Feb. 13, 2025
Embracing Formless Awareness: The Path to Authenticity and Enlightenment
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This episode explores the relationship between spirituality, mental health, and self-realization, emphasizing the importance of understanding our true nature as formless awareness. We discuss the necessity of addressing emotional traumas, the process of self-inquiry, and the intersection of spiritual practices with professional mental health support.
• Exploring the value of spiritual community and personal practice
• Understanding the essence of formless awareness and its implications
• Discussing pain and hurt in the context of spirituality
• The natural process of aging and its acceptance
• Analyzing misconceptions about enlightenment and pain
• Importance of self-inquiry and recognizing triggers
• Integrating mental health support on the spiritual path
• Introduction of an upcoming course on overcoming post-enlightenment challenges
• Emphasizing the continuous journey of discovering true self
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Transcript
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bearded Mystic podcast, and I am your host, rahul N Singh, today.
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Well, apart from the usual like comment, subscribe if you want to be on my discord server.
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Link is in the show notes and video description below.
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Uh, and all that stuff, um, just check out everything underneath.
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I was thinking about how fortunate I am to be spiritual like be part of a spiritual community or to even have an interest in spirituality, and how it doesn't come to everyone you know, and to be serious about spirituality, I think is something only a few people recognize.
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They may come across spirituality, they may be born in a religious household that follows some sort of spiritual practice, and yet they still haven't been able to kind of detach themselves from the world.
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And when I say detach themselves from the world, and when I say detach themselves from the world, you know one still remains in the world, but not necessarily of the world, as Jesus said.
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The fortunate thing is that a lot of the issues that could have grown into suffering in my life was kind of reduced to only a fleeting pain because of spirituality, by knowing that what I am, which that is beyond all understanding, beyond all polarities, beyond right and wrong, beyond good and bad, beyond positivity and negativity.
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It's that peace which remains unt, unblemished, unharmed, and it remains as clear as clear can be, that peace which is also bliss, and not the bliss that we get from, you know, a good night's sleep, or from food we've eaten or anything like that, but from just being in formless awareness.
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When I say being in formless awareness, this is not, you know.
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By saying it, one goes into that state.
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This is a state that remains with you, or remains as it should, as it always has been, which is eternal, everlasting, ever-present.
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You don't have to do any sort of practice to bring this around.
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We can be reminded about it.
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There may be a self-remembrance in the beginning, but and but, as our self-remembering gets stronger and stronger, we realize that there's no actual effort being put into being this formless awareness.
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It simply is resting.
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We are simply resting in that awareness and anything that arises, like the world, is like a bubble in that formless awareness, and like every bubble, it has a short span of life.
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But while that bubble is there, we can appreciate it, we can honor it, we can enjoy it and we can marvel at it, but we don't have to get engrossed in it.
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And that's the same thing with the world.
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You realize that, yes, I am formless awareness.
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This is an understanding that I have.
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This is now a realization that I have and this realization is who I am.
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The refinement is continuing because, remember, we will have latent tendencies.
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We may claim all sorts of things like, oh, I never feel angry or hurt.
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That's pure nonsense.
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If you don't feel anger or hurt, I would say that is a defect.
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But choosing to not react to the anger and hurt is the most important thing.
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One may get to that place where you know nothing will anger you and nothing will hurt you for sure.
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But I've never heard of any enlightened person that didn't go through some sort of pain or some sort of hurt or some sort of grief, whether that grief was for a few seconds, but it was there, it was present.
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And while we are in this body and mind, the body and mind will react how nature intends for it to react.
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We don't have to put any special effort into forcing the body to be as it should be or forcing the mind to be as it should be.
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All that happens naturally when we are just remaining in that state of formless awareness and whenever we feel pain arise, whenever we find that grief arise, we can always go back to the inquiry of well, who is feeling this pain?
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Who is feeling this pain?
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Who is feeling this hurt?
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We take a look at the mind and we say, mind, how long will you last?
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For it will last for as long as the body is and as something localized.
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Okay.
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So how long will this body last?
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We don't know, but it certainly won't last forever.
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It's actually funny because there's a guy who's got really popular, who's looking to reverse aging, and I think that's just going against nature.
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I mean, deepak Chopra talks about it too, like slowing down aging, but I mean, I don't know how much of this is to be true, but the moment we go into that game, we are kind of fighting against nature.
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Just be with nature.
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You know, a few more white hairs come through, a few more hair get lost.
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That's part of nature.
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Nothing can stop nature from being as it is and nothing can stop you from being as it is and nothing can stop you from being who you are, and that's the reminder you may need every day, constantly, because we're fed that we're something different in this world.
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We're fed with information, that we are separate, that we need this, we need that to feel complete, we need to interact this way, we need to be this way and, fundamentally, there is no way to be other than to be this.
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This awareness, this formless awareness, that's all to be, that pure consciousness that is, is not going to be changed in any way.
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It can't change.
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It's beyond the whole changing and changeless aspect.
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It's it's like something that is static, yet it's not static.
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Static will mean that it's still.
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Stillness is the closest to it, yes for sure, but also it's beyond stillness, it's beyond being centered.
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But all of this point to that reality again, which is formless, that reality which you are, that reality which I am.
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And we share the same reality.
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We are the same reality.
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The sameness is undoubted.
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We cannot doubt this sameness once we've realized what we are.
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Hence, an enlightened person doesn't necessarily see you as anything different To you.
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It may be meeting an enlightened person, but for the enlightened person they're only meeting themselves in you.
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And so that's why we have to understand the way the enlightened one thinks, in order to even transcend some of the limitations we've put on for ourselves.
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If we are apparently self-realized, then I would even go far to say that we've dealt with our traumas, we've dealt with our issues that could bring us down heavily.
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Reason why I say this is because I don't think an enlightened person can go down that path, not saying it's not a possibility, but I see it as unlikely.
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You know, I often hear how people become self-realized and you hear they get into trauma and they and they or they they get hurt and they're depressed and they get depressive um attitudes and the heaviness of that, and obviously that creates feelings of that.
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They want to unalive themselves.
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And all these things are there because we've not.
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Yes, we've understood that we are pure consciousness or we are this awareness, this formless awareness, but we've not really ensured that we've dealt with the mind.
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And that's why, you know, in the Advaita Vedanta philosophy it's very important that, yes, we all know I am Brahman, but do we have we dealt with their sense, cravings?
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Have we dealt with the vasanas, the samskaras, those latent tendencies, those vrittis, those movements that cause us to desire something, to think something, to want something, to chase something, to avoid something, chase something, to avoid something, to turn away from something.
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And, in the end, the enlightened person or the one who is self-realized, I think they're one and the same personally.
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They go with the flow of life.
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They don't resist life.
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So if you haven't dealt with the traumas yet and you believe yourself realized, I would say that it's worth checking whether one really did have self-realization or whether one had a mystical experience that was deep and profound but was a sign that we were going towards the right direction.
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And we can go towards that right direction.
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But we've got things to deal with.
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That's why I often say that if anyone is on the spiritual path, then you are known to have mental health issues and you're looking to transcend the mental health issues.
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Is spirituality your answer?
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I would say no.
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Alongside you must work with the mental health professional, do the necessary work with them and do the necessary work with spirituality.
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The whole point is to speed up that process.
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For example, if you rely just on spirituality, you will keep, you'll go a few steps forward, but you'll also take a few steps back.
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You will keep, you'll go a few steps forward, but you'll also take a few steps back most of the time.
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And to avoid that, why not just take steps forward and seek that mental health professional and also practice spirituality?
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I think it's of a sane mind that does that.
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You know someone who avoids their issues.
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It's going to catch up to them, whether they think they're enlightened or not.
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And the biggest test is see what triggers you, what upsets you, and inquire where that is coming from, what the root cause is.
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And so that's what my course is really going to be about, because the beginning of it, the first half so you know there's six, a six month course, and three months is actually dealing with the issues that we may face post enlightenment, post realization that I am Brahman, that I am formless awareness, because if we don't deal with those things, and formless awareness Because if we don't deal with those things, then and we don't do the work, we will only keep falling back into the cycle For me.
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That's why I want to do the course and create it, because I want there to be a structure to what we do, to the work that is done, and that the coaching also helps to produce the right line of inquiry and to understand that, yes, although we are not the body and mind, that is understood, but that doesn't mean that we let go of the function.
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We should optimize the function in order to explore enlightenment fully.
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What I mean by that is not like enlightenment is something to attain, but something to discover.
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And that's all one has to do is discover that you are already enlightened.
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But right now there are some roadblocks and we're going to deal with them.
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We're going to deal with those obstacles and that's the way to see it.
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That's how my journey has been.
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It's all been about dealing with those obstacles towards enlightenment.
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Once one gets rid of those roadblocks and those obstacles, one sees clearly, and then there is no worry about what is going to happen.
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There's no worry about am I enlightened or am I not enlightened?
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The answer is answered by itself and that's all we have to do.
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So just Remember that If you still believe you're separate to God, to me, to an enlightened person, to another, whether that's your family member, then that means we have work to do.
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But if you see all that as the one, as this formless consciousness, as formless awareness, peace, bliss, beauty, it's undivided, limitless, boundless, and you just simply rest in it, you simply dissolve in it, you sink into it, and that's all you have to do.
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Take care, namaste.
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