This series covers events from 06/20/1984 - 09/19/1984

This series of classes features some of the final teachings Anthony Damiani gave before his passing in October 1984. He focuses on selected paras, drawn from category 20, “What Is Philosophy?” of Paul Brunton’s Notebooks, on the aspiring philosopher’s need to go beyond nirvikalpa samadhi (thought-free consciousness) to attain the permanent and fuller realization of sahaja (awareness of Awareness whether appearing as thoughts or not).

Damiani doesn’t minimize the mystic/yogi’s attainment of the thought-free state. Indeed, he says that what is revealed in nirvikalpa is the miracle of subjectivity: “But to die to the ego and to realize that you really ARE now, even if it's for a moment, you really ARE now, this is what I mean about the miracle, the prodigality of our own subjectivity, that we are Consciousness or Mind.” And it’s a greater miracle than the immensity in time and space of a galaxy: “As a matter of fact they're like terrestrial incidences in your consciousness, the galaxy.”

But Nirvikalpa samadhi has two shortcomings: (1) it is impossible to sustain indefinitely and so it must be a temporary condition, and (2) because it excludes all thoughts, it excludes the ego and its world and so there is no understanding of the World-Idea or its source, the World-Mind. Thus the mystic/yogi is left with an unsatisfying dualism between his experience of the reality of the Overself in nirvikalpa samadhi and his experience of the reality of the world when the samadhi ends.

Sahaja samadhi, by contrast, is awareness of Awareness, whether it is appearing as thoughts (ego and its world) or not. Unlike the thought-free consciousness, it can include thought and so it’s not interrupted by the presence of the ego, the body, and the world in experience. Therefore once attained, it’s a permanent condition. Moreover, it realizes nonduality because thoughts are directly seen and known to be not different than Awareness. Damiani prefers to calls this “nonduality” rather than “monism” because monism suggests that all distinctions are eliminated, whereas nonduality suggests that duality is included in and blended with the unity, or the “Real is continuous with its Appearance,” as PB writes in The Wisdom of the Overself.

Damiani illumines the contrast between nirvikalpa and sahaja by providing several profound explanations of the Serpent’s Path exercise that PB gives in the latter work. In a sense, the ability to achieve a thought-free consciousness naturally comes before one can successfully complete the Serpent’s Path exercise because the introverted, dynamically alert consciousness that must be inserted into the gap between two pulses of the World-Idea is indistinguishable from nirvikalpa. When this rapt attention is inserted between two thoughts, the meditator recognizes that the substratum of the World-Idea is the consciousness of the World-Mind, the Great Void, and that the reality of their own consciousness is “a particle of” this same consciousness, so there is a nonduality.

Another approach to understanding this exercise is through the double nature of Soul. It is the ever-present, self-evidencing awareness that is always self-identical, but it also includes the World-Idea that it receives from the World-Mind. To know something about the World-Idea, it must send a part of itself, the Witness-I, to inhabit a body that is a product of that Idea, and through that it can begin to learn about the illimitable World-Idea. The philosopher who has matured insight, or sahaja, is continuously but effortlessly applying this insight to their conduct. All souls are “sent to school” to learn about the World-Idea through inhabiting a body, but the philosopher doesn’t resist the education, whereas the unenlightened usually do.

Damiani also comments on some paras that compare and contrast the two attitudes exemplified by the Advaita Vedanta of Hinduism and the Buddha’s doctrine of momentariness. PB says that the two doctrines complement each other but are incomplete in themselves. Damiani explains that the Advaita, with its emphasis on the Atman, is concerned with knowing and is coming from a psychological perspective whereas Buddhism, with its emphasis on the momentary and discontinuous nature of what is experienced, is concerned with being and is coming from a metaphysical perspective. The double nature of soul includes both: the Atman, which is egoless knowing, points toward the I AM, and the discontinuous nature of the ego and its experience points toward the pulsating vibration of the World-Idea.

Classes and documents available in this series