107. Three dimensions of Experience🔗

The single most important understanding that Patanjali wants us to have about vairagya is this: choice is suffering, choicelessness is bliss.

When you come to the understanding of choicelessness, you will suddenly start radiating so much of energy, so much of awareness, and you will be attracting so much wealth towards you, but you will not be bound by it at all.

I want you to understand this word, ‘guṇavaitṛṣṇyam’ - free from qualities. How are we caught in the qualities, and how can we liberate ourselves from the qualities?

If you just look a little deeply, you will see that your attachments and suffering are not caused just by the objects themselves. The quality of the mood which you experience through the object is what causes the suffering. If you believe that a certain mood is created by a particular object, and you enjoy that mood, you are going to keep trying to have that same object again and again in your life.

For example, you want money not just for the sake of money. You want money because you believe that money expands your freedom and gives you more choices in life. If you don't have money, all you can do is lie down on the couch in your home and worry. If you have money, you have more choices - so you can lie down in Hawaii beach and worry, or you can lie down in Miami beach and worry, or you can lie down in an Indian hill-station and worry! Of course, till you change your inner blueprint, these are the only choices you will have!

Similarly, if you feel that an object or situation creates an unpleasant mood | you, you are naturally going to reject it. So everything boils down to the guna, the quality which you experience through a person or object or situation.

the object is also the same, the person who is experiencing is also the same, but the experience itself will suddenly be different.

All we need to understand is, the experience and the experienced (the object) are independent of each other, they cannot be logically connected. You can see in your life - when you are in love, how connected you feel with the other person, how you always wanted to spend time with that person, and suddenly when that love disappears, the whole thing is topsy- turvy, the whole thing is different. Now you just want to escape from that person! The person who is experiencing is the same, the person who is giving the experience is same, but suddenly the experience becomes different.

Three things need to be understood here: • The object or person or money or home or car or bank balance or relationship or situation in the outer world • The experience which you go through because of that object or person or situation, which creates a certain emotion, a certain quality of experience in your inner space • The connection between the two - the external object and the internal experience

In Vedanta, we have a word called triputi bheda. It means object- subject-experience. For example, a sweet may create joy in you, so the experiencer experiences the joy. After some time, maybe after eating four or five sweets, the same sweet may create a very different experience in the experiencer! He may even experience disgust with that sweet. Please understand, here

All the three are constantly changing independent of one another, but you go on believing that they are permanent, and their relationship will always be the same. The very root idea with which we function is this. This gap between our understanding and the reality is responsible for all our suffering, both in the outer world and in spiritual practice.

The experience and the experienced (the object) are independent of each other!