If you were to distil all the suffering of humanity to one key reason, do you know what would it be?
I’ve discovered that it is the problem of forgetfulness (Apasmara in Sanskrit). When I first heard this word in 2012 from my Guru who is a living Avatar, his name is called Paramahamsa Nithyananda (fondly known as Swamiji), I didn’t quite grasp its meaning fully. It was only when I started to cognize it myself in my life and recently after having worked with many seekers that I began to understand the illusion (Maya) of forgetfulness. Be it sickness to health, depression to enlightenment, poverty to wealth, business failures to success, leaving spiritual seeking or going through the ups and downs of life, the root cause of these struggles in us is forgetfulness of our original state, space and powers as the Super consciousness, Paramashiva.
In Vedic tradition, Smaranath means liberation. Right remembrance liberates, Smaranath Mukthi. The remembrance of the right powerful cognitions is all that we need to bring liberation. One such powerful cognition that I learned from Swamiji is life is a continuous rhythm.
Here’s a small story!
There is a guy with a computer with many software and locked his house for a trip. When he returned, he forgot all the software he had downloaded in the computer. He is trying to do different activities other than the software he had downloaded. This guy needs to remember the software he has in his computer in order to do the activities he wants to accomplish. Only then he can download new software which he doesn’t have.
The analogy is your body is like your computer, your long trip is your death and new birth, the software are your prarabdha (life of birth). If you don’t know your praradbha, you can neither achieve nor plan for your further future. You may be trying to do many things, nothing will work out. Sometime it may workout as an accident, not as a fulfilment. Learning to download the software from the internet, learning to upgrade yourself is what is usually done in Gurukul (Vedic education system). When you come back from the long trip, the first thing your Guru does is making you understand your praradbha followed by teaching you the science of downloading new software that is required to fulfil your life. Then next is upgrading your old software, then finally supporting you to fulfil your prarabdha.
For people who do not have the fortunate guidance by an enlightened Guru, naturally they will associate their existence to this body-mind, they trust the mind instead of their Being. When they trust the mind, they will always choose pleasant over good. By the time of death, they will feel totally cheated by this mind and get trapped in the cycle of samsara (life and death). It is not that they forget the medicine in life, they forget that they have the disease in their life.
Swamiji explains that Cosmic Paramashiva is like a sun, your pure inner space, the space of Chidambara or Cittakasha is like a mirror. That sun reflecting in this space is called individual consciousness, Pratyagatma Chaitanya. That is the constant in all beings. This constant’s first side effect is will-persistence. The quality of your will-persistence determines whether your life is going to be stuck in time or depth or breadth or length dimension. You remembering this constant in you and what is not constant in you – can free you from the delusion so that you will not make permanently damaging decisions in your life due to temporary mood swings. A Guru is the person who constantly resides in the constant and supports your will-persistence to get back to your constant.
Swamiji said that if we have attended any of the inner awakening programs with him, by remembering the right solutions he had shared, we would have become enlightened now. We do not need anything other than an intense seeking and a declaration with integrity to Paramashiva. Through the initiation by Swamiji, if one has the vision of the Cosmos, he or she will never make permanently damaging decisions in life. All the damages in our life is because of the delusion, forgetting the cosmic vision and making the decision which damages us permanently due to the temporary mood swing. The Apasmara will not be able to make us take actions if we remember our Cosmic identity i.e. Paramashiva.
In essence, the first step to bring remembrace is destroy Apasmara – forgetfulness. The core principle is the right remembrance of powerful cognitions from the Source and burn Apasmara which is forcibly put inside us by anti-life narratives. Namaste 😀