communicate and point, but nothing is absolutely relatively true.
Yes, conversationally true maybe we can say.
We use actually many times, I feel like professionally many times I feel that we are very much stuck in the language actually. We have taken the language or the conversational things to be the truth and perhaps that's also causes trouble, you know. Like conversationally we speak, 'I am talking to you' or 'I went there,' and you take the time to be the truth. So you are stuck in the language, in the words.
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Exactly. That is the human condition. Language, language games. Wittgenstein called it language games. We're talking about all the philosophers today because she reminded me about the philosophers. True. But of course, when we ask, 'What do we know right now which is absolutely true?' you know, like what you are sure, 100% sure?
Like right now what I can say, I am not sure of anything, you know. And to the maximum provisional, I can say that I exist. That we are not sure.
True, true, very true. Even to say that 'I am' or 'I exist' is also not sure. I am not sure of that because we don't know what 'exists' is. We don't know here in the mind. We definitely don't know in the mind what 'I' is. But the true 'I' that we see, that cannot be spoken. You cannot put it into... it cannot be spoken. Maybe like you can point to it, but that's also far from it. And that is what is missing in most philosophy, at least that I found: this intuitive insight of the seeing without attention, you see. This discovery which is absent of perception or attention. This discovery of the self-knowledge of the true self-recognition which is independent of all that can come and go. Independent even of attention, which seems to be the light of all perception, isn't it? So we can say that something is perceived when the light of attention is on it, you see, or we can say there is no distinction between perception and attention, you see. But this Self, you see, it doesn't matter where attention is. Attention could be on anything, but self-knowledge is independent of that. And that's why I want to steer this conversation a bit back to this pristine self-discovery. This pristine self-discovery. So what are you able to discover without having to use attention? For all of you, what is your discovery without needing any tool whatsoever? So you don't have to even divest your attention from the phenomena. Trying to bring your attention into the non-phenomenal is an absurd statement anyway, because the minute we say attention is on it, it's objective, no? We've objectified it. So what is your discovery? And all of you can answer on chat or you can raise your hand because this is what I want to talk about or hear from you. What is your discovery which is without any condition, without any tools, without any time, without any effort?
That's the whole point of Satsang, Father. That's the Self what you call.