ANNAPURNA SARADA, Friday, August 21, 2015 10:44 am

Dyeing the Mind the Color of Real

“It is all a question of the mind.  Bondage and liberation are of the mind alone.  The mind will take the color you dye it with.  It is like white clothes just returned from the laundry.  If you dip them in red dye, they will be red.  If you dip them in blue or green, they will be blue or green.  They will take only the color you dip them in, whatever it may be.”  – Sri Ramakrishna

Vedanta is immensely practical and empowering.  First, the seers tell us that our very nature is “shuddha-buddha-mukta” – ever pure, the essence of Knowledge, and ever free.  Then they assert from their direct experience, that it is the mind that hides this, and it is in our power to train and purify the mind via spiritual disciplines so that we too may have direct experience of our true Freedom. 

The first and foremost practice is discrimination between the Self and the non-Self, the Unchanging and changing, the Sentient and the insentient.  In the last blog, we used the terms “aparinami” and “ajativada” as the two pillars of Advaita Vedanta that serve as our guidelines when practicing the spiritual art form of discrimination (viveka).  Aparinami is non-transformation and ajativada means non-origination.  Anything we perceive that transforms or comes in or out of existence belongs to the non-Self, the insentient, the changing, the unreal – to the realms of cause and effect, wherein all changes take place.  The witness alone is unchanging.

Discrimination purifies the mind and makes it ready to detach (vairagya) from what is unreal, changing, insentient, and finite.  Sri Ramakrishna also used the analogy of dipping the mind in Truth, like a new cloth, again and again, until it becomes soft and pliable.  New cotton cloths in India are heavily starched.  When they are unfolded they are so stiff that they remain creased like a mini mountain-scape when laid out on the floor.  It takes several washings before they become soft and nice for wearing.  Like this, ordinary mind is stiff with ignorance, coated with negative karmas, and creased with samskaras – it is unfit for Consciousness to wear and sport in freely.  It takes a powerful cleaning agent (viveka) to dissolve all these, to wash them away…and repeated “washings” will be needed.

Though we are to practice discrimination moment by moment, it is in formal sitting “meditation” that we can carefully withdraw from false identification with material mechanisms like body, senses, and mind.  I put quote marks around the word meditation, because true meditation does not occur until the mind is purified of habitual and unconscious identification with phenomena. Thus the aspirant needs to discriminate, then withdraw the senses and mind from objects.  A mind thus purified is able to achieve one-pointed concentration long enough for meditation to occur, and it is in meditation that one feels the presence of divine Reality.  The illumined never leave this default position of discrimination; it has become natural to them.  We admire their peace and equanimity, which is based on having dyed their mind the color of Real.

In closing, here is another story, also involving “cloth,” from Sri Ramakrishna’s treasure house of teachings:  A traveler once came upon a dyer who served the people of the village with a single dye tub. Standing nearby, the visitor spent the whole day watching customers approach the dyer, one after another, and ask for their cloths to be dyed yellow, blue, red, etc.  He would dip their cloths in that one tub and produce for them the color they asked.  At the end of the day, the intelligent bystander came up to him, cloth in hand, and asked, “Sir, please dye my cloth the color of the dye in your tub.”  

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