Are You A Penguin?

Where will you go that you’re not free? Try to go to the mind.

So, if you bought a story that you’re a penguin, would you become one?

You would feel like or imagine yourself to be, or it would seem like you are a penguin. But does that make it so?

So, can our bondage ever be so? Because in our mind we will only get ideas, and it is not an idea that makes What Is What Is. What Is is independent of ideas. Even if this simple thing you hear in today’s Satsang, that’s all that’s needed. What Is is not dependent on ideas. What Is just Is. All ideas are only proposals for It to conclude Itself to be something, which It can never be.

Why is there anything? You tell me one why, I will tell you this why. [Chuckles]. So, there is no such thing as ‘Why’. Like, ‘Why not’. [Chuckles]. There should be, huh? [Chuckles] Yes, all the struggle is that — that we know something that we think we are right about. Especially, the spiritual seeker is also filled with a lot of constrictive ideas while taking them to be big ideas. All our ideas limit us. That’s why it’s so beautifully said in Ribhu Gita, ‘Don’t even buy into the duality of the notion, “I am Brahman”.’ Now, ‘I Am Brahman’ is the highest idea in Vedanta.

Yes. Do you go around asserting the truth? In the sense that have you ever met anyone that says, ‘I have a mouth’? Because in that assertion is included the possibility that you may not have had one, or there is the possibility that you are not. So even in the assertion, ‘I Am Brahman’, we are opening ourselves to the possibility that it could be otherwise. That is the only reason that the assertion is needed. Nobody is saying, I am breathing air. Nobody is saying, I have a nose. Nobody is saying, I’m looking through my eyes. So, all assertions somewhere contain the possibility of their opposite. That’s why the assertions are needed. And our idea of Brahman — whatever the term we use, ‘Absolute’, ‘Brahman’, ‘the Self’ — as long as it stays in the realm of idea, it still represents something to us. Some of us might make a visual of some dark empty space and say that is Brahman. Some of us might have some other idea of it. But that which cannot be captured in any idea is your Reality. Not even in the idea ‘Your Reality’. [Makes air quotes) ‘What to do then?’

You must answer it now. You asked a question, ‘Is bondage just an illusion?’ What do you mean by illusion? [Silence] Shankara said, maya [illusion] both is and isn’t. So, same for anything that we consider to be something. As long as you consider it to be something, it seems like it is something. I was saying the other day that your belief in maya is maya. What can bind you, what do you have to be, to be bound?

Are you? [Silence] Then is it real or illusion? Illusion. But the tears are telling me that it can seem real. [Both Sangha being and Ananta laugh] This is the thing. So, then we can say both is and isn’t.

Who’s hanging? Who’s left hanging? Poor thing, we’ll go rescue that one, where is she? Even your phenomenal representation, which is this body, is sitting comfortably on the couch. Who’s the one hanging? This one is the tricky one, because this one can suffer even in the most comfortable physical circumstances. This is the trouble. That it is not even the body. We think that the trouble is coming because we think ‘I am the body’. The body could be fine, it could be sitting on a couch, but you might still be suffering because you have a representation of yourself which uses this body as a central anchor in a way, but what you believe about yourself is like, the owner of the body, the owner of our relationships, the owner of our materialistic objects. But that we don’t even imagine. We can say it is imagined, but it is not even imagined. So, this one is a good example. Let’s pause here because this is a very good point here, got very simply. She says, ‘But I am left hanging’. All of you have felt that at some point or the other, but you were not hanging at that point, even your body was not hanging at that point, so what are we referring to? Who is this allegiance to? Who is this one? We say it is body-consciousness, body identity, but body is sitting, as far as I see it’s quite comfortable. So who is the one hanging?

Even that, do we have a proper representation of it? Like if I say, ‘Imagine yourself to be an orange or a goat or a penguin’, you will have a representation of it, like the colour, the shape, the smell, all of that. But this ‘me’ we don’t even have a good representation of this.

Yes, we use that, we use that and yet we don’t find it contradictory that when we are sitting somewhere on a couch, we are saying, ‘But I’m left hanging.’

But then what did she mean, that is what we are asking.

So, this person, that is what I’m saying, do we have a good representation of even this one? Like, we may imagine yourself to be a penguin. You may say, doodling around, black and white in colour, you see, like that. Now, person?