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#3420 -
Thursday, January 22, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Manuel Schoch
was a gifted teacher. He died suddenly at a young age
this past October. He was featured in the following Highlights
issues:
http://www.nonduality.com/hl2062.htm
http://www.nonduality.com/hl2064.htm
His teaching method, Time Therapy, is shown in videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3fINZ76F-U
His latest book is Bitten By The Black Snake: The Ancient
Wisdom of Ashtavakra. This book presents each sutra from
the extremely nondual scripture Ashtavakra Gita and expounds upon
it. I've typed out the first sutra and a portion of Schoch's
commentary, with permission of the publisher.
Look inside the book at Amazon.com:
Bitten By The Black Snake: The
Ancient Wisdom of Ashtavakra
by Manuel Schoch
The First Sutra
Janaka asked, "Oh Lord, how does one attain liberation and
how is non-attachment attained? Please tell me this."
Ashtavakra replied, "Oh beloved, if you want liberation,
then renounce the passions as poison and take forgiveness and
innocence, compassion, contentment, and truth as nectar.
You are neither earth nor air nor fire nor water nor ether.
To attain liberation know yourself as the witnessing
consciousness of all these. If you separate yourself from the
physical body and rest in consciousness then this very moment you
will be happy, at peace, and free of bondage.
You are not a Brahmin or other caste. You are not in any of the
four stages of life.
You are not perceived by the eyes or other senses.
Unattached and without form, you are the witness of the whole
universe.
Know this and be happy.
Oh expansive one, religion and atheism, happiness and misery,
order of the mind -- they are not for you.
You are neither the doer nor the enjoyer.
You have always been liberated."
~ ~ ~
The wisdom of this sutra is that it urges you to see yourself as
the witness or the observer. The heart of the sutra has a
simplicity and directness that cannot be found elsewhere in
Hinduism and Buddhism.
Ashtavakra's wisdom penetrates deeper than any other because his
sword of wisdom cuts directly to the root of consciousness. His
teachings tell us that every form of existence, including
religion itself, should not be taken seriously. He may have lived
before the time of the Buddha, but had they been contemporaries,
Ashtavakra would not have followed the Buddha's teachings.
Ashtavakra tells us that we are constantly accepting the form of
the body as a fact. He does not say, however, that the body is
not a fact. In this sutra, he is urging you to see that you are
much more than just the body. You are consciousness -- beyond the
body, beyond the existence of form.
The Witnessing Consciousness:
How does Ashtavakra arrive at this understanding? What does he
mean when he says that if you want to be happy you have to see
beyond form? He is encouraging you to see that you are the
observer or, in his words, the witnessing consciousness.
Imagine that you are in a pitch dark room full of objects --
plants, pictures, chairs, tables, paintings, a TV, and so on --
and your eyes are closed. Now imagine that you open your eyes,
and they shine like two flashlights; suddenly, whatever the
flashlights shine on becomes visible. This is consciousness.
Consciousness is you being the light. When this light is focused
on objects, you can see them.
This does not mean (as some philosophers later claimed) that
nothing exists without your consciousness. This is nonsense. For
example, a tree exists even if there is no human consciousness
observing it. You cannot see the tree, however, if you are not
focusing the light on it -- if you are not "being" the
light.
So we can all shine like a flashlight if we open the eyes of
consciousness. When we are witnessing, we create light in order
to see. Without the witness, or the observer, things are there,
but there is no consciousness of them. Whatever you are aware of
exists because you are the light. A dead body may have its eyes
open, but it will not see anything, because there is no light, no
consciousness.
Ashtavakra says simply that the basis of all wisdom is the
observer. Everything else is an illusion -- not because it
doesn't exist, but because its reality is like a dream. While you
are dreaming you are very conscious of what's going on in the
dream. You are convinced that what you are dreaming is really
happening. If you dream that a lion is chasing you, in the dream
you will try to escape from it. Upon waking up, you realize that
there was no lion chasing you and your fear was based on an
illusion.
Ashtavakra asks us to imagine what it would be like to wake up in
the middle of such a dream, turn around, and command the lion to
stop. The lion would disappear. But we cannot do this in dreams,
let alone in daily life. Nevertheless, Ashtavakra tells us that
we are nothing other than the observer, and until we realize
that, we can never obtain liberation.
The Doer and the Observer:
If this is true, if I am really the observer, then I cannot be
the doer. The doer is therefore the mind. This presents a great
deal of confusion. In Zen, for example, there is the notion of
neti neti and wu wei -- the doing in not doing. There is also the
saying that once you are enlightened, every action is a good one.
This creates confusion if you think of the doer as the source of
action directed toward the outside world.
Ashtavakra says that action resides in the mind, and modern
science confirms this precisely. Action starts in the inner world
of the mind. Modern science tells us that there is no difference
in your brain activity whether you slap someone or merely think
of slapping someone, for example. In the brain's limbic system,
which is where motor control is expressed, just thinking of
slapping someone activates all the muscles that would be used to
do it.
We are reminded here of Jesus's teaching that if you just think
of being unfaithful to you wife, you have committed a sin. Once
you take morality out of the equation, you can truly appreciate
the depth of this wisdom.
The brain and everything the mind imagines is the action element
of doing. However, if one is the observer, this observer is more
than the mind, more than the doer.
Whenever you are taking any action, either in your mind or of a
physical nature, you are not in a state of observation. Hence no
liberation. Ashtavakra goes even deeper and calls this state
"witnessing consciousness." He doesn't say just witness
or observe; he calls it witnessing consciousness.
Witnessing consciousness means that observer is consciousness,
not that the observer is separated from consciousness. Now
recognizing this has a very deep impact. The observer is
consciousness, so being connected to the observer provides
liberation from the doer or liberation from the mind. Whenever
the mind is without observation, then there is no consciousness.
It follows logically that if everything is consciousness, then
there is nothing to aim for, nothing to gain, nothing to
understand. If you are consciousness, you cannot be more than
consciousness itself. Now, this is tremendously important to
understand -- not in the sense of intellectually grasping the
idea of it, but in the sense of feeling, of seeing it.
~ ~ ~
Bitten By The Black Snake: The
Ancient Wisdom of Ashtavakra
by Manuel Schoch