Witness Is Spirituality – In Gita Verse 11.1 Arjuna said: By my, hearing the instructions You have kindly given me about these most confidential spiritual subjects, my illusion has now been dispelled.
To understand this verse first we need to understand the Witness and the Illusion.
How may one enter into that supreme truth, how may one know that supreme mystery which is so near and yet remains unknown; which is forever with us and yet is lost? How may we reach it, how has anyone ever reached it? In these sutras is the explanation of that science, the process of that path.
Let us first understand a few things about illusion. Illusion means to see as it is not. Truth means to see as it is. Whatsoever we see is an illusion, because we involve ourselves in our seeing; our experience does not remain objective. Whatsoever is out there, it does not reach us as it is. Our mind distorts it, embellishes it, ornaments it, prunes it – making it bigger or smaller and changing it into many, many forms.
The biggest change and the deepest illusion is that we associate ourselves with everything, which in fact we are not associated with at all. As soon as we are associated the reality is lost and the dream projection starts appearing true. For example, we call a thing ‘mine’ – ‘my house’… the house which was there when we were not and which will still be there when we will be no more. Something that can be before I am, and will continue after I am not, which does not disappear with my disappearance – how can it be ‘mine’? If I die at this moment my house does not collapse or disappear, in fact it will not even know that I have died – then what kind of association can there be between myself and that house? What is the relationship? Tomorrow someone else will live in that same house and call it ‘mine’. Yesterday somebody else was living in it and he was calling it ‘mine’. Who knows how many people have stuck their ‘I’ on that house, and have passed away? But that ‘I’ never sticks onto the house, and that house does not belong to anybody; the house belongs to itself.
In this world everything belongs to its own-self. If we can understand this properly, we shall be able to shatter the illusions easily.
There is a piece of land. You call it ‘my field’, or ‘my garden’. If not today, tomorrow there will be claims advanced about the moon – America will say it is ’ours’, Russia will say it is ’ours’. Until yesterday the moon did not belong to anybody; it simply was. It simply belonged to itself. But now someone or other will claim the moon and sooner or later there will be struggles and confrontations. Up to now the sun belonged to itself, but tomorrow the sun may also be claimed.
Wherever man puts his feet he labels it with his ‘I’. Nature does not accept his labels, but other human beings have to, otherwise there will be confrontation. Others have to accept the labels because they want to put their own labels on things. So the house becomes somebody’s and the piece of land becomes somebody else’s. Why are we so impatiently eager to stick this label of ‘I’ somewhere? The eagerness is because the more places and things on which we stick this label, or make our signatures, the bigger the circle of ‘mine’ grows and the bigger the ‘I’ is developed within us.
‘I’ is as big as the number of things that carry its label. If someone says that he has one acre of land, how can his ‘I’ be as big as that of another person who says, “I have one thousand acres of land?”
With the expansion of the ‘mine’, the ‘I’ feels as if it is growing bigger. If the expanse of ‘mine’ decreases, the ‘I’ also shrinks. So every brick of ‘I’ is made up of ‘mine’. Thus the more ways I can say ‘mine’, the higher rises the palace of ‘I’. Hence our whole life we remain in only one race – how many things we can stick our labels on and say, “It is mine.” In so doing, while we continue to label things, one day we die and wherever we had put our labels, someone else begins to stick his labels on the things we had called ‘mine.’
Things belong to themselves, not to any person. They can be used, but there can be no ownership. Ownership is an illusion, and while we are using them we should have a sense of gratitude because we are using something that does not belong to us. But when we say ‘mine,’ all sense of gratitude disappears and a new world of ‘mine’ is created. That includes money, position, prestige, education and everything. For these things it may be okay, but what is more surprising is that things which have nothing to do with ‘I’ also get included. We say: my religion, my god, my deity, my temple – with whom ‘I’ can have no relationship whatsoever. And if it can, then there is no possibility of freeing oneself from the world. If religion can also be mine and thine, if God can also be mine and thine, then there is no hope; where shall we then find a way out of ‘mine?’ If God also falls within its jurisdiction, then there remains no space left anywhere for the ‘I’ to go away to. But we put the label of ‘mine’ on temples and mosques and on God as well.
Life does not accept anybody’s claim over it and goes on flowing each moment. But we go on claiming. This illusion of claim, this is man’s deepest illusion.
The biggest search of man is to find out if he too is nothing but an accumulation of many, many layers that we can go on peeling off and in the end there is nothing in our hand. If we go on denying and saying, “I am not the body,” “I am not the mind,” “I am not this,” “I am not that,” it may turn out to be the story of the onion and in the end nothing may remain of which one may say that “This is me.”
But the Upanishads say that even if it is so, yet it is necessary to know the truth; even if it is true that there is nothing within, yet it is worth knowing it, because the outcome of knowing the truth is very significant. But on searching deeply, however, it is found in the end that no, man is not just an accumulation of clothing, man is not just layers upon layers upon layers, there is something within the layers which is different. But we only come to know of that when by removing all the layers we arrive within ourselves. That element which remains in the end is called by the Upanishads sakshi, the witness.
The search for this witness is spirituality.
Remember: the search for God is not spirituality. In the ancient yoga sutras God is not discussed, not even mentioned. There was no need. Later, even when the sutras mentioned God, they called God a means in the journey of spirituality and not a goal. It is said God is useful in spiritual practice, in spiritual search, hence it is good to accept it, but it is only a means, a device, that’s all.
Arjuna got the distinction, the search for this witness is spirituality.
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