Dharmasār—Essentials of Essence of Dharma

Namaste, and thank you for being with us for another episode of Ulladu-Narpadu! Today we’re going to look into verse three – this is when it really starts to get good! [laughs]

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Everybody is looking for something. All our activities, all our desires, all our hopes and dreams, our thoughts, our plans, etc. are based on this universal impetus towards Self-realization. We may know it, or we may not know it, it doesn’t make any difference – we can’t stop, until we attain it. Suffering is the goad. In Vedic culture there’s one mudra, Aṅkūṣa-mudra, which is like this... No, I’m not giving you the finger! [laughs] It’s very indicative of an elephant driver’s goad, which is a pole with a sharp end, that he uses to get the elephant to move, sort of like spurs on a horse rider. So, because of this goad of suffering, or ambition, desire, we can’t stop, we can’t help ourselves. We have to act, we have to move, we have to do something to better our condition. As long as we have a condition [laughs], as long as we are conditioned. [laughs]

So, let’s look into this verse a little deeper. First he said, “What use is it to debate?” My level of realization, my level of insight, my level of consciousness is going to be different from yours and from everybody else. We’re all unique individuals, we see things in our own ways. What use is it to debate? Are we really going to change anybody else’s minds? The only way we can force someone to do things is by coercion, by some kind of force, and of course that immediately rules out any change in consciousness, or any change in outlook. So the master teachers of the world have never used force, the greatest teachers.

Now, at a lower level of religious teaching there are moral principles, and rewards and punishments, to get people to do, or believe, certain things. But these are inferior. Why? Because they use force and coercion. Rather than allowing a person to work on themselves, and giving them methods by which they can get deeper insights, the religions try to set a code of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad, and force people to fit it. This is the Procrustean bed of morality. [chuckles] Procrustes was an ancient king, and he had this bed, and you had to fit in the bed, and if you were too long, he would chop things off until you were short enough, and if you were too short, he would stretch you until you would fit! Either way, it wasn’t a very nice, pleasant stay... [chuckles] And the same is true of morality: morality, manmade laws... They say they come from God, but come on! It’s really from our tastes. And my taste is different from your taste, which is different from everybody else’s! Because we’re all unique, we’re all individual, we’re all at a particular stage of advancement in our march toward Self-realization.

Namaste 🙏 and welcome again to our series on Ulladu-Narpadu – 40 Verses on Reality by Śrī Ramana Maharshi. Today we’re going to look at verse number two, which is very interesting. [chuckles]

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This is another wonderful verse – well, they’re all wonderful [laughs], what can I say! But the last time we talked about the world, and the unreality of the world, because the world is impermanent, and it doesn’t have real existence; its existence is only derivative of some prior cause, and because of this it can’t be accepted as absolutely real. Nevertheless, most people see the world as the world, they see it as permanent and real. And why is that? Well, because the nature of the seer is similar to the nature of the seen. In other words, if the world is illusory, if it’s just temporary and relative and so on, then what kind of being does it require to see that unreality as real? See what I’m getting at?

The ego, or what most people accept as their self, is just an unreal as the world! [laughs] And it has to be that way, it has to be, because only an unreal seer would see an unreal world as being real. But these are the triad, the inescapable result of being in illusion, or being attached to illusory being, being in the world. One of our first video series way back, five years ago or so, was called Being in the World, and it goes into this from the standpoint of existentialism. Now, existentialism is very interesting, because it’s based on experience, phenomenology, or observation of one’s own experience. And this is very close to the principle of meditation advocated by Ramana, to look into one’s own self, one’s own consciousness, and say, “Where does this ‘I’ arise from? Where does this ‘mine’, where do these thoughts come from? Where do they originate?” and by looking into that one thought “I am”, one can transcend it.

But what you see when you first look at the self, you think “Oh, this is me! This is I, Mister So-and-so, and I have this designation on my job, or in my community. I am a this, I am a that. [laughs] I am somebody’s husband, or somebody’s wife, or somebody’s girlfriend or boyfriend, I am the owner of this property and that car and this thing and that thing,” isn’t it? That’s how we think when we’re naive, when we don’t know anything about spiritual life, or the philosophy of reality. But the more we look into this, the more we meditate on this “I am. I am this, I am that, I am so-and-so, I am such-and-such,” we start to see that this is actually just an illusion. It’s actually just words, and we’re attached to those words, and we think those words are real – in other words, that words are things, or that symbols are reality.

Namaste 🙏 and welcome to the next episode of Ulladu-Narpadu, and here’s where we start the actual 40 verses that are the body of the work, so let’s just jump right into it!

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So, basically, Awareness is everything. Now, what’s going on here in this verse is that Ramana is accepting the fact that most people perceive the world as real, and he’s starting from that point. So, let’s say we are in the world [laughs], and perceiving it as real as such, perceiving the world as real in itself. So, naturally this brings up the question: where did all this come from? I mean, look at all this stuff, this incredible variety of phenomena!

Well, first we have to understand that the world in and of itself is not real. Why do I say that? Because the highest standard of reality is that something exists eternally, both in the past and the future, and without change, isn’t it? If something comes into existence at a certain point in time, then for sure it’s going to go out of existence again, so it’s not fully real. And also, if something changes – I mean, beyond coming and going [chuckles] – if it changes in the middle, it’s also not fully real. Only that which is changeless and eternal is real enough to serve as the first cause, or the Lord, the Creator, the source of everything. In other words, as long as we accept the existence of the world, as long as we accept the existence of myself as an ego, being in the world, and an identity which is derived from the world, then we have to accept that there is something higher. Because the existence of this world, and all the phenomena in it, including ourselves, is only relative. In other words, it’s temporary and changeable, isn’t it?

I think it was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said, “You cannot step in the same river twice.” What does he mean by that? That between one step and the next step the river has flowed so much downstream, and so that river is gone, and now there’s a different river there – the river has changed. This world changes constantly. I mean, just look at what science has revealed about matter: matter is nothing but a conglomeration of atoms and subatomic particles that are vibrating at some incredible frequency! Changing, constantly changing, vibrating, moving, going in and out of different quantum states; in some cases going in and out of existence, on subatomic, micro timescales. So, what’s with that? [laughs] Even this planet, even the Sun, or the galaxy in which we live came into existence at a certain point, went through lots and lots of changes, and at some point in time it’s going to disappear.

Namaste 🙏  and welcome to another episode of Ulladu-Narpadu. Now, Ulladu-Narpadu, as I said last time, was not planned, it doesn’t have an intentional structure. The structure came afterwards, after all the verses were collated and collected together and put in order. Even though that’s a fact, still Ulladu-Narpadu is one of the definitive works on the philosophy and the outlook of Śrī Ramana, and the reason that’s so, or the reason that it’s possible is that a sage does not live in time; a sage lives in eternity, in consciousness, in silence. Not in an ego, but lives as the Supreme, as Brahman. In other words, he is not limited by ordinary linear time, it’s not something that conditions him the way it does an unrealized being. With that little introduction, let me read the second verse of the Preface:

“Those who have an infinite fear of death

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This highlights a very important theme in Ramana’s teaching, which is that death is a thought. See, time is a construct of our minds, and whatever exists in time has a beginning and an end. This is unavoidable. Whatever is born must also die, that is the law. And it is so because of the three phases of time: past, present, and future. These are all just thoughts, they only exist in the mind; they don’t really exist. And to the Absolute, to the Supreme, to the Lord, certainly past, present, and future are illusory. There only is what is, and what is is Him. [laughs] And what he is is awareness, as we discussed last time.

So, to awareness there is no birth, there is no time, there is no death, there are no conditions. I like the way the Ribhu-gita explains it, that Brahman, or the Self, is a solid chunk of consciousness or awareness, a solid block of awareness. If you can imagine a solid block of awareness, there is no inside, no outside, no object, no subject: the only thing to be aware of is awareness. This is the Absolute, this is the ground of being, this is the Supreme, this is the Lord, Brahman.

Namaste 🙏 Hello, and welcome to our new series on Ulladu-Narpadu. Ulladu-Narpadu means “40 Verses on Reality”, and these are verses that were written by Bhagavān Rāmana over a period of several years apparently, and later on collated into a book, and arranged in sections according to their topics. So in other words, it was never intended to be an anthology or a philosophical work in itself; it was simply verses that occurred spontaneously to Rāmana, and then he wrote them down, and they were collected later. So it does have that weakness that it’s not all one piece, it wasn’t conceived as a comprehensive work on philosophy or on Rāmana’s viewpoints, but it just kind of happened. We’re going to be going through this because it is considered one of the seminal works on Rāmana’s views, and it really does have a lot of good stuff in it. So, rather than try to introduce it any further, I’m going to jump right into the prefatory verses:

“Without awareness of Reality, can Reality exist?

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“Further, Ānanda, the monk—not attending to the perception of the dimension of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness based on the themeless concentration of awareness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its themeless concentration of awareness.

“He discerns that ‘This themeless concentration of awareness is fabricated & mentally fashioned.’ And he discerns that ‘Whatever is fabricated & mentally fashioned is inconstant & subject to cessation.’ Thus knowing, thus seeing, his heart is released from the effluent of sensuality, the effluent of becoming, the effluent of ignorance. With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world’.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

Namaste. So, this is Enlightenment. Complete, pure, and final. This is the thing toward which we have been striving and progressing for many, many lifetimes, and this is how the Buddha attained it himself. So, immediately after this, then he spoke the verse:

etaṃ santaṃ, etaṃ panītaṃ,

“This is peaceful, this is excellent: the stilling of all fabrications; the

You see, but it’s not like he was sitting there trying to stop the sankhārā. Rather, he was concentrating on these progressively more and more subtle layers of emptiness.

Some people wrongly accuse the Buddha of being a śuññyāvādī as it’s called, śuññyāvādī means that ‘emptiness is the truth.’ But if emptiness was the truth, he wouldn’t say that “these states of concentration are fabricated and mentally fashioned.” Because the truth is not fabricated, the truth is not mentally fashioned; the truth is the truth, and it’s always the truth.

Namaste. So now, if you’ve been following this series—which I hope you have, because you’ll need the background to understand these last couple of episodes—we’re going to talk about the stage beyond neither-perception-nor-non-perception, and the Buddha calls this themeless concentration:

“Further, Ānanda, the monk—not attending to the perception of the dimension of nothingness, not attending to the perception of the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception—attends to the singleness based on the themeless concentration of awareness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its themeless concentration of awareness.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

This is beautiful, this is potent. This is the very, very next stage to full Enlightenment. Why? For the first time he says “concentration of awareness”. We’re not dealing anymore with concentration of consciousness, whether our consciousness is on earth or space or nothingness or emptiness or whatever. For the first time we’re dealing with pure awareness. This is a very significant thing. Why? Because consciousness always has an object. Consciousness is a stick with two ends.

Here’s the stick: on one end you have awareness; on the other end you have the object of awareness. So this is duality, because you have two ends: one is the cause, and one is the effect. But it doesn’t matter at this point, because the only thing that’s significant now is that the stick has two ends. And what do you find in the middle? ‘I’ [laughs], my self: “I am conscious of this.” And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s something with form, like a village or wilderness or earth, or something formless, like space, nothingness, emptiness, like that—it doesn’t matter. There is still the question of who is conscious of this? And that who, of course the answer is always ‘I’: “I am conscious.” [laughs] But we know that ‘I’ is something dependently arisen. In fact, consciousness is dependently arisen. It depends on what? Sankhārā, and sankhārā depend on ignorance—there’s a cute little bird outside my window, he’s only about this long. [laughs]

Anyway, consciousness depends on sankhārā, sankhārā depend on ignorance. But what does ignorance depend on? Awareness. Without awareness there is nothing else. The thing about awareness is, awareness is only aware of itself, it has no object. Or another way to say it is, that the object of awareness is awareness itself. So this is the perfect stage, this is Nibbāna itself. This is the aim, this is the goal, this is what we’ve been working toward step-by-step.

Namaste. Welcome to the next-to-last episode of our series on Emptiness, where we’re going to talk about neither-perception-nor-non-perception.

“Further, Ānanda, the monk—not attending to the perception of the dimension of the infinity of consciousness, not attending to the perception of the dimension of nothingness—attends to the singleness based on the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in the dimension of neither-perception-nor-non-perception.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

What does this mean? Well, you should try it and find out! See, nothingness is different from space. I think I have to point this out, because we got a couple of comments from people who are a little mixed up about this, that space still offers a context for becoming. Because space is actually space-time, as we know from Einstein, and space-time allows for movement, change, and therefore becoming, being and so on, which leads to suffering. But nothingness has no dimensions, it has no measurement, therefore it has no time, therefore no change, and therefore no becoming. So there is no becoming, no being in nothingness.

So then the question arises “Well, how do I know whether I’m conscious or not?” [laughs] “If I’m concentrating on nothingness, if I have removed all other perceptions, and I’m just concentrating on the singleness of nothingness, how do I know that I’m perceiving anything?” and of course the answer is, you don’t. [laughs] It’s neither-non-perception-nor-perception, because there’s nothing to perceive. This nothingness, this is really the emptiness that we’ve been talking about, the emptiness where there is no opportunity for anything to exist. You see, existence has a beginning, a middle and an end, therefore it’s suffering. All perceptions are suffering, because they have a beginning, a middle and an end.

So, if we want to be completely free from suffering, we have to go into nothingness so that there’s nothing to perceive. But then how do we know whether we’re perceptive or not? How do we know if we’re conscious or not? Well, we don’t. And the thing is that this gives us, or simulates, the conditions involved in complete merging with Brahman.

Namaste. So, we’re going to continue with the sutta on emptiness, and this time we’re going to talk about nothingness.

“Further, Ānanda, the monk – not attending to the perception of the dimension of the infinity of space, not attending to the perception of the dimension of the infinity of consciousness – attends to the singleness based on the perception of the dimension of nothingness. His mind takes pleasure, finds satisfaction, settles, & indulges in its perception of the dimension of nothingness.”—Cūḷa Suññatā Sutta

So, we see that this sutta describes a series of contemplations, and each step is more subtle than the last, each step is more peaceful than the last. This is called tranquility meditation, ~samaṇa, samaṇa jhana~. What this means is that the mind is becoming progressively quieter, more settled, and deeper in a trance of quietude, silence, non-action, and certainly non-identification, non-projection – so many things. See, the Buddha’s process is a negative process, it consists in leaving off so many things that we normally keep active. Like a juggler, with so many balls in the air, our minds are always throwing thoughts around, and projecting different... Well, the word the Buddha uses is conceits. A conceit is a conception, but it’s a particular kind of conception designed to reinforce the ego. Now, the ego is an expression of individuality, but individuality doesn’t really exist. [chuckles]

Namaste. In our last episode we talked about infinite space. And what is space, really? Space is the complement of matter, it’s the reciprocal of objects. We talked about a bowl, and how the space inside the bowl and outside the bowl are identical, and also how the space inside and outside the bowl traces exactly the opposite of the shape of the bowl.

So space is the reciprocal of matter. And what is it about matter? [chuckles] Matter is always limited. Matter always has a beginning and an end, in space as well as time. And when we talk about space, it includes time. Because space has dimension, it has extent, measurement. So as soon as you have dimension, you have a possibility of motion, and motion of course makes it possible to change. Change is how we measure time. So there is no such thing as ‘just space’. There is space-time, and this is because of the possibility of space giving rise to measurement.

But there’s another thing about space that’s very important here. Matter is limited; it always has a beginning and an end, but space has no beginning or end. Unlimited space, infinite space means just that, no limits, no end to it. But since matter is always limited, that means there is much, much more space than there is matter. Even the whole cosmic manifestation, with all of its galaxies and whatever, is just a tiny, tiny little thing in the expanse of infinite space. So matter disappears in space, matter becomes inconsequential in space, matter compared to infinite space is infinitely small.

You see, the conception of infinite space is the first step in what Buddha calls the divine meditations, divya jhānas. Up until that point, our meditation is within the realm of form, and so it’s also limited. But meditation on space is not limited; it’s infinite. And it’s also a negation, a negation of matter. So this jhana or meditation on infinite space is our first contact with the infinite, the endless, the unlimited, the timeless, and now the Buddha is going to expand that. So let’s continue to read from the Sutta.

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