Download PDF - Stillness Speaks

outside Consciousness to evaluate it or reduce it to anything. Consciousnessalone is real.Or if this analysis seems too abstract, consider that time is different forevery individual and that the same individual experiences time differently.Where time real it would be exactly the same for every creature. One hour inan Iraqi torture chamber does not equal one hour at an exciting movie. Time,like space, is a function of the being that conceives or experiences it.Time and space are only in the mind. In the Self they don’t exist. Indeep sleep, a very familiar experience, they don’t exist. In no way do they fitour definition of reality.All Subtle Body phenomena depend on each other, the mind a richtapestry of interwoven interdependent psychic threads. Ego, one majorpsychic component, is unreal because it depends on Self ignorance.Ignorance is reducible to knowledge, because it ends when knowledge arises.Knowledge depends on Awareness. Ego is also unreal because it doesn’texist in deep sleep where all differences are dissolved. Feelings andemotions are unreal because they depend on interpretation by the intellect ofever-changing sense experiences, memory, and ideas, the person who loveshis or her spouse until he or she discovers that the spouse is unfaithful, forexample.The concepts "real" and "unreal" are reducible to intellect. Intellectreduces to thought, thought to the thinker, the thinker to Awareness. Nothought ever thought itself.Anything you can think about or experience depends on you, theAwareness. Without you there is nothing.That nothing on any level of existence is merely an apparent reality isdifficult to accept. The teachings of Vedanta are not intended to cementinto the mind clever spiritual concepts that accurately describe thenature of the objective and subjective worlds but to encourage us tothink about these worlds in a radical way. When we discriminate the innerworlds defrost and the rigid ideas that make life painful break up - like ice inspring. If the intellect no longer makes uninformed judgments about anapparent reality or fritters away its time gathering objective knowledge butturns upon itself and thinks clearly from the Self’s platform our responses tolife become natural and spontaneous. And ultimately, althoughdiscrimination means we must face continual disillusionment, in the end weare paradoxically led to the realization that everything on every level ofexistence is real - because it is the Self.33