5. Understanding And Moving Beyond
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Understanding the ahankar is easy because it is something to do with the outer world. All you need to do is, come to a point where you yourself understand that you are struggling to maintain your ahankar or image with the outer world. That is enough, the job is done! The moment you realize you are unnecessarily struggling to maintain an image for the sake of the outer world, you will stop doing it! If you just sit for a few minutes and contemplate, ‘I think what I am going to project is never going to be fulfilled or is never going to become reality’, it is enough, the job is done. You can drop ahankar.
But if you start fighting with your mamakar, if you start chiseling your mamakar, if you start developing your mamakar, there is nobody to even tell you that you are caught in it because it is something happening within you. Trying to develop the identity which you show to the outer world, and trying to develop the identity which you believe as yourself, both will end only in deep suffering, because both have no base. Neither ahankar nor mamakar have a base. The moment you understand that these two don’t have a base, that they do not have a hold over your inner space, then suddenly you will experience a great freedom, a great liberation, a deep restful awareness! This is the anandamaya kosha.
As J. Krishnamurthy calls it, it is called ‘choiceless awareness’. That awareness is a real gift from our tradition, from our great Vedantic tradition. This awareness is the essence or the fruit of the research and development which went on in Inner Science for thousands of years.