Many thanks for the time you have given me and the patience with which you have been kind to respond to my queries. I understood the logic you used to explain the oneness of consciousness in which everything arises – my hunger or yours. These are not one but two, as agreed by you, because they are ‘objects’.
Or it is the oneness of ‘me’ experiencing the relief of pain in the hand and continued pain in the leg, in your example. But is it not something like saying the terrorist who blew up the hotel and me are one because we are under the same sky? Yes, sky is one. The worries and pain and death are notfor the sky. They are for the bodies.
People suffer more from physical problems, diseases, penury, etc., than imaginary psychological problems, which are a privilege of the well-to-do! Out of the six billion-odd population on the surface of the earth, how many suffer from hunger and destitution? Psychological suffering is a sign of plenitude.
Now you clearly admit that ‘pain is inescapable and inevitable’. Why should it be so? Does it not imply that Advaita has not been able to answer the fundamental ‘Why?’ questions? Yes, staying like the sky does leave me totally unaffected by what goes on below: no psychological or any sort of turmoil. But is it not an escape to condemn the body as abominable and despicable and to be the sky because bodily disease, decay and death are inescapable?
Obviously, I may not have reached the ‘tipping point’ to that oneness about which I understand everything you say. I do not mean I have some desires or that I am suffering, but it looks to me like there is something beyond Advaita that man has still to find!
Let me assure you that I am not writing out of any arrogance. I have high respect for you, and the clarity with which you explain non-dualism leaves no doubt about the ultimate levels you have attained as per the Indian culture and philosophy.
The sensation of hunger in your body and the sensation of hunger in my body are two different objects. However, it is only because we superimpose the limitations of objects onto consciousness that we presume that these two sensations must take place in two different consciousnesses. There is absolutely no experiential evidence for this. It is simply an uninspected presumption that turns out, upon investigation, to be untenable.
It is true that when you eat, your sensation of hunger vanishes but mine doesn’t. However, this does not in any way imply that the two sensations appear in two different consciousnesses.
Take a situation where you fall over and hurt your arm and your leg simultaneously. To begin with, both your arm and leg are aching, but you have no doubt that it is the same you (consciousness) that is experiencing both aches. You start to rub your arm, and after some time the pain abates and is replaced by a nice warm, tingling sensation in your arm. However the pain in your leg continues.
Do you conclude that the fact that the pain in your arm is relieved but the pain in your leg remains implies that these two different sensations appear in two different consciousnesses? No, that would be absurd! You know that they both appear in you, in the same consciousness.
As regards violence, misery, disease, decay and death, in order to understand this we have to make a distinction here between physical pain and psychological suffering. Physical pain is an essential element of bodily existence and doesn’t in any way indicate the presence of an apparently separate entity inside the body.
Psychological suffering is entirely unnecessary and simply indicates the belief and feeling that we are a separate, limited entity, located in and as the body, that was born, travels through space and time and will one day die. Pain is inescapable and inevitable, but suffering is neither.
Disease, decay and death pertain to the body, but nobody has ever experienced any disease, change, movement, decay, appearance, evolution, disappearance or death of consciousness. It is only our exclusive identification of consciousness with the body that makes us think and feel that when the body dies, I, consciousness, will die. It is with this thought that physical death becomes associated with psychological suffering.
So we do not invoke the oneness of consciousness as an escape from bodily misery. On the contrary, suffering is an escape from consciousness! Consciousness knowing itself is our primary (and ever-present, although sometimes not noticed) experience. We don’t have to do anything new or make any efforts to be this presence which knows itself. In fact, the opposite is the case. We have to make a subtle effort to seem notto be this presence of consciousness.
To put it another way, happiness is not an escape from unhappiness. Rather unhappiness is the apparent veiling of happiness. Even though we do not always know it, happiness is always present. There is no escape from it. In its pure form it is called happiness. In its apparently veiled form it is called unhappiness.
To put it another way, there is only consciousness, always knowing itself, being itself and loving itself. There is no escape from this. Where would it go? Where could consciousness go that was not already made out of itself? What could it become that is not already itself?
Every experience is only the knowing of consciousness knowing itself.
