Integrating Ancient Wisdom in Modern Life: Perfection and Totality
- Four steps to realise ourselves. World is suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of ignorance and discerning knowledge.
- World is suffering because we see imperfection in external things. We are busy putting our effort into becoming perfect. Don’t be bothered about perfection. Replace the word ‘perfection’ with ‘totality’. Trying to become perfect you are dependent on others, circumstances and objects. Till the time you are dependent on these you will suffer. One who found the possibility to erase the suffering of the future becomes total. Total means they can hold the opposite. They are at ease in anger and love both with self-awareness. Perfectionist is not at ease with imperfection. They create more suffering by trying to become perfect.
- The cause of suffering is our association with identity and forgetting self. We are attached to the temporary. This is ignorance. In ignorance we create a world of dreams, imagination. We create a world around that dream, which is called the tribulation cycle. Association with identity is a dream and man has to be only a witness thereof. One who could realise that the witness state develops the dreams begin to break, until only that remains in the end, which is the reality, which is the truth.
- The end of ignorance is also the end of association, attachments. Our ignorance is that we associate Prakriti with Purusha as one, when they created the world. But when we can discriminate that to create the world Prakriti and Purusha had organic unity without losing their individuality. This realisation will end our ignorance.
- Discerning Knowledge is knowing the difference between temporary and permanence, happiness and suffering, Prakriti and Purush. Ignorance vanishes with Discerning Knowledge and truth remains. Remember; Information is knowledge received by tuition; Discerning Knowledge is knowledge unfolded in intuition. As soon as the Discerning Knowledge is awakened, then ignorance no longer bothers. Because they are no longer an identity but become individuals.
- Once Discerning Knowledge is awakened it has seven grades. They are Active and Inactive. Active will take you towards the world and Inactive will take you towards self.
- First four are for Liberation from Action – known what is to be known, the absence of all pains, the attainment of full knowledge, the attainment of the end of all karma through discrimination. Next three are liberation from Mind – freedom of the fluctuating mind, Fearless Chitta, and Established in Self.
