I have recently been thinking a lot on three fundamental aspects of our day to day living – the People surrounding us, the Circumstances we find ourselves in and the Events that keep taking place in our lives. I would like to give a more compact term to the Trilogy of the People, Events and Circumstances – and since I am not much of a creative person, I would just call it the Trilogy of Existence – or Trilogy in short. The matter of this article rests on the fundamental premise of Upanishads – that the Aatman (or Brahman) alone IS. The rest is merely Adhaysa (or superimposition). While this assertion will need to be almost axiomatically accepted, what follows can still be perceived even at an intuitive level with some amount of common-sense. But for the more rigorously minded folks, the basis for the arguments herein can be traced to Vedanta. I wanted to get this submission laid out in advance so as to preclude any further doubts as to the basis of the statements to follow.
The rest of the article seeks to establish the overwhelming effect of our “thought patterns/desires or Vasanas as they are called in Sanskrit and Vedantic Literature” in shaping the nature and form of the Trilogy mentioned earlier. It seeks to eventually establish that what we see around us, invariably disguised in the trilogy mentioned earlier, has its roots firmly grounded in our Thoughts alone (conscious but mostly sub-conscious). It is a position that is – as we will shortly see – in juxtaposition to commonly held thoughts and beliefs as to the nature and cause of the Trilogy surrounding us.
The world we see around ourselves does not exist independently of us as commonly understood. This is the principal purport of all Upanishadic Teaching. This misconception - which is resolved in the Upanishads by the concept of Adhyasa (or superimposition, alluded to earlier) - is one of the fundamental causes of human misery even though in itself it is not the root cause. The root cause lies in a different locus - and that is the locus of our very own Self. Without going into the nitty gritty of what Adhyasa is all about - for it is too gigantic a subject in its own right - Adhyasa is how Brahmasutra explains the nature of all that we see around us. In simple terms, Brahman alone is the reality and the rest of the Cosmos we see around is merely a superimposition which appears Real and Independent owing to our Primal Ignorance of our own True Self. This ignorance - as has been pointed out in earlier articles - is akin to the Rope appearing as a Snake and Water appearing as a mirage in the desert. Both the Snake and the Water are false - but for the duration that the Snake appears - it causes fear in us and vanishes when true knowledge dawns, and the water in the mirage ceases to excite us because its truth is known to us and yet continues to be seen even when the truth of it has been established. In a similar fashion, it has been argued that the World is Unreal - insofar as it has no Independent Existence - but its existence derives from the Brahman. Whether concurrently with the knowledge of Truth, the world disappears as does the Snake from the Rope or continues as does the Water in the mirage is hard to tell - but is irrelevant to our current discussion. Besides this is not what I intend to discuss anyway - but since I will be using the premise of Brahman's reality and non-reality of the world as a fundamental pillar to establish the case of the Universe being an outward concretization of our inner state of mind - some reference to the underlying literature seems appropriate at this point.
When we see a beautiful (cute, good-looking) individual, we attribute the occurrence to chance or luck because that's what we are given to understand through our general experience. We believe almost unquestionably in the truth of the following statements – this person makes me sick; oh how I hate him (or her); oh I wish I didn’t have to undergo so much pain just to get a simple thing done; why is he (or she) behaving this way?; why doesn’t she (or he) “get” me?; what have I done to merit what I am getting?; why is God so unfair to me when I have never hurt anyone ever in my life?, and so on. All these are verily a matter of routine experience. We firmly believe that it is the circumstances or the people or the events such as these that are making us sick and causing all the ills in our lives. What this article seeks to establish is the exact opposite. It seeks to turn this notion on its head by arguing that inasmuch as these people are bereft of an independent existence, their reality therefore is merely a projection of “some aspect” of our own state of mind. The Trilogy itself is merely an outward reflection of the turmoil (or bliss) within us – only it appears to us in the form of a person or an event or a circumstance. It’s not as if these People, for example, existed in their own zone and zoomed into our focus to make life miserable (or, by the same token, pleasurable – though this aspect is not being debated for it causes no problems to us to be a subject matter for debate) for us following some inexplicable quirk of destiny or fate, which is the commonly used argument to describe the reasoning behind our current situations.
Insofar as the Universe is merely a projection of our own Thoughts, it can be shown that the beautiful individual (or the despicable event or circumstance we find ourselves in) we see is simply a manifestation of our own desires (known in some cases and sub-conscious in most others). By the same token, when we seem to be surrounded by loving, caring individuals, it is a direct response to our love for our own self. The foregoing exposition in itself may not translate into a ground-breaking finding, but its implication has the potential to fundamentally change our perspective of life as we know and see it.
When we see people who we believe hate us, what we are seeing is actually a progeny of our own hatred for our own selves. It is this hatred – the cause of which may or may not be directly known to us – that materializes in the form of a Person (or event or circumstance). We believe that this Person or Event or Circumstance came about independently and has no connection with our inner state of mind. What follows then is the struggle to “fix” the person, or event or circumstance so as to make them more conducive to us. It is here that I challenge you to reverse your position, following the teachings mentioned earlier, and look into the possibility instead of the Trilogy being fashioned out of your own inner turmoil, the Trilogy itself being merely a “concretized reflection” of an essentially abstract emotion buried in your own self.
The Universe is created by our own imaginations. This statement has been analyzed in an earlier article on the Reality of Existence in my blog and follows from the Upanishadic lore. Our imaginations in turn are created from an innate and natural power residing within us. It is erroneous to ascribe an independent status to people, events and circumstances around us. We are their creators and we are their sustainers and we equally are their destroyers. This has been elaborated in the article mentioned earlier. If the Truth of this is questioned then the rest will become meaningless. But if the testimony of Holy Sages and the Upanishads is held sacrosanct then the discussion can continue.
Now let’s see from practical experience how far what has been mentioned thus far is validated. How often we have seen that when we are happy, everything around us seems happy and joyful. Conversely when we are sad, everything around us seems to evince sadness. When we are in Love, the whole world seems lovable. When we are heart-broken, we begin to think the whole world as treacherous. Some of these statements may sound sweeping in nature and intelligent ones amongst us would be ready with counter-arguments. But if you pause to reflect on the matter calmly, the truth will be evident in full force. On account of the foregoing therefore, it can be reasoned that it is actually our thoughts (conscious, but mostly sub-conscious) that generate the People, Events, Circumstances trilogy. The obvious implication is that by the power of our thoughts we have a capability right in our own hands to influence to a huge degree, if not completely, the composition of the Trilogy, for better or for worse!
Tomorrow, when you see a sulking boss, a furious wife, a pestering friend or even a lovely woman or a cute child or win a lottery of a million dollars, pause to think a while before ascribing the happening to mere chance or luck. Something far deeper has colluded to bring about the kind of trilogy surrounding you and know that the power to determine its nature is actually in your own hands. Know the force of your thoughts, for the truth is that there is no one else out there existing independently of you anyway. It's just YOU, the True Self, Brahman that exists in Reality. All else is Adhyasa (Superimposition of the world on the True Substratum or Brahman).
For so long as the bodily journey continues, an appreciation for this knowledge can give you some degree of control in governing the trilogy, and even if you cannot control or govern everything, you will at least understand the part of YOU that's causing the despicable portion of the trilogy surrounding you. This way at least you will stop the blame game and the analysis/paralysis syndrome that eventually follows when the trilogy goes bad. You will be much more contented and happy.
So before you blame your spouse as the source of your misery, know that the spouse in reality has no existence of his/her own. The problem which you are ascribing to your spouse has its roots in YOU alone. Analyze and fix that first before dashing to the family court to file for divorce. Chances are that once you have reached the core of the issue and fixed it, the errant spouse would seem to concurrently undergo a massive 'transformation' of sorts and would seem to become one with you, with all your issues/problems vanishing in thin air. The wise one knows all along that it isn't the spouse that needed the fix - it's YOU who needed it and once that's done, the ”errantness” of the spouse disappears even as the source of the errantness itself is annihilated.
