Vedanta, one of the world’s
most ancient philosophies, says there are only five reasons why humans
suffer: not knowing who we are, identifying with our ego or self-image,
clinging to the transient and unreal, recoiling in fear of the transient
and unreal, and fear of death. Vedanta also says that the five causes
of suffering are all contained in the first cause — not knowing
who we are.
If someone were to ask, “Who are you?” your response
would probably be “My name is so-and-so. I’m American,
or I’m the president of this company. You may also identify
with your body, “This bag of flesh and bones is who I am.” But
sensory experience is totally illusory. You may think you are the
body that your senses can locate in space and time, but the body
is a field of invisible vibrations that has no boundaries in space
and time.
How long can we cling to a world of illusion? Is there such a thing
as the color red? Every color we see is a particular wavelength of
light, and the light we can actually detect is a fraction of what
exists. An insight that comes to us from both Vedic science and the
Jewish Kabbalah is that the center of our awareness is the center
of all space and time. It is at once everywhere and nowhere. But
my eyes tell me this is not the case. I am here, you are there, wherever
you are.
So maybe we should not trust our senses that much. My eyes tell me
that the ground I am standing on is stationary, but we know that
the earth is spinning on its axis and hurtling through space at thousands
of miles an hour. Sensory experience tells me that the objects of
my perception are solid, but we know they are made up of particles
that whirl around huge empty spaces.
The experience of a material world is a superstition that we’ve
developed because we’ve learned to trust our senses. The universe
is actually a chaos of energy soup, and we ingest this soup through
our five senses, and then convert it into a material reality in our
consciousness. Our senses transform massless energy into form and
solidity, texture and color, fragrance and taste, sound and vibration.
And our interpretation of that energy soup structures our reality
and creates our perceptual experience.
Most of the
time we do this unconsciously as a result of social conditioning.
This superstition of materialism relies on sensory experience — what
we can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch — as the crucial test
of reality. If information is not available to our senses, we tend
to think it isn’t there. And the intellect, with its linguistically
structured system of logic, serves to justify this mistaken perception
of reality.
The essential you, your real essence, is a field of awareness that
becomes both mind and body. The real you, infinite consciousness,
is inseparable from the patterns of intelligence that permeate every
fiber of creation. And yet the intellect divides infinite consciousness
into a world of objects separated by space, time, and causation.
As a result, we lose touch with the true nature of our reality, which
is powerful, boundless, immortal, and free.
We are all prisoners of the intellect. The intellect mistakes the
image of reality for reality itself. It squeezes the soul into the
volume of a body, in the span of a lifetime, and the spell of mortality
is cast. The image of the self overshadows the unbounded Self, and
we feel cut off or disconnected from infinite consciousness, our
source. This is the beginning of fear, the onset of suffering, and
all the problems of humanity.
To one who is trapped in the prison of the intellect, all is indeed
suffering. Ignorance of our real nature causes the inner self to
be obscured. But when ignorance is destroyed, the powerful, unbounded
nature of the inner self is revealed. Once you fully grasp this understanding,
not only will you have the power to accomplish all that you want,
but you will also have true freedom and grace. This means you will
never experience fear, not even the fear of death.
Excerpted
from Power, Freedom, & Grace: Living from
the Source of Lasting Happiness 
