Cosmic Consciousness: Break Your Mental Barriers

By S H VENKATRAMANI

Break Your Mental Barriers

Most of us find ourselves trapped in our mortal ken because of our ingrained habit of linear and sequential thinking. We find it difficult to break this habit. The habit arises from our innate striving to discern patterns in our sensory perception of reality. Our mind interprets these perceptions by piecing together their constituent elements with other entities in our mental database of past experience. By systematically stringing these patterns together we have created the corpus of human knowledge.

An apple fell on Newton's head. This provoked and inspired the legendary scientist to formulate the law of gravitation. A physicist whose life's mission was to unravel the laws of nature, Newton was able to intuitively discern the underlying physical law linking the fall of the apple from the tree and the motion of the earth around the Sun. Newton discovered a pattern connecting natural phenomena and formulated the law of gravitation.

All knowledge constitutes the discovery of relationships between different objects, phenomena and various concepts that were once thought to be independent of each other. The establishment of a cause-effect relationship between the formation of clouds in the sky and rainfall added to man's knowledge. The causal correlation that we have discovered between a mosquito bite and malaria enriched medical knowledge.

The web of concepts and relationships ensnares man and distracts him from spiritual quest. A concept is an abstraction derived from perceptions. It is a certain specific feature of a perception that can be carved out as a separate and distinct entity; a definable and distinctive feature that our mind can identify.

When we see a rectangular block of wood, we are able to identify it as being four-sided. We distinguish that abstracted physical property from the wood itself. We can also make out that the rectangular piece of wood and the rectangular piece of metal share the feature of being four-sided. Our perceptions of the two material objects as quadrilaterals strikes a relationship between them is also knowledge.

Our conceptual ability also allows the maya (illusion) of dualism to sneak unnoticed into the human psyche. Our propensity to dissect every perception, break it up into its constituents, analyse these different constituents and discover the connections between them, destroys the indivisible unity of all consciousness. A relationship presumes the existence of at least two entities. So the very effort to discover and explain a relationship subtly injects dualism into the mindscape, abnegating advaita .

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: "Where there is a duality, as it were, there one sees another; there one smells another; there one tastes another". But if you are able to keenly watch your mind at work, with awareness and sensitivity, but without judging or evaluating, you will find yourself wafting above all equations and even catch a glimpse of the evanescent glimmer of eternity. When you are sensitive as gossamer, you will receive subliminal 'Intimations of Immortality'.

Go beyond sense perception, beyond the mind, which is a reference library of all your past experiences and acquired knowledge. In the depth of your soul, you will experience the incandescence of the creative cosmic void. In that depth, you lose yourself. You, as a concept and as an idea, will cease to exist. There is only the Tao of reality, the background hum of cosmic existence. The intense, soulful experiencing of living reality. There is no 'you'. Only the cosmic consciousness, the other, the paramatma . Thou art that - Tat Tvam Asi .