My Path to the Truth

I try to live my life with the following understanding forming the backdrop from which I do whatever I do:

1. Actions spring from thoughts. Thoughts spring from desires. Desires spring from ignorance of our true nature.
2. Our true nature is Consciousness.
3. Consciousness being formless and hence limitless, is blissful.
4. This world, including body-mind complexes in it, are mere names-and-forms whose substance is Consciousness, much like a pot is just a name-and-form whose substance is clay.
5. Although Consciousness is blissful, we feel unhappy because we harbour desires due to ignorance of our true nature, and any desire by making the mind restless hides the bliss of Consciousness.
6. But we mistakenly think that the unhappiness is due to the lack of the desired object and not due to the desire itself, and hence we get caught up in karma or action to obtain the desired objects.
7. Actions spring from thoughts. But, the thoughts themselves we do not think, but rather they arise spontaneously in the mind due to the past of the mind and the interaction with the present environment in which it finds itself, either in the form of memories or external objects and events.
8. Since we as the “ego” do not think the thoughts, we as the “ego” are not the doers of any actions. God or Nature is the doer.
9. Ego is nothing but this sense of doership arising from identification with the thoughts and actions as issuing from itself, identifying as it does with the body-mind complex as being itself.
10. Mind performs the four-fold function of processing sensory input, making decisions and forming judgements and opinions, forming and retrieving memories, and creating the sense of “I” or ego (ahamkara).
11. But since the body-mind itself is just a name-and-form whose substance or reality is Consciousness, similarly the ego, which is a product of the mind, is also a name-and-form whose substance or reality is Consciousness.
12. Hence, as Upanishads put it “Tat Tvam Asi” or “That Thou Art” and “Aham Brahmasmi” or “I Am Brahman”, Brahman being Consciousness. Or, as Mansur Al-Hallaj, a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism, put it in the 9th Century, “Ana al-Haqq” or “I Am the Truth”.