Understanding
A dear friend of mine, before her neo sanyas initiation asked me, ‘how can you understand so much?’ It was not a question I was expecting ‘Coz I’ve never thought of it. So I replied, ‘I don’t know.’ But the question stuck with me. As a means of a deeper enquiry into myself. A week later, a senior sanyasin asked me at breakfast, ‘how is your understanding so deep?’. And this time the answer was there. In that moment I didn’t quite know how I had arrived at the answer but now I understand, which I’ll attempt to share in this blog. I replied,
‘It is because, at all given moments in life, I’m ready to accept that I understand nothing. In fact, I know that I know nothing. It drops the entire knowledgeability, entire mind, entire ego in a second. Space is created for understanding. There is no interference of the mind and so the understanding goes deep. But’, I said, ‘this only happens because I’m not consciously doing it. I’m only ready for whatever comes, the process is happening on its own. If I do it consciously, again the mind will interfere.’ She said she’d try it & I wondered how she’d try, ‘Coz it cannot be done, it can only be understood. So had she said, ‘I understand’, that would make more sense to me. I didn’t quite fully understand myself then. Now,
What is understanding?
Understanding is awareness. Normally, we carry around a database of knowledge, which we have acquired from the world outside & our experiences with the outside world. The world outside has given us knowledge & our experiences have given us wisdom. But wisdom that is based on knowledge acquired from the outside. This together constitutes our sense of ‘I’ and our understanding of the world. The whole ego. Essentially knowledge is not the same as understanding. Knowledge is acquired from the outside and understanding is something that grows from within us. Once we understand something, it places itself in our consciousness and we operate from that understanding, not the knowledge we’ve acquired. It is a natural process.
Understanding is a deep rooted energy & so it cannot be swayed or manipulated. It becomes an awareness. We become aware of what we understand. Awareness becomes A part of the being. our parents, teachers & friends have imparted great knowledge from which they’ve operated too. But they haven’t told us how they got there. They are also living from knowledge given to them & their own experiences based on that same knowledge. No two experiences of life can be the same, ‘Coz each man is a unique individual with his own experiences. Each needs to flower uniquely individual. The society in contradiction is designed in a way that ‘one size fits all’. This is why, all the fighting for equality. Essentially the fight is for equal opportunity to be different. To be unique.
Even great wisdom received from wise men, cannot become an understanding, unless we know the how. It remains only knowledge. We don’t know how the wise man got to that understanding. A wise man’s words are irrelevant, meaningless to the ordinary mind, until he understands it. To understand, he must know how to get to it. The journey is important, the setting & circumstance is important, not the destination. I’ll try to share a perspective & a possible process.
Acceptance – The first step to understanding
The first step to understanding, which is essentially awareness, is to accept. The very first step is to accept everything, including yourself, as it is. Without judgement, without wanting to change anything. To accept all as it is. Inside & outside. This is the hardest part, acceptance. Because the ego won’t accept all as it is. It needs a fight. It lives to fight & feeds on conflict. But without any judgement of right or wrong, accept. The best way I found is to not let the ego interfere at all. It will, but once the inner being has accepted, the ego cannot do anything. Whatever it takes, tears, anger, catharsis, helplessness, whatever. Just accept. Once the acceptance has happened, the rest is easy, or rather, easier, I should say.
The moment of acceptance is crucial. Suddenly, all the becoming stops. The chasing, the running, the dream. Everything stands still. There is no movement. There is no desire for horizontal (outward) growth for a moment. We drop all knowledge. In that moment, the energy drops closest to the grounding navel centre, which is the only space from where bliss can be experienced. This centre is touched during orgasmic sexual experiences & during meditations. That is why both create bliss. One is temporary. The other is more long lasting. In those moments of calm, in the bliss, a new dimension of experience opens up. The vertical.
The vertical dimension
One of my earliest introductions to meditation was through a daily 20 minute guided third eye meditation on YouTube by swami Nityananda. Something he said, instantly caught my intrigue & seems to be the best way to explain vertical growth.
He said, ‘intuition is nothing more than being ‘in tune with reality’. Imagine, a person standing on the ground floor of a building can see 100 meters on either side of the road & in front. He cannot see what’s behind him at all. But a person standing on the 11th floor of the same building, can see 2 Kms in all directions. He has a birds-eye view. If he says that don’t cross the road, a car is coming from 1 km away, The man on the ground floor upon seeing the car will say he had an intuition. But it was not intuition. It was only being in tune with reality. Man on the ground floor is only in tune with 100 metres. The man on 11th floor is in tune with only 2 kms. That’s all. Neither can see all unless he is the open sky himself.’
Beautifully said. The horizontal dimension is the ground floor. The dimension of outward expansion/growth. The 3rd dimension. The vertical dimension is the entire building. Each floor has a higher vision & a higher experience of the same circumstance on the ground floor. 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th dimensions of existence. The man on the ground floor sees an elephant on the road, he sees the trunk and by the time he walks to the tail, he cannot see the trunk. The mind works in fragments. The full picture is never available to the sight. The man on the 11th floor need not be fragmented in his vision of the elephant. He can see the whole elephant. The elephant is a metaphor for any circumstance that we are faced with in life.
The horizontal dimension is our world. No need for any explanation there. The vertical dimension is available anywhere, at any point in time, when we are ready to accept all as it is. It is a surrender to life itself. The moment we stop the fight with life, many dimensions of existence are open to us.
Understanding = healing
A friend of mine said to me the other day, ‘the entire construct of the the ego, is to cover up our deepest wound – a feeling of unworthiness’. It’s an incredible understanding and can only come from a reason focused masculine energy. Because the ego is stronger in a man. His ego will not surrender before he understands.
The human condition, this deepest wound is a need to be needed. This stems from a deep seeded knowledge of unworthiness, a feeling of not being good enough. From our earliest days, we have been conditioned to ‘become’ not ‘be’. The entire construct of society, our world, is to ‘become’. We are educated & conditioned to become. So essentially, we are not accepted as we are. There is no value of our being until we become. There is no education system that teaches a child how to ‘be’, just throws him into a world of ‘becoming’ without even a ‘how’. Only with an ego, filled with knowledge.
So everyone wants a unique, individual destiny, but is following the footsteps on paths already walked by others. It is in hopes of a similar experience. The seat is one, the chasers are many. That same experience cannot be repeated. For the same story to be written again, all the characters in the given individual’s life journey will have to be the same and so will the experiences. That is not possible. So more often than not, the becoming leads to a feeling of failure, adding further to our human condition of unworthiness. For a unique individual destiny to unfold, we must be willing to walk the paths not walked before. And the horizontal dimensions have few, if any, undiscovered paths to walk on.
This wound of unworthiness is essentially the lack of love as children, resulting in the lack of love in the world. Love accepts as it is. There is no need to become. The becoming itself is a barrier to ‘be’. The ‘being’ is nothing but vertical dimensions of growth. There is growth. And love is the nature of being. We all suffer from this feeling of unworthiness, some less, some more but we are all suffering from the human condition. The more we have love, the higher we rise, the more we understand, the more we heal this condition.
The healing happens on its own & so does understanding & so does love. We just need to accept & ‘be’ ready. Ready for the ‘I’ to die. Healing is from the ego. The ego is a thick coverup that don’t let the wound heal. The wound must be open & dressed with medicine for it to heal. A cover up don’t help, no matter how thick it is. Understanding is healing because healing is ego death.
What you can’t achieve, Supersede
‘What you can’t achieve, supersede.’ This is one of the greatest wisdom, imparted as knowledge, to me at an early age by my mother. I always knew it but only understood it, much later in life, through my own journey. My mother couldn’t teach me the how, although she tried a lot, but to no effect. This is ‘Coz we are intrinsically designed for different paths of life. She is a ‘karma yogi’ & I’m a ‘Bhakti & Gyan yogi’. Her path is of ‘doing’, my path is of ‘being’. But both of us transformed the same knowledge into our individual wisdom. The destination don’t matter because it is the same. We arrived at the same understanding. But our journeys are uniquely individual.
So to supersede, is to rise above. What we can’t achieve, we either chase, or run from, or blame. Either ways it is a conflict, a fight with what life is presenting us. The moment we drop the fight & choose to ‘be’ the vertical dimensions open up. What we can’t achieve is already a block to further becoming. We must achieve it or reject it to move forward to become some more. Else we are stuck. And stuck means, we are incapable of ‘doing’. So what to do? Don’t ‘do’. Just ‘be’ & rise above it.
The mind cannot ‘be’
But the mind, the ego cannot ‘be’. It needs to ‘be’ occupied ‘doing’ to cover up the wound & there is nothing ‘I’ can ‘do’, except to accept all as it is. Including the mind and it’s need to do. The mind is essentially the servant not the master. It only ‘thinks’ it’s the master. Mind can be reminded that you are the master, not the mind. It can be told that the ‘doing’ from this point on is to ‘be’. The ‘being’, meditation, internal growth, vertical expansion; call it anything, can be the doing itself. Not that you can move forward anyways. You are stuck till you become. But you can move upwards. That direction is never blocked by anything outside ourselves.
As we rise higher through the vertical dimensions, our understanding expands, the vision expands. The situation we were trying to achieve, seems achievable now but also minute compared to the extent of the vision. The big vision as we call it. The visionary. With these higher states of consciousness, vertical growth; it becomes close to impossible for the energy of understanding to be swayed or manipulated. One, because you just don’t need external advise or validations to take any decisions. Two, you know you can see the full picture as compared to someone who is only seeing part of it from the ground floor.
With vertical growth, one can not only supersede what one cannot achieve, one can also expand beyond the vision one originally had. This is healing the wound of unworthiness without becoming. From the birds-eye view you can also see which roads to walk (freeways), which to avoid (traffic jams) to get to a particular destination.
One becomes one’s own gps navigator just by ‘being’.
Loveless man
Have you ever watched a child? The innocence of a child? The child don’t operate from the mind. He don’t have no Knowledgeability yet. The child ‘does’ what he feels. He lets the feeling lead him. The parents are busy with guests lets say, for instance. And the child starts to seek attention. He wants to be seen. Acknowledged. One parent will scold the child, telling him he did something wrong by disturbing before guests. Another parent will give attention just for a moment to shut the child up and then send him to his room. And a third parent will give the child attention & include the child in the conversation.
Each parent is operating from their knowledge of love. What each parent has known as love, seen as love. But essentially love only gives & accepts as it is. As my mother often says, ‘there is no guide book for raising children. Each child is unique.’ Love can be the only guide. Love in any form is the greatest teacher. My sibling and me have been raised with the same values but very differently. Our individual need for attention varies immensely. Even our need for guidance varies immensely. Even siblings cannot be raised alike. Each child’s need for love is different.
How you’re loved is how worthy you feel
The child who was scolded, and who was sent to the room, feel unworthy and with multiple such circumstances, unworthiness becomes their reality. Then he either accepts himself as unworthy and moves through life, or he doesn’t accept and rebels his way through life to prove his worthiness. This wound of unworthiness, It can manifest in any area of life, personal or professional. It subconsciously leads all decisions in his life.
The child who was included in the conversation, feels worthy. In fact you can say, no perception or feeling of worthiness was raised or affected. The question of worthiness hasn’t arisen because he has not yet felt any unworthiness. The conflict is only between the dualities. This child only feels the love. Feels satisfied. There is no need for attention left. It is there. Need for attention is only an asking for love 💕
The world outside the home plays a big part too but the child’s own sense of worth that comes from the home always leads the way. We all carry this wound of unworthiness as the ego through life. To heal this wound is to re-parent ourselves, this time with love. And love accepts as it is.
Transforming energy
Our entire ego, that is to cover up the unworthiness wound, is basically conditioning; which is essentially energy. Everything is energy. It can be anger, greed, jealousy, desire for love (sex), happiness, peace. Whatever we are made up off. All of it is only energy. And energy cannot be killed, suppressed or eradicated. Whatever we suppress, try to deny, it will show up in another form in another area of life. It is energy, and energy cannot remain without flowing. It cannot be denied but it can be transformed.
All energy can be transformed. And once it is transformed, it expresses the same energy through a higher quality. Vertical growth is the only way energy can transform and the catalytic thread, the path itself is Love. When energy transforms, the physical manifestations can be seen in the horizontal dimension too. It may not look like the original vision but for certain, the original vision will look small compared to the big reality unfolding. Life is happening to us then. I’ll try to share my understanding on energy transformations below.
Distorted love to divine love
Love is one of the most chased after means of covering the wound of unworthiness. When we feel loved, when we get love from another, our ego gets satisfied that ‘I am worthy.’ That child’s need for attention is satisfied. Need to be loved is the ego. Wanting to give love is love itself. For a man the journey of love begins as a desire for love (sex). It is not lust that he will act on. Sex is a desire to get love because he has been loved the least. It manifests first for a man as a sexual desire. For a woman, the journey of love begins again as a need to be loved. A desire for love. For her it may not manifest as sexual but will manifest as romantic love.
Like the body needs oxygen to live, the soul needs love to live. Love is a need for us but love’s need is only to give. If love is there, any energy can be transformed to a higher expression. The being can grow. When in love (honeymoon phase), sex can be transformed to eternal love, and love can be transformed to compassion. The more sex energy one has, the faster the transformation. A highly sexual man is most probable to enlighten if his sexual energy is transformed to love. Once sex is transformed, so is lust and other sexual addictions. Freedom – But love is needed for any transformation. A relationship based purely on attraction or lust cannot transform. There is no love
Only in love is one willing to fully surrender the ego. In love, ‘you’ is always more important than ‘I’. When there is no ‘I’, there is love. The lover sees the divine in his beloved. This is not possible in a relationship based on pure attraction or lust. There is no love for transformation. When in love, if the sexual expression of love (sex) is made meditative, sex will transform to eternal love, and eventually sex May drop but love will remain as love or be further transformed to compassion. Passion realized is compassion. Distorted love that ends in boredom, transforms to divine love that is eternal.
So here’s how
So how to make sex meditative? One, see the divine in the beloved, so their body is transformed to a temple for you. This is only possible with the one you love. Two, keep the focus on the third eye, between your eyebrows. This keeps one conscious, aware to the experience & for the understanding of love to happen. Three, take it as slow as you can. Enjoy not in minutes, but in hours. Of course there are many other techniques but these are the basic three to transform sex energy to real love. Over time, love will grow, and sex will go 😊. The same peak of an orgasmic bliss, will become the natural state of being.
Once you have love, you have god. You can transform any energy by making it meditative. Tantra is full of such techniques to make our entire life a meditative experience, no matter what we are doing. All energies can be transformed through vertical growth. Anger, greed, jealousy, all worldly desires; they can all be transformed with love. How they will express once transformed, will depend on the individuality of the being. In consciousness we are all the same with the same wound to heal, with the same ego to break through; but we all flower uniquely individual. Even with the other, The path is always alone, but the experience is oneness. The experience is transforming, it is healing.
Enjoy it to transform it
The only way to transform any energy is to fully and totally enjoy it. So totally that when it’s lower expression drops, you don’t miss it. You’ve played with the toy enough, you don’t cling to it. If it is sex, enjoy it so totally, with such conscious presence, that when it drops, you don’t miss it. You don’t even think of it. It has transformed to divine love. if it is any other desire, enjoy it so totally, that when ot drops, you don’t miss it. It drops only to create space for a higher experience. You are not defined by your experiences. in fact, you are not defined. period. But to enjoy anything fully, you will have to go into it. The way even to rise above, is always through, not around.
As you rise in love, you will get farther away from the ground floor. A certain detachment from the world will seep in. As you detach from the need to be needed in the world, you will also detach from the material aspects of yourself. The body. You will only use your body & your mind when it is needed. You will see not just the world but yourself too from the birds-eye view. Then you will understand yourself back to the innocence of the child still feeling unworthy in you. You can love that child through his healing journey back to worthiness.
Love is the only way to rise, the only ‘how’ to heal, the only thing to understand, the only catalyst for transformation.
