Assignment Details ¶

= PATH ASSIGNMENT #N004 =

• What: Read Bhagavad-Gita 6.16-18
• Where: PDF ⇓; and at: https://ananda.icu/trans/bg/06/16-18
• When: 2024-11-21 ⇄ ...
• Why: Importance of balance and self-regulation; the extremes of excess and deficit and their negative impacts; introduction to the "generative mind", its entanglement, and its release.
• How: Read and respond with your reflections, as before.
• Notes: Just three verses for this one — there's plenty there, and the verses that follow start a new theme.

Your Response ¶

The texts start off by mentioning union. This implies that it is the goal of the reader to attain this union. Balance is the key. The texts mentions sleep and eating as two things the reader must be in balance with.

💡 I believe that a reason for this balance in addition to the obvious psychological, emotional and physical benefits, could have something to do with attachment. Someone who is under eating is attached to not eating more. Some one who "needs" 8 hours of sleep is attached to not sleeping less. When a person is attatched they are controlled and not free to become one with all.

Purity is a part of this, purity of attatchment. The next paragraph speaks about how self regulation of all things will not only create the framework for one to attain union but also manifest it. This is powerful because by self regulation of all aspects of ur life will keep you on your path and the attainment of union is a by product of that.

This next paragraph goes a lot deeper. It seems to be saying that for humans we have a mission to separate from the awareness of state of being that is directly tied to our outer world. Being tied to desire is being tied to the world outside of you. The real yogi or master has severed these ties. The awareness that is a mirror like reflection of the world outside leaves a person entangled and not clear to reach the state of union. 💡 A person must continuously sit in the seat of the observer of all things unattached to conditions and happenings of the outside world.

I think I need a little more explanation on this as it seems pretty deep and I want to make sure I am understanding it correctly. I don't understand the part of 💡 "mental dynamics" as well as what 💡 "faculties of life" refers to._ Lastly I find it interesting that one must not get rid of themselves or the mind but get rid of there attachment between there mind and the outside world.

Early Feedback ¶

1. 💡 Attachment is definitely behind the behavioral patterns of excess and deficit. There are different planes of attachment that contribute to a particular behavior. We've touched on the major planes of attachment (sensual, emotional, etc.) in the comments on 6.4 — you may want to revisit that for the context, reflecting on how the different planes of attachment contribute to excess and deficit in our lives.

Beyond the specific planes of attachment, I'd like to highlight the attachment to habit. Habits are a significant driving force in our lives, some of them conscious and others unconscious. All the same, they hold significant power and control over us. Habits are not a single plane of attachment — rather, they are an aggregation of multiple types of attachments, and they push us with matching manifold momentum. Then, habits are a significant sustaining force of our conditioning.

2. 💡 Seeking for and establishing oneself in the observer seat is central to overcoming our conditioning. This "witness dimension" is the detached vantage point that reveals the actuality of existence to you — and it does so because you rise to a plane of perception unclouded by desire and aversion. Initially, we will only have glimpses of it — and these are important previews, flashes of clear existence beyond the prison play of conditioned life. In time, it will become a constant presence, an ever-accessible dimension — and then, you will have the freedom of choice to detach and transcend or to incarnate and immerse.

3. 💡 On the phrase "consciousness that entangles and identifies with mental dynamics" — mental dynamics are the sum total of the interactive patterns of your awareness, like the fisherman's net floating in the ocean (of consciousness). Here, understand mind as separate from consciousness. Consciousness is a higher plane, existing independent of the phenomenal world, and cast into it. Mind on the other hand is a product of encountering this world — there is no independent mind that would transcend the world.

When we witness the network of our mind and its workings, we can first of all see it for what it is, understand it clearly — including all of its distorted and maladapted traits and habits — facing and acknowledging its current condition. With this, we'll be in a position to adopt informed strategies and methods for the purification, reformation and realignment of our minds. (Witnessing the actuality of our minds is also an incredibly humbling and grounding process — and an antidote for the immaculate egos we fancy in our hallucinations.)

4. 💡 On the phrase "faculties of life are not rejected", here the "faculties of life" refers to every asset and facility, every physical and mental capacity, etc. that we have as our accessories and instruments of life. These need not be rejected or renounced. It would be a shame and a waste, just as a person unable to complete their homework might throw the study books into the trash, imagining that a resolution was achieved. It is simply an ungrateful abandonment of worthy resources.

Whatever we've been given, all of our innate traits and all the gifts we've received, should be each engaged in tune with their "universal purposes" and essential (undistorted) natures. As in, to advance the cause of union, both individually and collectively. Instead of embracing or rejecting them on the basis of whatever the fragmented, myopic, bewildered mind-in-separation deems a good idea — due to attachment and aversion, due to obsession and frustration, etc. Be a unifier — not one who "lights no fires" etc. (6.1-2).