A Final Postcard from Holy Mountain
Haunted by `Yourself
The cafe, Da Mantra, where I go on many occasions while here in Tiruvannamalai has a sign above the kitchen area. It reads “Relax - Nothing is Under Control’.
I like that. I have written in previous posts how the teaching here focuses on the fact, contrary to the assertion of Western culture generally, that there is nothing you can do ( or not do) to determine you life’s outcomes. So I will not write about that again. I am more interested in who it is that has the idea we can control our lives in the first place.
This is where it gets slippery. But the suggestion here is that it is ego, or self, that is addicted to the idea of control. The ‘real’ you, which is neither determined nor non-determined, lies hidden below this acquired idea of self.
Self, the sense of ‘me’, although a kind of ghost in the head, wants desperately to survive as an entity. Because this self has been told that it is the real you - the one with a name, with a history, with a culture, with a enormous set of decisions that has brought you to this moment. And it fights hard to survive, by pummelling you with doubts and fears. Am I really ‘getting it’? Am I ‘enlightened’ now? Is this all a big con for gullible Westerners to earn money for self styled gurus?
The self never stops questioning. It is like being haunted by yourself. Yet the self is a hallucination, a trick of the memory, like a sparkler that, rotated in the dark, appears to make a solid circle. You cannot ‘try’ to make it shut up. You can only recognise that it is not the real you. And with this recognition, your chattering, chastising, predicting, remembering mind (self) begins slowly to lose its power.
