Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD.
Published on www.academy-advaita.com
The Netherlands
24 April 2020
Hope (4)
“Expect”
Understand that if you have a thought to be thoughtless, you cannot be thoughtless. How could you? You are convinced that you can do something to become thoughtless.
Understand to do something is a thought in your mind, which prevents you being thoughtless, which is enlightenment. You hope to be enlightened. The hope is a thought in the mind as well.
Understand that the thought to become enlightened prevents enlightenment. You also believe in the path which you follow to be enlightened. Understand that this is a thought in your mind.
You are convinced that enlightenment can be given. How can you become thoughtless when you are anticipating enlightenment? Life gives you a wide range of attractive reality, but not one of them is real.
Life gives you opportunities in every moment of your life to understand that your mind with thoughts manifests the illusion and to become life. The opportunities are in your house. In your office. Amongst your neighbours. Every day of your life.
But you have not yet observed and understood what is happening in your mind. You simply want to take a shortcut by the path you follow and hope to get enlightenment.
It is not going to work because your mind is full of thoughts and stays there. You want to get enlightened and hope as well. At the same time you keep all your treasured thoughts. You do not want to lose them.
You find delight in thoughts because only through them can you pick on others. Only through them can you dominate the other. Only through them can you anticipate, expect, demand, insist and hope.
Man does not want to live life as it is. Man wants to change life. Man wants to control life. Man hopes to live life. How long will you do this? And the price you pay for it is enlightenment.
The wise understand that every moment in life, including its content, happens and you cannot hope for its contents.
The enlightened never hope. They live every moment as it is.
Author: Dr. Vijai S. Shankar
© Copyright V.S. Shankar 2020
Editor’s Note:
This reader acknowledges that on the first reading of this article the words tabula rasa sprang into mind – accompanied, moreover, by a degree of delight. So much for thoughtlessness was the subsequent thought. And yet, the appearance of any word or emotion in the mind is, as the wise reveal, the very opportunity that occurs regularly in our daily life for understanding the mind. The thought that thoughtlessness is impossible may undermine morale, yet it provides a gradual insight into mind, our companion in life. Understanding this is the path towards realising who you really are. Live life as it happens.
Julian Capper. UK
German Translator‘s Note:
Hopes in everyday life torture humans without them noticing it. With hope for improvement or change, the ego acknowledges that what is right now should definitely change in order to accept life again. Dr. Shankar's article shows that this discomfort that hopes create in everyday life eventually awakens a new hope in spiritually interested people: the hope of enlightenment. Then one hopes to take the right path to enlightenment, to follow it in the right way, and finally one hopes that enlightenment will be reached as soon as possible. The contradiction in this way of thinking is clearly shown to the reader of this article and, if it is meant to be, it will be resolved. The enlightened realize that the idea that hope is real in life stands in the way of enlightenment.
Marcus Stegmaier, Germany.