Burbling Along

 

When you are young you burble along with your own special properties of amiability or being a nuisance or that unique special blend that is all your own. Character is in the process of being formed and it is likely unless you come into abrupt contact with the legal system that it will be forgiven for its shapelessness.  You  may even be told ‘life will knock the corners of you boy’.  What a thing to say, am I not great as I am?  No you are probably not but stay busy adapting the world to yourself.  Then at a certain stage you get into a relationship often marriage back in the day, in  your early 20s, imagine.  Rows or radical adaptation would commence or resignation.  There it is, it is what it is.  We were still malleable.  Children raised their pudgy little paws, endearing as bear cubs.  They demanded care and you gave it.  You adapted to what was in essence a life of obedience and you got on with it.

Nowadays, that dread word, you will be in your 30‘s not so behaviorally supple.  Is your relationship committed or not, you don’t know.  What does that mean anyhow?  The having of children has been put off, now never seemed to be the right time.  Both of you are set in your ways with individual and couple routines and there’s the barrier of inertia that keeps both of you burbling along.

Thou art That #155, #156, #157

 

It has been said before that the benefit derived from (the proximity of) the Self is that it appears conscious like the former.  Being a revealer the intellect, like light and so on, pervades objects such as jars etc.

Just as a jar placed in the sun may be said to be brought to light, so, an object in the intellect may be said to be brought under its cognizance.  This bringing to cognizance is nothing but being pervaded by the intellect.  Objects become pervaded by the intellect one after another.

The intellect pervades an object (and assumes its form) when the object is revealed through the help  (i.e., the reflection) of the Self.  Like time and space the all-pervading Self can have no order or succession (in pervading objects).  (#155, 156, 157 Chap. XVIII ‘Thou art That’ Upadesa Sahasri)

Pervasion being an action must be performed by the intellect.  As previously noted the intellect has action but no consciousness.  That is supplied by the Self which due to its closeness to the intellect reflects consciousness on to it.  Thus the intellect appears to be conscious and directed towards an object.  As the individual subject (Jiva) is located in the material universe of space and time its attention flows sequentially.

In these expressions of the subject/object nexus the analogy of reflection is required to do a lot of work.  The core truth for advaita is that everything is within Consciousness.  There is the tantric saying ‘what is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere’.