The Broken Mind Returns Home
Acharya Prashant: “The 15 parts return into their foundations and all the gods pass into their proper godheads, works and the self of knowledge all become one in the supreme and the imperishable.”
So what is the context? What are we referring to here? We are referring here to the ultimate state possible. What is it that the mind finally wants? What is it that happens, rather stops happening, once you are out of illusion and bondage? The 15 parts pass into the whole. The shlok says, “kala, Panchadash kala,” 15 parts. Kala in Sanskrit means parts as well.
The Upanishads have to be read in light of their context. The student has come, and the student is in illusion but eager. He does not know what he wants to inquire about. So there is ignorance but with the spirit to inquire. There is darkness but with a movement towards illumination. And all that is being said by the seer is with a view to dispel false knowledge.
We have to remember that the Upanishads do not seek to bring the truth to us. They proceed via negative. Their method is of ruthless negation, they destroy the false, they expose what is hollow and weak and hence fit to be rejected.
So, what is it that gets rejected, destroyed, or comes to an end as you progress through your consciousness in an upward direction? The 15 parts return to the whole. Parts gain wholeness, the inner fragmentation reduces. The number 15 is not significant. I could go into where the 15 kala’s come from and all that, but that is not significant at all. It could have been 14, it could have been 6, it could have been 70,000. Doesn’t matter. Only three numbers actually exist in Vedant — 0, 1, and the rest of them.
So, when you are reading the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita and you come across 8 or 42 or 7,000, they all mean the same. What do they refer to? The many-ness evident in our sensory experience.
I’m speaking to you today, maybe there are 50 of us here today, this is a session in progress. And yesterday there were some 80 of us here, and the day before that, 300 plus. It’s the same, it’s the same from the point of view of Vedant. Vedant simply says “many.” Lao Tzu says, “the 1,000 things.” He dismisses diversity with this one name “the 1,000 things.” So you ask him, “What’s there in the mind?” He’ll either say “nothing” or he’ll say “1,000 things.” He won’t bother to count.
For us, 8 is very different from 18. For the knower, 8 is the same as 18. Therefore, he does not seek to reduce 18 to 8; he seeks to reduce both 18 and 8 to one. What is that one? That’s not the final thing, that’s not the ultimate unity. That one is ego tendency — the mother aham-vritti. All things arise from the one, and that one is not Brahm. That one is the mother ego tendency. Because nothing arises from Brahm. Brahm does not give birth or rise to anything.
The truth does not father the world. Because of our ignorance, truth itself appears as the world. The world is not different from the truth, provided we have the eyes, the eyes to perceive rightly. So, all things boil down to just one thing. What is that one thing? The perceiving entity — the ego tendency. I have the tendency to perceive, and because I have the tendency to perceive, sometimes I perceive 8, sometimes 18, sometimes 8,000.
All things are my own experience. All things are to me. Things exist. Don’t believe in superficial objectivity. Ask, “Who is the subject to whom these things exist?” Something great happened. Immediately ask, “To whom does this exist? For whom?” Because nothing exists in isolation; nothing exists independently of the perceiver, the seer.
To think that something exists independent of everything is to give it the status of truth, and that will lead to suffering. If something exists, it exists for a particular somebody; otherwise, it does not. Therefore, the same thing is different to different people, because there is nothing called a thing. There is just the experience of the thing, and there is the mighty experiencer sitting within all of us intent on experiencing diversity.
It cannot experience one thing. If there is just one thing, there can be no experience. If all is white, can you experience even white? Obviously, if all is white, you cannot experience red, green, blue, or violet, so that’s discounted. But if all is white, can you experience even white? If all is white, can you experience even white?
What is the color of this background? Brown. What if I wear brown? what will happen? What will happen? Kamlesh will not like it, Kamlesh will just not like it if I wear brown on a brown background. Why will he not like it? What does that mean? To experience, you require at least two. Brown and brown will lead to obfuscation of experience, you will not be able to experience anything. On top of that, if my entire face is brown, including the hair, the audience will actually not see anything. It will only see a certain brownness.
You can see a thing only when its opposite is available as a backdrop. Otherwise, perception cannot happen. So if you are the experiencer, it becomes a compulsion on you to experience diversity. There can be no experience sans diversity.
You cannot experience happiness if you have not tasted sadness.
There is no experience that is not nondual, that is not dualistic. In other words, there is no nondual experience. Are you getting it? So the mother ego tendency that says, “I exist,” for its own survival, continuation, projects a huge diversity — and that diversity allows it to remain engaged. That diversity allows time to exist because now you can change your subject: “This (pointing towards one side) exists and that (pointing towards another side) exists. Today I’m related to him, tomorrow I’m related to her.” What has come into being? Change hence time. If diversity is not there, time cannot be there. Time is therefore a compulsion upon the mother experiencer, the one. Are you getting it?
Wholeness is not oneness, that’s what differentiates Vedant from the other philosophies. They stop at one. There has to be somebody at the top. All right, we can afford diversity at the bottom, we can have a lot of things on the earth, but let there sit some one particular controller on the clouds in the sky. They suffocate without one. Vedant dismisses even the one. Vedant says even the one is fictitious, because if all this that you see here is just dualistic. One thing exists only as a contrast to the other thing, then the mother of all these things too has to be fiction.
If the 7,000 things are all fictitious, then the mother of those 7,000 things too is fictitious. Therefore, the one means nothing — one God, one issuer — none of that in Vedant. No. Vedant will never ask you to swear allegiance to the one. No. Just as you can think of 8 and 18 and 8,000, you can equally think of one, can’t you? So 8, 18, 8,000 and 1, they are all objects in the mind. How can you call a mental object beyond the mind? Therefore, the one is to be given no special credit. Are you getting it?
One is the same as two. One cannot even exist without the second. How about zero? Now even with zero, there is a bit of a problem. Now, zero is technically right if it means nothing at all. But the moment you say “nothing, zero, shunya” — again you create a mental image, a friction rises, a story starts building up.
Therefore, Vedant says, not many, not one, zero is risky; hence Advait. Do you get this? Not many, because the many are just figments of my own inner compulsions. I see differences because I have a stake in differences. If I do not have a stake in differences, they don’t matter much to me.
You must remember that whatever you see or experience has your own desire at its root. We just don’t see anything — if we are seeing, sensing, hearing, experiencing, perceiving — there is desire involved. Desire begins not only after the stimulus hits the senses, but actually, in a deeper way, desire causes the stimulus.
This much should be obvious, that if you look at a nice pair of jeans somewhere, it can arouse desire, right? So this is self-evident, that stimulus provokes desire. But what we must also meditate on is that unless you have a latent desire, you will not even perceive a pair of jeans. And this is more difficult to grasp, but stay with this. You will not come upon anything if it does not hold meaning for you. It will just not blip in your inner radar even if you factually come upon it.
If something makes its presence felt in your inner world, it is because you were already prepared to have its presence felt inside you. If you’re not prepared, the thing will not even exist for you, it will just come and leave as nothing. Are you getting it?
Now, this has very deep implications. It means we are responsible. It means we cannot ever play the victim card. If stuff is happening, it is happening with some kind of a latent consent. I know we are walking into choppy waters with this, because next we’ll be asked that if a fellow has a heinous crime committed on him, did there pre-exist, a latent consent? And if it did, then how do we have courts of law? How do we hold somebody guilty? All these questions arise. We will get to them. But please consider this, first of all, we are not talking of events here, we are talking of suffering here. And suffering is always subjective.
No external event can provoke a response of suffering from you, if you were not prepared for that event — prepared not in the sense of readiness, prepared in the sense of vulnerability.
If you were not vulnerable to that one thing, that one thing couldn’t have elicited a response of suffering from you. It could have caused you damage in the physical sense. Maybe your money is robbed away, maybe your arm is hacked off, those things can surely happen without your consent. There is so much in the physical world that is just random. Suffering is not random.
Vedant is a darshan of ultimate responsibility, therefore ultimate empowerment. You have the power to dictate your inner conditions. You’re not a hapless thing being thrown around by random forces of chance. Things don’t happen to you, you are an equal participant, rather you are the progenitor. And if you are that, then why do you play the weakling? Why do you ask questions in such servitude? Why do we believe that we are victims of circumstances?
This was about the number 15. Be it 15, be it 15,000 — they are all in me, through me, from me. And this “me” that is projecting this great diversity has to ultimately dissolve into Advait. If it remains, the diversity will remain. Diversity will mean false choice, and that will mean I’ll never be at rest.
Now, what does the Rishi mean here when he says that the parts all return into the whole? Being fragmented is our suffering, and we all live in fragmented, that is, divided conditions. We are not one. Just as the world outside is many, we are many, not without reason. The many-ness of the world creates many imprints on our minds, and those many imprints all operate from their own centers.
The many things outside of us that we perceive become the many masters that rule us, and each of those masters has a certain province within us. One part of us is controlled by the urge for profits, one part of us is controlled by the husband or the wife, one part of us is devoted to a particular ideology, “I’m a socialist” and these parts just cannot agree with each other.
The relationship one has with his occupation just does not sit well with the relationship one has with his religious inclination. But they all exist within us and they quarrel with each other. We are the battleground. We are being slaughtered daily. We are not the same entity when situations change, and our changing existence is not an autonomous response to the change in circumstances.
When circumstances change, we are forced into submissive and corresponding change. These are two very different things. Circumstances keep changing all the time, right? One thing is that circumstances change and I retain my autonomy. What is that autonomy called? Atma. That remains, I don’t stray too far away from it. Circumstances change, and my response to them is one of freedom. I do change when circumstances change, but it’s not as if I’m a slave to circumstances, that is one thing.
But that’s not the way most of us operate. When circumstances change, they beat us into changing as per their demand. When in front of the idol in the temple, we are one being. In front of the boss in the office, we are just another being. It’s not as if choice is being exercised, it is a compulsion. This is called fragmentation. This is what is being referred to in the verse. The 15 parts, we said it could have been 15,000, because there do exist not 15 but indeed 15,000 parts within us, and those parts are just not good, right?
How do you feel being with the boss in the temple? Do you see the conflict? It’s easy when you are in front of the boss and you are wearing a mask. It’s affordable when you are in front of the deity and wearing another mask. But life loves fun. Life will create a situation when you are in front of the deity with the boss. Now which mask will you wear? Even if physically such a situation does not arise, internally such a situation always exists, because we have just too many masters commanding us, holding our reins.
They have to all converge into one, and when they converge into one, the one just cannot stand, it dissolves, it goes away. Do not have multiple masters. Do not be slave to situations. Do not be thrown around by circumstances — that’s the message of Vedant. Getting it?
It’s not very skillful or clever of us to wear a thousand hats at a thousand different places, do we think so? No. In front of elders in the family, we live and behave one way. In front of somebody you are wooing, or your wife or your fiancée, you are just another personality, are you not? And when we do that, we think it’s very clever of us, “Look how I fooled both of them. Granny thinks I’m such an obedient and ideal child, well-behaved, thinking nothing of the bad things in the world.” Right?
“And my girlfriend, in front of her, I’m the sexy stud.” And we think we have been able to manage both of them, right? From this kind of thinking arise phrases like “work–life balance” and such things. People think that their profession is one thing, their personal life is another thing, and there is no continuity. And when there is no continuity, there can be no harmony.
The one thing I have always advised those who are on the verge of choosing a career, or even those who are deep into their careers, let there be no dissonance between who you are and what you do. Your work is who you are. Do not say that you work just for money, and that your real life starts after work.
Or is it possible that you are a very affectionate and soft father to your kids, and you work in a firm that slaughters kids of animals to sell packaged meat? There would be a bloodbath within. Are you getting it? Let the deed reflect the doer, and let the doer reflect the truth. In other words, the ego should follow the truth. The ‘I’-sense, the ‘I’-identity, should not be deeply attached to anything. It should simply be an inquirer, a seeker, a lover of truth.
And if you say you love the truth, then let that reflect in your deeds. Do not assume too many identities, and even the ones that you do assume, let them sit very lightly on your shoulders. No identity is your real identity. Have a truthful identity, and once you have that, if that is how you internally know yourself and think of yourself, then let that reflect in all that you do. Do not create fragments. It’s because those fragments hurt us so badly that the Rishi is saying that in the state of liberation those fragments disappear. Had those fragments been good for us, there was no need for them to disappear. But they must go away.
Questioner: Sir, the ability to see that we are in the same situation as many others before us, even though it might appear different, can save us from committing the same mistake as others. In this sense, reducing diversity or reducing 8,000 to 8 is beneficial. Then why does **Vedant say that 8 and 8,000 are not different?
Acharya Prashant: Because even the eight are just one. If you want to categorize, why create eight different categories? Even the eight are just one. So straight away come to one. And being stuck at 8 is just as bad as being stuck at 8,000. How does it matter where you are stuck? You are stuck.
There are all these vehicles on the road, you can neatly classify them into 8 categories, can’t you? All the vehicles on the road can be classified into 8 categories. Now, which of these categories would you want to be run down under? They are all one. You are hit by one of those 8,000 vehicles, what happens to you? You’re gone. You classify them into 8 categories, the result is just the same. They are one. They are one, and all of them are to be avoided, avoided in the sense of not inviting a collision.
See, we are all system-makers, and systems we do make. Having made systems, we think those systems are final. No, they are not final. You have to go beyond every inner system that you create. You can say, “People are of 4 kinds,” and you can classify the entire 800 crore people of the world into 4. It’s clever, but not very useful when it comes to liberation.
