Through this text, I am going to try my best to present to you, the reader, several relevant spiritual concepts, interspersed with incidents and visions experienced by several of my spiritual friends and me. The purpose is to influence you to fall in love with yourself. This is of course, a colloquial way of saying, learn to accept, respect and revere yourself. No mean task this!
I will have to talk about the various stages that I went through on this journey. For that I will need to spell out my life in two pages as a reference to context. Do bear with me.
As today is Janmasthtami (the birthday of Lord Krishna) let me say in His honour, His was probably the most inspiring story of self-reverence in known history or mythology. I wish I could provide both you and myself a change-over or switch that would instantly take us to the level of consciousness that Lord Krishna enjoyed. Though the technology for that may take lifetimes to acquire, let us see to it that a beginning is well made.
Lord Krishna will bear me out when I state that in eternal truth, there is no difference between Him and ourselves but one; the spell of our limitations. Though we share the same God Particle (colloquially speaking), we are limited by the cages of our bodies and minds to see ourselves not as we TRULY are, but as we seem to be.
The story of my self-evaluation has been a jigsaw puzzle of likes, dislikes, acceptance, non-acceptance, rise and fall of my self-worth. Half my school life was spent being molly-coddled and monitored. I was handled with kid gloves, as I was an adopted child, acquired with great difficulty from the younger members of the family. The second half was spent in a boarding school. As I had joined half way, I was a misfit. Average at a few subjects at best, but bad at most. Naturally, I saw myself as a loser – what was there to be proud of?
College presented an opportunity to show off and get attention. I wore clothes that attracted attention and got it. I made a bit of a spectacle of myself and got away with it. I stood for elections in college and won them. Who would not vote for a jester? And a jester I was! “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,” as Shakespeare rightly said.
Later, I discovered my debating and acting talents that won me many trophies. I was confused – was I not such an idiot after all? Fortunately, I was not too unpopular with the girls. Maybe, I was better than I thought! Self-evaluation was so confusing and what was I evaluating myself on? Social Success?
During my early college days, I got an attack of rheumatoid arthritis. I had to undergo acupuncture daily, for years, to keep myself going. I was cured in one-and-a-half minutes by my future spiritual guide, Gurudev. He went on to accept me as a disciple.
It was time to learn. Actually unlearn!
I thought ‘discover yourself’ meant understand yourself psycho-analytically. It was a lot more. It has been a journey of 35 years from trying not to dislike myself, to learning how to love myself and more.
Do join me in this story of understanding self-worth, shedding limitations and understanding your true nature.
If you are a part of the Consciousness Supreme, then how come you don’t know it?
Finally, how do you understand it?
That You Are (Tat Twam Asi)
In a slightly informal way this book describes the sentence ‘That Thou Art ‘in a deconstructed manner.
‘That’ stands for the Supreme Consciousness of which everybody is a part.
‘You’ stands for you the body, you the spirit, and you the jivatma or individual soul.
‘Are’ means that you are part of the Consciousness Supreme even if you don’t know it, even if you don’t feel it, even if you don’t want to believe it.
It’s a very intriguing sentence, though I must confess, quite impressive. The idea expressed through this book is that you need to understand its meaning and to take up the concepts as a practice. I would suggest you take a pencil and highlight the concepts that interest you. After you have finished a couple of readings, do re-read the highlighted portions and see whether they are working for you.
While my spiritual associate, Rajeev, was reviewing this text for me, he happened to ask a question that I least expected. ‘But why should I love myself?’
On reading this text I hope most of you will discover, if you don’t already know it, that ‘yourself’ is a component of many entities and the ‘you’ who are reading this book is just one of them, mainly the physical incarnation. But the ‘myself’ does not stop there. It includes all the components that go along with your individual self and end up in ‘you’, the physical body at the outermost level.
My answer to Rajeev is that he should learn to love the Consciousness Supreme which at the subtlest level is only a few steps away from his outer self.
Unfortunately, putting theory unto page is only a job of a few sentences. I could redesign the philosophy of the world in 30 pages, but what good would that do?
It is my prayer that we should move together through the pages of this book and its illustrations and reach some life changing conclusions. Firstly, that we are not who we think we are and secondly, we must look at some introspective mirrors that can showcase to us more than our outer-selves.
The conciousness needs to break out of its sensory jail
that holds it in delusion.
This book is a deconstruction of the concept ‘Tat Twam Asi’. We need to examine why most of us would find it difficult to believe this sentence. Even if we do acknowledge it, why do we think that we are not capable of living it.
This book starts off with trying to understand patterns of disbelief, and breaking them down bit by bit. It takes you further, through examples and anecdotes to a stage where you question your disbelief. At many such crossroads you have to decide whether you are willing to invest in your faith, or would you rather take the easy way out and bury your ostrich head beneath the sands of illusion.
According to Albert Einstein, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
