Amanaska

Tuhin: “I’m sitting with Sankara, who has created a systematic approach to inner well-being. It’s the absence of inner sorrow. Sankara welcome”.

Sankara: “Thank you very much Tuhin”.

Tuhin: “In Amanaska Yoga, you keep talking about the self. There is a bigger Self and there’s a smaller self”.

Sankara: “Yes”.

Tuhin: “And can you describe the little self? What are the qualities”?

Sankara: “Well, the little self to begin with is somewhat unfamiliar to us for the simple reason that we are the little self ourselves. So we may not have had an opportunity to view it, to study it, as an entomologist would study an insect, or an ornithologist would study a very interesting bird. It has to be observed very carefully. And it’s not all the time there for you to observe it. It’s kind of like a meteor flashing into the canopy of the heavens. It makes its appearance in a very darting way and then it disappears. And it is at those moments that we must be ready with our ‘telescopes and microscopes’ of observation to pick up what we have seen. Hmm. So the self is a very elusive thing, to answer your question because we are the self ourselves. And it’s not a ‘noun’, you could think of it as a ‘verb’. It’s a moving, dynamic energy. It is divisive. It draws a line between yourself and the other human being with whom you are dealing. Mm-Hmm. It’s divisive. It’s judgmental. It is critical. It is always pursuing success and victory in a highly competitive world, and it is seeking pleasure perpetually, for its own beatific fulfillment. And it does not know how to deal with failure. That’s basically what the self is. But still, all this is not to say that you come to know a little bit of the self, we’ve not even made a beginning”.

Tuhin: “Would you call it the force of evil inside us”?

Sankara: “We cannot go so far. We have to first of all, the object we are studying, the ‘octopus’ or the ‘crab’ we are going to study is new to us. So we don’t know enough about it. But from whatever observation I’ve been able to make over the last several years, I find that very often in the interpersonal drama of life, the self is looking for a villain, which it can crucify in its judgmental posture. But I find that the self is itself the villain. The self is the architect of inner suffering, and it creates that suffering inevitably in its pursuit of success, pursuit of pleasure. And both are inevitable.  The self cannot, but pursue success, the self cannot but pursue pleasure. So to tell the self, ‘don’t pursue pleasure, don’t pursue success’ would be an absurd thing, because that’s what the self is probably there to do.

“And so, by observing the movement of the self, we probably have to learn that the self has got a dichotomic nature – very paradoxically. On the one hand without it, life will not be creative, without it there is no dream and aspiration in life, and there is no joy in life. There’s no ‘fulfillment’ in life. At the same time, in the process of weaving the dream and in the process of bequeathing to ourselves this fulfillment and this joy, a creative joy in every act of living, it is simultaneously and unintentionally unleashing a very divisive and destructive energy. So, we can go that far”.

Tuhin: “And what is the connection with the ego – of the self”?

Sankara: “So when we take a term like the self and we have to be a little careful in applying new synonyms, both from the Western intellectual tradition, like from the Jungian tradition of psychology or from ancient Hindu wisdom, where the self has got the name of a purusha in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, or it has the name of Jivatma in the Bhagavad Gita and in the Hindu scriptures. And what is this Jivatma or what is this purusha? It is a sense of individuality where there seems to be a living moving, very alive energy, which has somehow set itself apart from the rest of creation. So it’s a kind of a lonely seeker. It’s looking for fulfillment. It’s looking for – importantly for permanence, for permanence and for victory over others. And for a timeless quality for love, even. It’s looking for love and it’s looking for success. It’s looking for permanence and it’s doing all these things. The question is, is it successful or is it meeting only with fleeting successes, which with it is not satisfied? That’s the question we have to pose in our study of the self”.

Tuhin: “And you say the goal of Amanaska Yoga is to let this little self die, so that a new self can take its place, right”?

Sankara: “Actually, we are used to, like the older physicists – before quantum mechanics- they could only think of the physical universe in terms of a Newtonian Cartesian framework, where there  are particles moving along very definitive space-time trajectories, and that a particle can have position and velocity at the same time and so on. But after the advent of quantum mechanics, the physicist’s universe completely underwent a somersault, and the world view was turned topsy turvy. In the same way, when we go very deep into consciousness, then we find that our commonsense notions don’t help us to describe reality very accurately, deep down in the depths of our consciousness and the depths of our heart and feeling. So we have to be careful with the terminology that we are developing. And the ego is certainly a word which is used here”.

Tuhin: “Its old world, its old world, old world”.

Sankara: “But it is not wrong, and I would say that, if you think of a flower, a beautiful flower, lotus flower or hibiscus or whatever it is, and we just begin with the bud and then we can’t obviously mistake the bud for the flower, which has fully bloomed because the flower, which is fully bloomed, has certainly developed from the starting point of the bud. But it’s certainly much more than the flower bud. In the same way, the ego may be applied to the genesis of the self, or some people apply the ego – they say, it’s a irather unfortunate feeling that you’re are somehow superior to everybody, and therefore you walk with your nose in the air with lot of pride. People, some people, put it like that. But the self is – you can say, it is the biography of the ego, or it is an enriched meaning of the ego, as it blooms fully in the very treacherous field of relationships”.

Tuhin: “And that’s human-to-human relationships or all kinds of relationships? Which means, your relationship with money, your relationship with business, and your relationship with some spiritual pursuit? Not just interpersonal relationship? Does it affect that, too”?

Sankara: “Of course, you have asked an extremely profound question. The relationship between your self, and the self of another human being, that’s one thing. Then the relationship between the self and the object it is questing for. That object – could be political power. The object could be – the power of wealth or the power of status, or even the power of understanding which a scientist seeks. And in this whole relationship, whether it is interpersonal or in the world of science, or in the world of business or the world of politics, the first thing we have to notice is, the self has already taken a posture, a very divisive posture that it is completely different from the human being with which it is going to relate, and it is different from the object, which it is going to seek. So though this is understood, but we have to become more fully conscious of that, of that divisive attitude, which is kind of woven into the relationship of the self with the whole world, both animate and inanimate.

“And later on we will discover that that sense of division is going to bloom and play out, creating all the difficulties for the self. But it is there in a very miniscule proportion to begin with and as the relationship develops, this sense of division flowers, then you’ll find that all is not well in that relationship and that love can turn into hatred, as we often see in the news media, you can see in the film world, you can see in the political world that the so-called love we are professing, we are talking about, it’s nowhere near durable. And it’s there today, and tomorrow it vanishes. And why does this happen?

“It happens because the self is extremely divisive. And the question for us is a very difficult question. I’m giving you a very difficult answer to a very difficult question you have posed to me. Is it possible for us to transcend this divisive mentality of the self? And if it did actually transcend the divisive mentality of the self, then the question arises, if you are not the self, then who are we, if we have transcended? So those are very deep religious questions, they are philosophical questions, and they naturally come up as we plunge into the waters of self-Knowing. They will come to us in a very genuine, in a very authentic way, and we will find that they become part of our pursuit, part of our seeking”.

Tuhin: “At the end of it all, once you are free of the little self, how do you feel”?

Sankara: “You feel very good, and you feel that you’ve become free from a monster”.

Tuhin: “Really?”

Sankara: “Paradox is that this monster was very much a part of yourself and you even became so honest that you made a declaration of it that this monster is also some part of myself. And as I said, the monster is like a double edged sword. It gives you tremendous pleasure in life. It gives you tremendous fulfillment. It gives you tremendous creativity. At the same time, it gives you tremendous pain. So the question is, can we have the pleasure? Can we have the fulfillment? Can we have the creativity and then somehow get rid of the pain?

“And I find that that’s not possible. And this is the universal verdict of the religions as well, and that you must dispose off, lock, stock and barrel, both pleasure and pain, both the fulfillment and the failure, both of them must be dispensed with, done away with, so that you may float into another plane of life where there is a beautiful, unperturbed calmness, a plane of creativity and joy. And once you start living life from that plane, where the self is not operative, where the self is not the master, where the self is not the director of the whole show, then you find that life is really heady wine”.

Tuhin: “And what about the absence of inner conflict once the self disappears? What happens to your inner conflicts? Is there hardly any conflict”?

Sankara: “The conflict completely ceases because the self is the creator of conflict. Conflict arises because the self is asking something from life, for its individual, separative existence. It wants something, but life may not give that to the self, and that may be denied to the self. And therefore, the self goes into a conflict and asks the question which is really the wrong question. Why did this happen to me? And why was this not given to me? And the self is not wide awake enough to perceive the universal truth that this is the state of humanity in which the whole of humanity is living-that life is full of fulfillment and the negation of fulfillment. They come together as a dichotomic pair, and conflict certainly goes away completely. And because so long as there is conflict, though, some people may argue that conflict is necessary for being creative. I don’t vote for that.

“I say that when there is a complete cessation of conflict, then you come to that plane, which I alluded to, the plane of tranquility and equanimity from which life appears very different and life appears to be a beautiful aesthetic experience and a mystery. And you don’t ever feel this mystery so long as the self is alive and the master and trying to be the master, at least of all the affairs in your life. You don’t sense this mystery, and tears don’t come to your eyes because the self is more like a ‘war general’ wanting to win in every battle of life because it conceives of life as a battle between itself and a positioned adversary which it calls as the ‘other’ and so on. But you leave all that and the whole thing – that goes away, and you come into another plane where there is quietness and where there is love and intelligence, both are the same thing and they’re beaming out then one may even go so far as to say that life begins only from that stage onwards”?

Tuhin: “It’s very interesting, very interesting. Thank you very much”.

Sankara: “Thank you very much Tuhin for bringing me on board”.