sandananda giri

Here is my translation of a Malayalam article from ‘JANMABHOOMI’ which I thought is worth publishing here :-

Divinity is untouched by thought – by Santhananda Giri

Experience the Absolute Truth in the denial of the ‘I’ awareness. It is all the imagined differences joined together that has perpetuated and maintained the ‘I’ throughout the ages and rebirths. When that is removed the quest as to ‘who am I?’ ends. The doubt as to what is that I see around also ends. Because the apprehension of everything is one single unity; then how can one see a second? To evaluate what you see and to elaborate it, the mind is ever ready; but where the mind has vacated what elaboration can exist? Unity is where no two things exist for comparison. Everything ideologically or conceptually habituated end there. Before the existence of One Truth nothing second remains to be talked about. That is the joy of divinity.
Right, wrong, good, bad, blessing, sin, duty, idling, etc. or the interpretation of language to conceptualize the meaning of a thing and its shape, its memory and experience, nothing of these are there in divine experience. Divinity is untouched by thought.
Our decision on any subject is always likely to be wrong. That is because, what we know is about a thing or subject that changes. On things that we know, we decide that it is such and such, but it should have been so and so, that it is beautiful or ugly, and that it is useful or useless etc. They are all ideas that get changed. Life and death are just two concepts. And soul is divine experience. It is very difficult to understand. If life is the continuance of the present, death is an interval. Again it has to continue. The entity that remains throughout the changing experiences is the Truth.
Our conclusions about a subject are most likely to be wrong. Because, what we know are about changing things. And on those changing things we decide what we know as beautiful, ugly, good, bad, useful, useless, essential, unnecessary etc.etc. The ideas are all subject to change. Life and death are just two ideas. And Atma is an experience. It is difficult to understand this. If life is a continuation of the present, its stand-still interval is death. It has no alternative but to repeat itself. That which continues through all these changes of experiences is The Truth. That is the essence of divinity. It is to that entity that has no birth or death. It is beyond time. It is not something that has come into being. Therefore it has no death. Only when one goes beyond the mind it will get revealed. There is neither space nor time there. Therefore God does not engage himself in the work of completing your imaginary aspirations of the future. What is the role of God in life? It exists ever luminous throughout, at the root of all, enlightening everything and every experience, omnipresent, while you conceive and execute every action of yours. Once you understand that God does not undertake the work of making changes in the day to day transactions in the life of man as per man’s wishes, you will not feel cheated.
The reason for all tragedies, all untoward happenings and all sorrows is because of seeing things through the narrow gap of the senses and mind constricted by the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’. Once you know the basics of ‘I’, all problems end. The first thing to understand is that the experiences of the senses are not truth. And firmly establish in your mind that the world around you is not as you see around.
Athma is essentially in the nature of bliss. Therefore whatever you understand in Atma is blissful. Bliss is right. All else is wrong. When does a thing create sorrow? It is when you separate what you see through names and boundaries and considering them as different from you that something becomes the cause for sorrow. Know that all experiences are within yourself. Without the presence of Atma nothing exists here. To know anything ever there must be first a person to know. While knowing as well as after knowing he is there. Therefore without the presence of an ‘I’ it is not possible to know or experience this world. Before experiencing the world there is no sound. Where all the sounds terminate there is the real form. Atma in the form of knowledge is the self; that is the fact and all else is false. There is no ‘knowing’ there. What one knows is of things imagined or conceived in one’s mind due to ignorance. One who knows that what is known in imagination when the energy of Grace is reflected and present, is different from Atma, is the greatest among the spiritual masters. There is no doubt about that. See the world bereft of conceptual imaginations. Don’t doubt whether that is possible. To see our body we do not need imagination, is it not so? Like that see all bodies. That is the way or trick to experience ultimately the divinity in its entirety. In all that you consider as universe, you can experience the essence of divinity. ‘All this in its entirety is divinity of God!’ “Isavasya midam sarvam”, understanding that should be without the interference of the mind.
The duality perceptions of one who sinks into the depths of his visions in the heart gets annihilated. When sights are annihilated the ‘se-er’ is left. The illumination and brightness of the seer is not imaginary or a guess-work. That is Truth. You cannot take it and present it to somebody as you give a physical object. It is not possible to take is as something that can be argued about and won over. It is beyond words. The Atma entity cannot be shown by any demonstration. Those who say that they can show God is misleading you. A real Guru is one who shows you that ‘God Is’ behind the process of your seeing. Not the one who undertakes to save you in the name of God and cheats you.
Words, mind and intellect have no reach there. Then how can it be shared? How can it be shown? There is no other way but to sink into one’s own self. Existence is infinite. Everywhere it is complete. Therefore by perceptions in depth inside it does not become non-existent there. That is how its ‘is-ness’ is to be experienced.
Dry leaf has no individuality in the wind; likewise fly for the sake of Truth in complete renunciation. In that you surrender everything. Let detachment come with a passion. This Absolute Truth is not far off. It is because of burying one’s heart in darkness without appreciating the greatness of human life that we fail to know it. Keeping the mind silent turn your attention towards its depth. It is there, for sure.

I AND MY BOREDOM

I and my boredom
Who am I?
Of course, I am surely the entity that feels the pain when this body is pinched.
No doubt about that. Is that your body that feels the pain or the mind behind it?
The body feels the pain and the mind recognises it.
Then who are you?
The body-mind-complex, or the body-mind system as a whole.
But what is the mind?
Running thoughts, memory, and memory retrieval mechanism (and the running commentator?) constitute the mind.
What about the sense organs and attention? Are they not part of the mind?
No, sense organs just feed the attention at the moment, and the memory storage. Attention seems to be focussed awareness, a part of the vast awareness that powers everything.
Then where comes the feeling of ‘I’ or the ‘ego’ as it is referred to?
‘I’ seems to be a mental construction of an image from various memory factors for purposes of identity, self perceived security, and self importance.
In this set up, who is bored? The body cannot be bored. There is no reason for the memory, or running thoughts to be bored. Awareness, while supplying power, is a passive witness, never bothered about boredom. Then who gets bored?
The mental construction that is ego, who is selfish and wants some pleasure all the time, coaxes the attention to jump from one thing to the other searching for pleasure or at least some engagement of the attention so that it can ride on it and enjoy. Otherwise it is afraid that it will be burdened with suppressed fears, discomforts or aches of the body highlighted, and other unpleasant experiences. That could be the only reason to be bored. It is this ego, a fictitious element that is getting bored.
There is that great saying Tat Twam Asi ‘that thou art’. What is ‘that’ and what is ‘thou’? ‘that’ seems to refer to the Ultimate reality, and ‘thou’ to ‘you’. How can the ultimate reality be the miserable ’you’?
'THAT', of course, refers to the Ultimate Reality, which is the same entity as the Pure Awareness that powers man including his universe. Or it could be what is virtually beyond and behind the Awareness in the quantum domain. There is no way of knowing.
And ‘thou’ here does not refer to the miserable ‘you’ or the ego. It refers to the entity that is beyond and behind the body-mind complex, powering it as well as everything else. It cannot be ‘you’ in the sense that the limited ego or ‘I- feeling’ cannot be the vast immeasurable Infinity that is the ultimate reality. The profound statement if thus interpreted would seem to be nothing but a tautology saying ‘ultimate reality is ultimate reality’. It may look absurd, but It means that the ultimate principle of the universe is the same as the ultimate reality lying within you. That is to say that you need not look elsewhere to find the Truth but within yourself.