Atman - The universal and only truth.

 This is the something which we always see it as an engima. Very few bother even to reach to the first step, that is not our point of discussion here. Atman in itself as no expression or in other terms; The Body, The Mind and The intellect are not capable of finding or realizing atman unless the person reaches the state of self realization. This state is very very difficult infact just even to experience or visualize to that state is very tough.
We will see why this is so:
1. The Body - as we have seen the past discussions is the lowest state where the person identifies himself as body or its miseries. At this even the person is so occupied with lower - petty things that even he deos n't reach to the emotional level. Forget Atman, he even does not believe in real love. His entire life is spend on I the one word and spends all the possible things to acquire for I and pleasures of I.

2. The Mind - as we have seen the recipient of all input from various senses and the action initiator is so busy in processing information and delagating jobs is never free. We see always there is something always going in our mind. Mind is never vacant for that matter mind is always pondering over things which hardly makes in difference in our lives. We think about past - can the past be changed? and yet we spend millions of minutes or for that matter hours on that isn't that true? Or we think too much about the future which is yet to arrive. If mind has no work it starts creating the world of itself. It is not possible for mind to identify Atman because mind deal with more of emotional level, if mind cannot raise above emotions to intellect it cannot reach atman state.

3. Intellect - as we have seen intellect is mostly absent or performance only when called. When we say that intellect should be called for as we write all this then intellect should know atman but intellect has its limitations too. Intellect falters because it has habit of analyzing everything and atman is more to be realized than analyzed. Though intellect is the only or say prefered tool for reaching self-realization.

This brings us to various routes for atman:
अतीतः पंथानं तव च महिमा वाङ्मनसयोः (Shiva Mahimna - Pushpadanta)

Intellect: (ज्ञानयोग:)
This is the highest form of mode where we can reach to atman as we have seen atman can be only realized. It is the ignorance of the self which causes the "ego" and hence desolution of "ego" and so by involving intellect in all actions and all experiences we can reach there. Although writing this may look simple in reality it is not so. (We will look at this in the sessions to come.)

Mind (भक्तियोग:)
Here we are devoting ourselves to some God (idol or anything higher). This is most popular channel through which everybody operates. Everybody has faith in that entity which everybody calls by different name and also quarrels with other people who follow that same entity with different name. Suprising but true and everyone who is following his/her own path thinks that he/she is following the superior path again amazing. Therefore we find millions of ways and millions of schools and millions of workship centers though that entity is one!!
I will offend everyone to say that all these are commerical centers to nourish people who don't actually believe in entity itself. Also any path or religion or sect doesn't teach either discrimination, violence or hatred and if that were true there won't be any riots based on religion or sect and we see it almost everyday. On the contrary we are taught tolerance, non-violence, character, detachment and so on..... so where are these values??
We are attached to probably all possible things in the world either materialistically or emotionally. Violence is probably default mechanism. And what is tolerance/character??? isn't it? Ironically all the disciplines of life tell you precisely this. If this is so contradictory so is the reason why our life is that miserable and then why we should blame others for our debacle.

Anyways..... so we were in भक्तियोग:, now as we devote ourselves to the entity with some shape or form or ideologies we then engage our mind on it. As we know mind engaged in activity is much better than idle. This engagement with some higher subsistence disintegrates or liberates our mind from the petty, mediocre and unnecessary things of life.

We have always had someone as our rolemodel. Say a person in music will have "Lata Mangeshkar" or "A. R. Rahman" as his rolemodel. So he will follow them try to attend their programmes. Read about their lives. Also will try to emulate their styles or ingeniousness. In doing so he actually forgets "ego" (temporary dissolution of "ego" in much higher state "we"). This is also a common observation that in such a state the person forgets his miserries or problems just to achieve that higher enjoyment. In a way that is भक्ति too!!

Body (कर्मयोग:)
Our body is the best working machine in the universe and yet just because we are attached to the inaction we are ruining our lives. Again all great people have possessed highest level of discipline and have worked (कर्म) a lot in their lives to achieve some degree of charisma/state. We do mostly all the activities for the fruit of action (although there is a difference between activity and action) and just because of this we face pairs of opposites (joy or sorrow; we are using joy/sorrow as meronymy), isn't it.

The person who does exactly what he is supposed to do without expecting fruit of his action and simultaneously is not engaged in inactivity is sure sign of karmayogi.(कर्मयोगी) . For this the person should know his duties or he does everything without actually bothering for fruit of action. A typical example is that of mother or saint they simply love without counting for any returns.

Well this session is little .. heavy !!!

In coming sessions we will see pointers to atman.