Tuesday, November 02, 2010

The Mirror Forgets - excerpt two

From The Talks of Upasni-Baba Maharaj
Volume II
Part B
Pages 692 - 693

This excerpt continues from the previous post. I believe that the word sanskaras needs some clarification. Both Meher Baba and Upasni Maharaj are very consistent with the meaning of this term. As the soul, through its agents the physical, subtle and mental bodies, acts and experiences for the sake of gaining that consciousness required to ultimately experience itself, i.e. that pure, celestial, eternal, original clear state, that consciousness gets impressed by the actions of its own bodies. These impressions (sanskaras) are like dust which covers the mirror of consciousness, thus hiding the reality of the soul’s original, pure, unsullied state. All the great forms of yoga, i.e. Karma (the yoga of action), Dnyan (the yoga of knowledge), Bhakti (the yoga of devotion), and Raj (the yoga of concentration), offer various practical ways of transmuting, transcending, or wiping away the sanskaras (the dust) that cover the mirror of consciousness.
On a more mundane level, the word
Ahamkara is consistently misspelled in this excerpt as Ahankara. I have changed it back for the sake of correctness and consistency.


With that reflected mass, the mirror forgets its original clear state, and assumes itself to be that reflected mass; in the same way, we also begin to identify ourselves with all those Jivas that associate with ourselves. That is why we do not remember our original state, nor are we able to experience it. It means this body of ours is not really one’s own but a place to accommodate all others related to us. In other words, our body and mind are nothing but a storehouse to accommodate all the good and bad relatives and associates, the friends and foes, various desires with their objects and the corresponding Ahamkaras pertaining to them.
All these things within, as they inter-react, naturally give rise to various shades of Ahamkaras, and according to their nature we are bound to act in different ways resulting in a variety of pleasure and pain to our own Jiva. All those Jivas that have flocked into our being, as time passes, try to entrench themselves firmly within ourselves. It is this stability won by them that is interpreted as the stable sanskaras of our own Jiva.

1 Comments:

Anonymous keysunset said...

I'm sort of lost in this excerpt, so I try to relate it to something I can understand.

In my faith practices, the more I spend time allowing interaction, and relationship, with God, the easier and more fulfilling the interaction becomes. Jesus prayed that we would all be one, and so God wants us to be one -- with each other and with Him. If He so wants it, more so than I can ever want it, then allowing that time for God brings me closer to Him and hopefully closer in aligning my wants and desires with His.

Only when you really spend time with someone in relationship, do you truly get to know them, maybe that is also true of getting to know or find yourself in the life journey.

6:57 PM  

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