Are you truly living in the present, or are you unconsciously re-living your past? Most of us move through life reacting to today based on fears and pleasures from yesterday. This habit creates a cycle of repetition that keeps true connection out of reach.
Below, Gurudev Shri Amritji dissects the phantom ego and shows how we divide our world into friends and enemies based on old data. By understanding how we superimpose history onto the now, we can learn to embrace the freedom of witnessing presence.
I will now share with you the core secret of life that I have discovered: you are the creator of everything that you experience. Whatever way your life is—whether it is working or not working for you—is your own creation. None of the experiences you have had in your love life, family life, work life or social life came exclusively from the outside. You have had a significant part in the way you perceived and processed all that happened.
What happens outside is perceived from the inside. And everything you have perceived and judged is your personal interpretation. Your interpretation is your creation. It wasn’t created by what happened outside. It is a creation of how you live with yourself inside. You are living within a personally created, pre-learned division. This division is addiction to pleasurable—and fear of painful—memories.
Every time you reactively interact with people, places, and things, you superimpose your reaction over the one who triggers it. In this way, your past is perpetually superimposed over the present. This means you are living your life out of split memories of ‘for me’ and ‘against me.’ You are interacting with impersonal reality through the filter of your personal past.
Even though it is true that the other may be acting from his or her personal past, what matters most is for you to recognize that you are acting out of your past. Who or what is present is the outer manifestation of the oneness presence that you are. You are the reality of oneness presence. You have no inside or outside. But if you are identified with your reactively perceived memories—your false ego self—everything you see outside appears to be either for you or against you.
When you perceive it through the reactive perceiver that you are not, it becomes the outer manifestation of an absence in you. You are not what you are attracted to or what you are afraid of. You are the witnessing presence. You are not the reactive perceiver that divides the perceived reality into good and evil, ‘for me’ and ‘against me.’ These are your creations. You are the nonreactive, impersonal, choiceless awareness. The one that chooses is the reactive perceiver, the phantom ego self that you identify with as though it is you.
Everyone and everything that you encountered in your journey through the medium of mind in the dimension of time became divided memories of personal attractions and repulsions. Your memory of relationships, events, and objects represent snapshots of what happened in the past. It has no relevance to reality.
But when someone or something triggers your fear in the present, you use it as a weapon to protect yourself from what happened. But what happened is a phantom. You are protecting a phantom self that you identify with. It does not need defending because it has no real existence.
As long as you are living and interacting with outer life through your memories of the past, your entire life is your creation. Whether your love life, family life, work life, or social life, it is all created not by you but by your memories that continue to reactively shape your experiences of life all along the way.
No matter where you go, what you do, or whom you are with, you are looking for perceived friends who will resurface positive memories of the divided, dualistic past. At the same time, you are afraid of seeming enemies who trigger your negative, painful memories of the past. You are not living in the present—you are living in the past. So, the question is Who is judging, interpreting and creating those experiences?
The past memories have nothing to do with who is currently present. The one who triggers them is not the cause of your reaction. If you were enlightened and free from all preprogrammed conditioned impressions of the past, the other would have no capacity to trigger your memories. Nobody can cause a reaction in you that is not already there. Once you become free of the prison built by your reactively perceived memories, you have no enemies, and you have no friends.
The fundamental principle for entering the unfolding journey into the spiritual dimension is to learn the turnaround technique. In the practice of Patanjali’s Ashtanga yoga, it is called pratyahara, or withdrawing from reactive thoughts and the reactive thinker every time someone or something brings up a reaction in you. This is withdrawal from the object that triggers the reaction and returning to the subject that is triggered.
Yogis call this world an illusion. The world that exists is not an illusion, but when your reactive memories are activated by external objects, relationships, or life situations that you face, what you see reactively creates illusions. Most people live in the illusive creations of their life’s problems and solutions which are created in their own minds. The real issue never gets resolved.
The phantom ego self experiences life through its memories of the past, reacts to who or what is present (friends or enemies), and lives in pursuit of friends while avoiding enemies in the future. The seeker is the subject that carries the split memories, but it attempts to find friends outside. Since the friends it finds correspond to the pleasurable, happy memories of the past, friends have nothing to do with friendship.
Even if you find friends who are in harmony with your positive old memories, the negative ones do not go away. The practice of yoga is to witness your thoughts of attraction to the pleasurable—as well as resistance to the painful—thoughts and emotions that arise from your memories of the past. As you witness, you withdraw not only from conflict-creating thoughts and emotions, but also from the thinker, the alien ego self which lives in separation from the divine presence within.
In the practice of yoga, you learn the difference between the choiceless awareness that you are and the reactive chooser, or the ego mind that you are not. When you withdraw from the reactive chooser that you are not, who you really are is revealed. You cannot practice yoga as a goal of achieving the Self through the medium of the mind in the dimension of time. When you consciously withdraw from who you are not, it simultaneously becomes a Self-discovery process.
To practice yoga, you do not have to believe in God, or have trust and faith in God. The practice is recognizing who you are not. Gradually, you learn to withdraw from reactive interaction with reality and replace it with nonreactive, choiceless awareness. Thus, you are no longer planting the seeds of separation in the present moment. Every step becomes integration all along the way.
Each time you disidentify from who you are not, you remove a layer of reactively processed memories. You progressively and experientially connect to the soul presence that you are. You don’t have to believe that God is within you. Every time you step out of the reactive past and into responsive interaction with who or what is present, the presence that God is within you is revealed.
The ego self that lives in separation from the soul or loving presence within is spending its entire life in the confines of its own memory walls, the prison of the past. These walls are stronger than the Great Wall of China because they are made of reinforced memory fears and attachments. There is no good or evil. There are no friends or enemies. There is nothing that exists for you or against you. You made these up in your mind, just as you are looking for solutions through your mind. You are living in a world of dreams.
This is why in the Judeo-Christian creation story, God said to Adam and Eve, “Do not eat the forbidden fruit of good and evil of the tree of knowledge.” The ego mind has been creating a karmic ‘tree’ by dividing it into good and evil, for me and against me. The ego mind is the carrier of good and evil—the personally created, karmic tree of knowledge. This story of the first man and woman is allegorical. It contains the secret of witnessing presence. This inborn presence within each of us is silently speaking through the male sympathetic nervous system (Adam) and female parasympathetic nervous system (Eve.)
Our subconscious, autonomic nervous system represents the instinctive, choiceless presence within. At the transition time from the nonreactive, co-creative, subconscious to the self-conscious ego mind, the soul presence within (God) is instructing Adam and Eve not to divide the instinctive, co-creative Oneness reality (Garden of Eden). Without choosing, they are not separated from the oneness presence. They are living in harmonious interaction with what is as it is.
Animals have no individual freedom to choose outside of their instinctive choices. But human beings have a choice available in every moment. To the intuitive mind, the divine presence within directs, “Do not choose” and “Do not divide what is present with your personal choice as conditioned by your past.” This allegorical story explains that every time you choose, you are thrown out of the harmony and oneness of the Garden of Eden.
This separation from both the oneness presence within and the natural world of creation is an evolutionary part of human nature. It gives us humanity and the ability to explore our human potential. We are born to discover the extraordinary powers of the human mind, and its capacity to reveal the hidden secrets of the objective world of creation—in the cosmic body as well as the human body.
When we stop dividing the world into good and bad based on our conditioned past, we return to a state of harmony. Gurudev reminds us that we have a choice in every moment. We can react from habit, or we can respond from presence. By choosing to witness rather than react, we dissolve the illusion of separation. This process reveals the divine presence that has been waiting within us all along.
Comment below and share your thoughts!