The Ocean Does Not Fight Its Waves.

There is a teaching found in certain schools of Advaita Vedanta that says that in order to discover your true nature, you must remove all your mental impressions, all your likes and dislikes. Every single one of them. But it raises a very honest question. Is this really possible?

Cleaning all your mental impressions, Vāsanās, is like opening a can of worms. You remove one and more worms pop up everywhere. Clean out a set of impressions today and, one year later, a brand-new set has moved in. The truth is you will never be able to clean up all your vāsanās. You can only clean up enough so that they do not bother you.

A simple metaphor makes this clear. Can you keep your house perfectly clean? Not a single speck of dust, not a single germ? You can have some leaves in the house and some dust around. That is no problem. The turning point is when the mess starts to genuinely pull your attention away from other things, when it becomes unhealthy. When you are trying to study and you cannot focus because of everything floating in the air, that is when you clean up. But will you ever clean up completely? No.

The path is one of right balance. Not too much, not too little. Just enough so that the impressions do not trouble your mind or distract it from what is truly important in life. This is a great relief. The pressure of thinking you must arrive at a perfectly clean inner state is enormous. It is easy to say from a comfortable place, clean up all your vāsanās. But if you take that same person into real challenges and then ask how the so-called clean-up is going, reality does not lie.

From your own experience, you know you cannot have a perfect mind. You cannot have perfect composure at all times. You cannot maintain total tranquility in every moment. When real challenges come, you will waver. The work is to remain alert and bring your mind back to a composed state. That is the work. This whole idea of a one-time clean-up, getting it all right at once, will never happen.

So the idea of perfection has to go. No teacher has ever been perfect. No person has ever been perfect. As long as this idea remains, you will search for perfect qualities in yourself, and when you cannot find them, you will turn outward and begin dismissing others for their imperfections. The better use of your energy is to work on yourself rather than concern yourself with others, because you do not truly have control over other people anyway.

Now here is what makes all of this truly freeing. Beneath all the impressions, beneath all the thoughts that come and go, there is something that is not touched by any of it. Your true nature is awareness, the awareness that enables all thoughts to be known. Not the thoughts themselves, but the light by which all thoughts are known.

Think of it this way. Why do you see your hand? Because of light. Another thought comes, different in nature. Why do you see that thought? Because of the same light. One light illumining all objects in your mind. The mind is constantly reshuffling, with new thoughts coming in and going out, but there is only one light. And that light in your mind is not different from the light in anyone else's mind. It is one universal light, not physical light, not photons, but something like light, simply illumining all the changes taking place in your mind, and thereby the witness of everything that happens in your life, your mind, and your body.

The waves will keep coming. That is what waves do. But the ocean does not wage war against its waves. It witnesses without disturbance.