I Am Free

The answer to violence is love and reconstruction of the lost links of communication. ~ Amritopanishad

"Amritopanishad

Here and now liberation for me from the shackles of my body.  

My awareness is a mirror. It reflects me to myself. So I see myself only. All that I see, all that I experience, is my own self. This whole world is me, a reflection of myself. I contain this world which has arisen in me as an experience. Space and time are thoughts in me. I am not delimited by a subset of my thoughts. So I exist beyond space and time. I am immortal. I am free.  

Since I am the whole world and beyond it too, I cannot die. I exist, my awareness exists, when time itself is not there. So I was never born, I can never die.  

Since I am the whole world, I am not a part of it, particularly, the part which appears to me as my body. When others say I am dead, no more, and my body is burning, I see myself through the millions of others' eyes I have. When I am seeing my body burn, how could I have died?  

What is death? Moving awareness away from a particular time or place makes that particular time or place die. Lack of awareness is death. It's like sleeping. But, I wake up in a different body, casting away all my previous ideas into the waste paper basket of the past. Some times, I may pick up a discarded paper from the basket. That's when I remember a past life experience.  

The process of death is not unfamiliar to me. I can be aware of my foot. Now, I can be aware of my hand. When I am aware of my foot, I am not aware of my hand, I don't know if it was there. Next moment when I become aware of it, it came to being. Birth and death, these are continuously happening every moment. They are painless. I cannot be afraid of birth, I cannot be afraid of death, since I am not afraid of passage of time. Then why and how can I be afraid of death? Of stoppage of time? Death is my friend not to be afraid of, nor wept for. Death is a celebration, to be enjoyed, like throwing away useless torn clothes.  

Death does not exist. Nor does birth. Nor does growth. The world is a constant invariant. That contains all experiences which flow in time. It is full when time flows. It is empty when time does not flow.  

Whatever I see is myself. This is a fundamental truth. From this all possible interpretations of truth flow. What is truth?  

Truth is that which is not limited by space, time or matter. It exists everywhere, always, in every thing. So it is called pervasive (Vishnu), immortal (Kaala), and matter (Brahma). Truth is also called existence (Brahma), consciousness (Shiva), and bliss (Vishnu).  

Each aspect of truth implies the other two; so there is only one, the unity of the three. How is that?  

Deny existence. Can anything that does not exist be conscious or bliss? Deny consciousness. Can anything exist or be blissful? Deny bliss. Can any consciousness or existence be without pain or pleasure or peace (all three aspects of bliss)? So each implies the other two. They are all one.  

I love myself. I am the world. Put these two together. I get: I love the world, the whole of it, because it is a part of me. I love this world as it is; all its vices, all its virtues.  

If I see something I don't like, it is like a bad thought in me. I do not hate it, I love it still, because it is also me. Now I get the idea: love overcomes hate, it is the answer to hate.  

I believe in myself. What else is there to believe in, when the whole world is myself? My belief in myself means that I believe in the world.  

I have a choice. To be morose and depressed. To be happy and joyful. No matter what happens to me, or to my kith and kin. I choose to be happy and joyful. No matter what happens.  

Sometimes things do go wrong. Like sometimes, I get bad thoughts in me. Let them go wrong. Its alright to let go off things. To happen the way they want to. This is the formula for peace. To let go of control. This is sometimes called surrender.  

Suppose a part of me, say my little finger of my leg is hurting. I don't take a stone and hurt it more, because it is hurting me. On the contrary, I take pains to nurture it, to relieve the pain. Suppose someone hurts me badly. That one is a part of me. It is my duty to nourish that one, remove the ignorance there. All I have to do to remove my hurt, my injury is to take away my awareness from that experience. That gives me an idea; my awareness gives energy to a thought.  

My awareness is like a magnifying glass. It amplifies what I focus it on. It manifests that, by not lending my awareness. I will not afford the luxury of allowing negative thoughts. Because they are nourished by awareness, they grow on it, they manifest it, they attract everything that increases that particular brand of negativity.  

The answer to violence is love and reconstruction of the lost links of communication. The answer to violence is never fresh violence. In this lies the art of survival, in the mundane sense.  

I will lend my thoughts to harmony. My whole existence is devoted to that single cause. Harmony allows different notes to play without interfering with each other. Harmony allows freedom and discipline. Harmony is an aesthetic combination of liberty and bondage. I love it. It pleases me. It pleases everyone.  

Knowing that poison cannot kill me (the whole world), I choose still to eat food, not poison. That is my choice. I take what nourishes me.  

I am nourished by love. Love that I can give to other parts of me. And the love other parts of me give to me. If I can be of any use to anyone, I will let them use it. If this particular body, mind or intellect are any use to some `others', what better pleasure is there for me than offer it in service? Is it not like my hand taking a soap and washing other parts of my body to help them become fresh?  

I love to see beauty all around me. I love to see people's happiness. It is my commitment to see every living being happy. I nourish my love by expressing it, not containing it. The more I give love, the more I get it. So the more I give. It is my nature to give, to share my love, peace, happiness with everyone. Not silently in my mind, but by and through actions.  

I nourish my negatives, such as fears, lust, anger, greed, possessiveness, pride, jealousy and hatred by containing them, not expressing them. I transform them into fearlessness, love, calm, sharing, letting go, humility, fun and regard respectively by not lending my awareness or thinking to them."

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"You cannot have Kama to infinity. You would quickly become overwhelmed by Her Desires, which are a million-million times more than anything you are capable of containing.

So let’s say we manage to shut off Mahisha, Kama, Desire. Let’s say we’ve turned off our lust to get more and more. What do we substitute for it? Eros; Sringara, Love. You want to beautify the world – you are tuning in to the desire of the Mother, and Her desire is to discover better and better expressions of Her Love in this world: Better civilizations, better understanding, better manifestations of Her beautiful creations; that is what She is after. And when you tune into that desire, then Kama becomes Sringara.

The transformation from Kama to Sringara is the story of Mahishasura Mardhini, Devi as the Slayer of Desire. What is this Mahisha? Mahisha is the bull which represents blind, hurtful lust. Lust has to be transformed into something higher. Lust means that the notion of the other is preserved and you want it badly, no matter what cost. So you want to grab and seek only for your pleasure, ignoring the other's sentiments or feelings. That is lust. This has to be transformed into love. In lust there is no caring for the other's pleasure, as you would care for your own pleasure. You are only interested in your pleasure. That has to be transformed. Transformation means changing its nature. Transformation means killing its present nature, and giving birth to a new nature.

However, love can not survive without lust. Let us understand this. The lotus flower is born in the mud then grows in the water. Its flower comes out into the open, into air and looks to the light and blooms when the sun comes out. We are like the lotus. You are born in flesh. You can say, "I don't want this flesh, I want to throw it away", and then you cut off the lotus from the stem. It is the lotus itself that will die. So it is the fear, the lust, the greed and the jealousy which are transformed into love. It is the demonic that have to be transformed into the divine. But you cannot totally destroy the disorder. Order and disorder have to be in balance.

When She comes and kills Mahishasura – ardha nishkrantha evasou – he “comes out half of it” (i.e., halfway out of the Buffalo he has transformed himself into; halfway out of the body of his Desire) and devya veeryena samyuthaha – he is filled by Her energy and thus he emerges. Devi transforms that loveable part of Kama into love, and She slays carnal desire, the hateful part that remains. Then She grants Mahishasura a boon: “Whenever my name is mentioned, your name will be mentioned first.” And thus is She called Mahishasura Mardhini. She has controlled him.

So lust transformed into love is what preserves the world. That is why it is Sthiti, Cosmic Maintenance. This is the function of Maha Lakshmi. Maha Kali governs the first part of the Durga Sapthashathi – the birth of the child from inside the womb of the mother. And then in the second chapter we have its continuance in the form of love sustained by erotic desire. The erotic expressing itself in waves of beauty, waves of organization.

Annihilation of Shumbha-Nishumbha
The final part is the Shumba-Nishumba vadha, governed by Maha Saraswati. In the film The Matrix Reloaded, there is a version of the Durga Sapthashathi demon called Raktabija. Each time a drop of this demon’s blood falls to the ground, another demon is born out of that drop, in equal proportion to the original. Rakta here means Desire, the seed of desire as it exists at the Muladhara level. You kill Kama, and it becomes anger; you kill anger, and it becomes lobha; and so on. And once again Kali has to come to the rescue. When the Devi tells Her, “Extend your tongue and make sure that the seed does not fall to the ground!” – that means that the seed of Desire is not allowed to return to the Muladhara Chakra, where it would multiply into more and more Desires, but is stopped at the Agni Chakra, which simply burns it away. The purpose of Srividya Upasana is to loosen the structures that constitute Duality and bring them into Unity. What we’re trying to establish is the identity between what you see and what you are.

One way to conceive this is to see the whole world as collapsing into ourselves; another way is to see ourselves as expanding into the whole world – both are equal. The first is achieved by the Pasham, the noose that attracts everything to you. The second is achieved by the Ankusham, the goad that pushes everything away.

In fact, we need both; they are the very atoms of life. If we have only attraction, everything reduces to a point. If we have only repulsion, then everything expands away to infinity. First you need attraction and then, if it comes too close, you need repulsion to push it all away.

Remember this: Our inquiry does not stop at stories. One has to go behind the stories and understand the meaning of every single line.

Loka samastha sukhino bhavanthu.
Let the whole world be happy.
Pranams"

~ Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati (Guruji)