Running to Stand Still

Welcome to Sutra A Day.

No matter where you are, there you are. I learned this lesson at a young age – 16 to be precise. I was suffering the small town midwestern adolescent experience as a misfit with too much acne and relatively absent parents, generally wallowing in misery, fantasy and Taco Bell when I decided that I’d go be a foreign exchange student. Surely my sadness and lack of connection were due to this horrible place, not something inside me. 

Newsflash… I was still sad (and still had acne) in Australia. And one of my host families was going through a divorce and kids were still cliquey, just with cuter accents. It was a year of highlights – whale watching, meeting other students from around the world, snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney sights, and on and on. And lowlights – mean girls, weight gain, and my mom’s remarriage while I was on the other side of the world. 

Whatever, I learned, I still had to learn it again. And again. And again. And again. You get the picture. 

Liberation

18. Virama pratyayabhyasa purvah samskaraseso’ nyah. “By the firmly convinced practice of the complete cessation of the mental modifications, the impressions only remain. This is the other samadhi (asamprajnata samadhi)”

In last week’s Sutra a Day (the current inaccuracy of the name of these posts isn’t lost on me, I’ll pick up the pace again dear 20 or so readers of mine) – we learned that there are two types of samadhi, or basically enlightenment and the first type is broken out into four parts in which we progressively, basically turn inward and go more abstract. In the first kind, according to Satchidananda’s interpretation, we can still be pulled back into worldly experience by our “samskara” – or what they call seeds and I suppose I’d just call attachment points or tethers. 

In this next kind of samadhi, there is no ego feeling, no past impressions, there is only consciousness and nothing else, he says. “Although you appear to be in the world then, you are not involved…He or she is called a jivanmukta – one who lives but at the same time is liberated.” He goes on to warn that people can’t renounce the world by hiding in a cave somewhere, for example. “Such people can never be free from nature. They can never hide anywhere; wherever they go, Nature will follow. There is no other way except to understand it, handle it properly and then rise above it.”

When I first read this, I thought, BUT NO!!!! I AM of the world. I don’t want to let go of love, joy, travel, tactile experiences, and how on earth can one live in the world and not be of it. I was very literal. Then I thought back to my experience over time, about how every time I find myself faced with discomfort or pain, I feel this itch to change something about my external environment, a job, an exercise routine, a location and how this never really works because the same thing comes up time and again no matter what I do. 

You can never escape Nature (Praktri). There is no other way except to understand it, handle it properly and then rise above it.

Ahhh, I thought. And here we are again. It’s the internal journey. It is actually about being free from those samskaras in a real way. But you can’t get there without a process. Letting go is a process. Liberation is not about freedom of movement on the outside. It’s about freedom of movement on the inside.

I have a long way to go.