Awareness Vs Suppression – In Gita Verse 5.16 When, however, one is enlightened with the knowledge by which nescience is destroyed, then his knowledge reveals everything, as the sun lights up everything in the daytime.
Krishna says the person who becomes enlightened his ignorance is destroyed. Also Ignorance does not mean that one does not know; ignorance means that one knows only the play, only the objective world. Knowing as such is there; even if one knows that he does not, things you have suppressed in your mind.
Let’s understand Awareness Vs Suppression:
The first thing: No enlightened person has ever taught suppression.
The second: never has anybody attained through it.
No master who knows, no master who is enlightened has ever preached suppression.
A person who wants to suppress hunger and who has gone on a fast, as Jains go every year, what will they do? They will try to distract the mind somewhere else so that the hunger is not felt. They will chant mantras, or they will go to the temple and recite sutras, or they will go to their religious leader to listen to him, so that the mind is engaged, and they need not pay attention to the hunger which is there. This is suppression. Suppression means: something is there and you don’t look at it and you pretend as if it is not there. So if you are occupied deeply in the mind, then the hunger cannot penetrate and cannot bring your attention to itself. The hunger will go on knocking on the door but you are reciting a mantra so loudly that you don’t hear the knock. Suppression means distracting your mind from the reality of your being.
You feel hunger. In fact, you have never been hungry. The body has been hungry, you have never been hungry. But you are identified with the body, “I am the body.” That’s why you feel you are hungry. When you pay attention to hunger a distance is created, the identity breaks down. The identification is no more there. You are no more the body; the body is hungry and you are the watcher. And suddenly a blissful freedom arises in you that “I am not the body, I have never been the body. The body is hungry; I am not hungry.”
The bridge is broken; you are separate. What happens, what is miraculous…. When you are separate, when the bridge is broken, you are not identified with the body, you don’t say, “I am the body,” you say, “I am in the body, but not the body. I live in this house but I am not the house. I am in these clothes but the clothes are not me.” When you have come to attain this – and I say attain because intellectually you know it already. That is not the point; you have not realized it. When you realize it through deep attention to hunger or to sex or anything, suddenly the bridge disappears between the body and the embodied soul. When the gap is there and you have become a witness, then the body lives through your cooperation.
When in hunger, one watches the hunger, the cooperation is not there. It is a temporary death. You are not supporting the body. When you are not supporting the body, how can the body feel hunger? – Because the body cannot feel anything; the feeling is of your being. Hunger may be there in the body but the body cannot feel, it has no feelers.
The fasting of a Mahavira or a Buddha is a totally different fasting from the fasting of Jains and Buddhists. The brahmacharya of Mahavira is totally different from the brahmacharya of Jain monks. Mahavira is not avoiding it, he is simply watching it. Watching, it disappears. Witnessing, it is not found there. Avoiding, it follows you. In fact, not only follows you, it haunts you.
No Yoga teaches suppression – cannot teach – but there are yogis who teach. They are teachers; they have not realized their innermost being. So there exists not even a single person who can attain buddhahood through suppression. It is not possible, it is simply not possible. Through awareness one achieves, not through suppression.
Krishna in very simple words says that, we don’t have courage to realize it. He is giving us the courage to realize and tells us that if we don’t realize from the objective world, same aspect we will try to suppress it. That is our ignorance. Once we realize it, through our own light the ignorance which is darkness will just disappear.
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