Understanding Indian Vedic Philosophy (Vedanta #3) — You Are the Problem. You Lack Self-Knowledge
There are basic defects in your thinking
Your actions have one of four ends.
When you see something but you don’t recognize it for what it is, you think it to be something other than what it is.
You are born helpless. You are dependent on others for your needs.
You seek security through insecurity and fullness via limited means. Security is sort in stashing away money but the value of money goes up and down (ie: inflation). You look to others for support who themselves are also always changing and are more interested in themselves than saving you. You look to your children as you grow older but they move away get married and have children of their own.
None of these sources of apparent security are free from defects.
Every action delivers a limited result. You inflate a tired on your car. The action is limited to that tire only. You wash your car, it only stays clean for a short amount of time. It doesn’t stay clean forever.
Incremental actions never produce infinite results. You are never satiated or full. There is never recognition on your behalf that you seek absolute security and unlimitedness.
You convert situations into personal problems
Problems that you encounter are personalized to be your problem. When the problems are resolved you then bring the past into the present and project out into the future.
Your car gets a flat tire and you change the tire. After this, you continue to fear that you will get another flat tire.
The temporary flat tire gets converted into a permanent personal problem.
You center your problems on your I-sense and become unhappy
The things in the world have no inherent meaning.
You give the things in the world meaning. On a hot day, a cold drink is seen as pleasurable. When you are sick and cold, the same cold drink is seen as undesirable. The drink has not changed its nature in any way.
Your physical body, sense organs, and mind function according to their nature. The body looks to self-heal. The senses take in stimuli as designed. They don’t complain or seek something other than what they are.
You cast judgment on them yourself. “My body is too fat” or “I cannot see that far away.” When you say your knee hurts. You say “I am experiencing a lot of pain.”
You look to another person to help and see yourself as being dependent on another. You see yourself as helpless. This is further extended to “I am not loveable” or “I am never understood.”
Animals also experience pleasure and pain. They don’t reach these self-conscious decisions as being ugly or being overweight.
You are aware of yourself as a distinct person. There is an I-sense. That you exist as an apparent individual self. You see yourself as either happy or unhappy. The problems you experience are centered on the I-sense. Whether you are happy or unhappy is on the I-sense. Your feeling of security is centered on yourself alone.
You don’t know exactly who you are
You seek solutions to these problems. The problem is centered on yourselves. You need to decide whether the self-judgments are correct.
When your knee is sore, is it you that is in pain? There appears to be no separation of the pain in the knee and the pain you experience.
You take your breath, senses, mind, and intellect to be yourself. You think that you can improve all these aspects of yourself thus they are limited.
You do experience spikes of happiness, which are temporary. These packages of happiness drive you to seek more happiness. However, there is an underlying self-assessment that you are a wanting person. However that you experience happiness and you are a wanting person cannot co-exist.
But if being a wanting person was our true nature, we could be comfortable with it and would not complain. For example, when you are hungry you don’t complain, you understand this happens and it’s normal for you to experience hunger.
Similarly, when there is something foreign in the body such as foodstuff that causes food poison the body rejects it. When it does this, you don’t consider the body rejecting this foodstuff as unnatural.
Sorrow, insecurity, and unhappiness are not natural to you. You want to move towards what you are.
There is no object that in and of itself can be said to be happiness. No object provides all people with happiness. Some like ice cream and other people dislike it. There is no specific location in the world that all people like.
The conclusion can be then drawn that the world is not the cause of happiness. The happiness then is centered on you the apparent individual.
But how can this be so when your experience of happiness is only temporary? Why is your happiness conditional on some experience?
You lack some knowledge of yourself as to why these apparent contradictions exist. There is a possibility you are what you are seeking to become. But something is impending this understanding.
Thus the next step is to become free of the problems of insecurity and unhappiness along with a complete and correct understanding of yourself.