Advaita Post #20 – 02
From the book Satsang, What about yourself?
A talk with Douwe Tiemersma, Hoorneboeg, March 6, 2009
The universal conflict: expansion and retention
The radical breaking open can go completely by itself. When that doesn’t happen, it makes sense to look very carefully at what is apparently closed, what is stuck, but can still break open. It will have to come into the light of consciousness, so that it can open up. Through consciousness it can come completely free. Of course, it’s about yourself, your own self-being. When there’s something in it that’s closed, you’ll need to see that very clearly. If it remains vague, then what follows is also a question. When this vagueness remains, and that’s all too easily the case, then your whole life is based on that restricted area. Then it affects all aspects of your life, without you being aware of the cause. What can you say about these closed off things? They have the character of stuck energies. When all goes well, energies give and take space. They flow, they dissolve, but they can also calcify. It’s about energy but at the same time it’s also about the self-being that has identified itself with this energy. So there’s a piece of consciousness in it. Traditionally, when a new baby is born, it is said: “The self has incarnated in a chunk of energy and then says: this is me.” When this identification is there, there is one complex: not just of energy, but of ‘I’ and energy, an ‘I’-energy complex. The experience then is that everything that happens to that chunk of energy happens to yourself. What happens with the body happens with you. So you’re sitting internally in that chunk of energy; there is an internal in contrast to an external world. Everything that comes at that piece of energy from the external world comes at you.
Why can’t this energy clump/matter flow freely? Apparently, there is a force that restrains the energy. If there were to be no restrictive force, the energy would take the space. In a very early stage of life that restriction is for the most part not very strong, but by differentiating internal and external energies, this restriction gradually increases in strength. There are all kinds of forces that limit or capture this vital energy. You see how quickly the energies are absorbed by the self-being, so that an ‘I’-complex is formed with all kinds of energetic shells that function restrictively (the kosha’s). These restrictive energies in the sphere of the ‘I’-identity are expressed as judgments: “I can’t do this or that”, “I am this body”, “this belongs to this body but not that”, “there is a border here”, “it shouldn’t go any further”, “I am my brain”, “I think”, and so on. Then there is an internal conflict. On the one hand the energies want to take the space, and on the other hand they are held back. A dam arises when the restricting force of internal or external energy is particularly strong. When this inner dam is very strong the energy seeks a way out in a less attractive way, such as aggression. In an early phase of life the situation is still very open. When this openness is attacked, it can be experienced so intensively that the reaction is total, a total fear, because it is perceived as a total threat. In the further course of life, that [reaction] doesn’t enter into daily consciousness very often because it is repressed. On top of that there are the complexes that you acquire further on in life. All these things that you keep outside of your daily consciousness still continue to play a role in the shaping of your life.
When we are engaged in yoga as a liberation from the body schema, usually it’s not about very heavy emotional things, but rather about established bodily structures that are deeply ingrained, such as top and bottom, left and right, the size of your body, and so on. When an expansion comes you see that the easier things come free at first but increasingly you have to deal with much deeper issues that are much tighter, that are more restrictive and more emotionally charged. They come free when more space comes.
It’s good to see that inner conflict very clearly. In the primary situation energy has a tendency to expand. This is expressed on the level of the person as a desire for liberation. Even when there is an identification with a chunk of stuck energy, such as the body and traumatic experiences, that desire for expansion, for broadening, remains present. That is something authentic because originally the self-being is not limited. Therefore everyone has a longing for this universal expansion. The other side is there, too. Through identification that self-being is completely linked to that specific form, this specific clump of energy/matter. Through habituation this identity has become an anchor, a certain basis that you experience as yourself. When this energy threatens to fall apart, there is thus the fear of falling apart. On the one hand there is the authentic desire for infinite expansion, on the other hand there is the will to hold on to this form in order to preserve your normal-identity. That is an incredibly huge conflict.
This identity is continually reinforced from the outside and so that’s always a huge dilemma.
Yes, but apparently you take on that affirmation. [So] It’s an internal conflict. It’s the basic conflict that all people live with, the greatest conflict that there is. Everyone relates to it in their own way, but everyone has it. So it’s good to see how it works. People sit in that conflict with a double desire. On the one hand to be infinite, and on the other hand to be identical with a form which one imagines doesn’t change. Therefore, people want to have an eternal life and they’ll do everything they can to stretch it out a few years. That’s a huge misunderstanding, the biggest misunderstanding there is. The desire for infinity is authentic because the self-being is not stuck in a form. This infinity then becomes identified with a limited form. Different levels get mixed up with one another. Naturally you’ll have problems with that. You notice that the limited form is not eternal. Do you see the absurdity of this contradiction? Do you see the tragedy of man? Do you now see the suffering it causes? Do you see that it’s not necessary?
thegroundlessopenness 