NOT ME, NOT IT

It begins with your not feeling comfortable in your own skin.  Then your clothes don't fit right you feel.  Then you don't feel comfortable with everyone around you.

You go to school and are bored with the subjects.  You ask, "What does this have to do with me?"  The subjects miss the point you feel, even though you don't know what that point is exactly. 

You finish school and go out and get a job, and then the work you've been hired to do feels irrelevant.  Again and again you say to yourself, "This is not me.  This is not it."  The feeling continues year after year, decade after decade.

Along the way, you get married and raise a family, but it might as well be someone else doing it.

Joseph Campbell would say, "You simply haven't found your 'bliss' yet.  You haven't found what you are passionate about.  What do you like to do above all else, no matter how incidental it might seem?"  You've thought about this, but, "It's not about what I really like to do, or even what I really like to think about."  "Well, keep looking," Campbell would say.

But then you reach a certain age when it's time to take stock of it all.  You note that you've held jobs galore, been everywhere, done everything, been successful in societal terms, but alas every bit of it still feels hollow to you.  You see now that you will die just as "unrealized" as when you started your life.

Except one morning, during your walk through the neighborhood, something happens.  With everything off the board now, your having lived your life, your having been everywhere, done everything, what should arise but your bliss.

That vague feeling deep down in you that you always paid no attention too, because it was precisely that, vague, you find has burst forth all of a sudden like a fireworks display.  It had been awaiting just this condition in you, apparently.  It was there all your life, but its time was not yet.  Now it was.  You awaken.  "Eureka!  Bingo!" you shout.  "Me, at last.  It, at last."

WHAT'S THE MATTER?

The matter is that everything in this physical world, in this world of form, is suffering.  And the reason everything is suffering is because everything is in a state of flux, is transient, changing, ever changing.  Another word for it is "becoming," meaning that everything is forever becoming something else.  Buddhists use the term "empty," everything is empty, meaning that things come and go all the time; they are like water that you try to grab in your hand only to have it run through your fingers.

The Vedantists point of view is that, yes, everything in the world of form suffers due to impermanence, but for us humans it is particularly miserable.  For us, perpetual frustration is the problem.  We are constantly frustrated.  What is it that frustrates us?  There are minor matters, of course, the hair on our heads that must be trimmed all the time, the return of hunger throughout the day that must be satisfied, and so on. 

Shankara in his Crest Jewel of Discrimination, however, presents the bigger picture.  He says that our greatest source of frustration is the Atman/Brahman.  As the needle of a compass is drawn to a magnet, the Atman (soul, roughly) in each of us is drawn to it's source, or counterpart, the Brahman (God, approximately).  We each feel this pull to degrees depending on how much "dust" is covering the compass, the "dust" representing what Vedantists call ignorance, that is, the distractions of every kind that we have as humans, our feelings, our intellect, our thinking, our sense of ego, etc., all of which we identify ourselves with as if they were real.  In fact, they are an illusion, and are as transient as it gets.

We go through life, therefore, in this sort of dream of the unreal, all the while feeling the pull toward the eternal, the permanent, which is the Brahman.  The idea behind the Crest Jewel of Discrimination is that we must learn to differentiate between the eternal and the non-eternal, understanding that the eternal does not change and therefore is where peace, happiness, and bliss reside, and accordingly is where we should be focused.  The Brahman is where we truly want to be, where we are naturally drawn.  When we awaken to the Brahman, as will come the more we turn our attention to it, seek it, in the same way that it is seeking us, our frustration, suffering, will end.