Awareness   Beingness

The Vichara

The vichara is the primal, wordless, direct experience of the reality that you are.  When you practice the vichara, to some extent that happens immediately.  But for me it’s come into far more evidence now that I’ve been practicing it for 18 months.

Though there are others who write and speak of the vichara, I’ve found that John Sherman offers the clearest and most practical description of it.

The practice itself is simple.  And here it is outlined it in nine simple points.  Though simple, they’re each one true, precise, proven, essential, and important:

1. There’s no need to change or avoid changing anything else you’re doing.

2. The only problem there is, is a false belief about what you are.

3. The only solution that will work, is to see the truth of what you are.

4. There’s no need to understand what you falsely believe yourself to be, nor is it possible to do so.

5. This false belief is entirely unconscious and cannot be seen.

6. There’s nothing you can do that can rid you of this false belief, other than directly seeing for yourself the truth of what you are.   It’s not seeing what you’ve been taught is the truth of what you are. It’s directly seeing for yourself the truth of what you are.  There’s a difference.  Here’s the way I look at it.  We don’t need to be taught the flavor of watermelon in order to be able to taste it, and neither do we need to be taught about reality in order to be able to experience it.  I think the only way to really experience what’s real is to taste it for yourself on your own.

7. All that you can know for sure about yourself is that you are here. All the rest is conjecture. This is similar to Translation’s axiomatic major premise.  But with the vichara, rather than think Truth is that which is so, you notice you are that which is here.

8. So to practice the vichara you just direct your attention to your hereness, presence, or being — and see for yourself how it’s so simple, obvious, certain, continuous, changeless and permanent.

9. As you continue to consistently practice the vichara, over time, false belief will dissolve, suffering will stop, intuition will increase, drama will weaken, problems will diminish, falseness will vanish, and your life will relax into peace, harmony and ease.  I know because that’s what happened to me. Plus, my Translations now say less, mean more, and work better.

Yet I still keep listening to John Sherman’s talks because they continue to further clarify and deepen my understanding and experience, both of the practice and the context within which it functions.  Hundreds of hours of John’s talks are available for download free of charge from his websites.  Here are the links: http://www.riverganga.org and http://johnsherman.org

Shifting gears a bit, let me share with you something that helped me to have a clearer experience of “this feeling of presence that is always the same.” It’s something that John mentions, yet he doesn’t elaborate on it as extensively as I wish to do now.

I was wanting to test this for myself, to experience whether this feeling of presence was truly always the same. I sensed that it was, but I wanted to make the discovery for myself.  So I proceeded to do the following: I would lie on my bed and scan every conceivable event in my life that I could think of, trying to conjure up as wide a variety of events as possible. I dug up events involving fear, guilt, suffering, meanness, praise, success, cruelty, pride, love, trauma, pleasure, happiness, joy, achievement, failure, tragedy, contentment, lust, hatred, grief, delight, shyness, discomfort, passion, shame, illness, cowardice, arrogance, skill, deceit, events of that nature.

It was fun to see that no matter how wonderful or horrible each memory happened to be, the feeling of presence was unquestionably there, completely unperturbed and always identical regardless of my age or the nature of the drama involved.

For instance, there was one scene, as a young child, where I was terribly humiliated and severely punished because I had done something that seriously injured a cousin with whom I was playing. I remembered that memory as something quite awful. But now it was simply fun to notice the feeling of presence that was perfectly intact in that little kid’s awareness. And, at the same time, I was still aware of the whole drama as I always remembered it, only now I was totally free and unaffected by it.

I also found it helpful to alternate between distant memories and my current, present self. In so doing I found it encouraging and fortifying to see how clear it was that there truly is a sense of self that’s exactly the same in five-year-old-Ben as in 59-year-old-Ben, and that this permanent, changeless, and untouched sense of self most certainly is the truth of what I am.

One thing that surprised me was that I enjoyed doing this as much as I did. I thought it was going to be something I’d have to discipline myself to work at. Instead I found the practice to be extremely interesting, lots of fun, very easy, and gently energizing in a way I don’t yet understand.

Thus I recommend you test this for yourself.  It’s a good way to discover a greater depth in your experience of the vichara.  No matter what you’ve experienced or when; no matter what you’ve ever thought, felt or done; no matter what has ever happened to you, test it and see. The one thing that will always remain the same for you throughout is this feeling of presence that’s always the same.

As John Sherman puts it:  “To look at yourself just once, and then again, and then again… is to move from the endless work of self-definition to the endless adventure of self-discovery, which is the vichara.”

In closing let me say this. It is possible for a good photograph of a watermelon to arouse enough interest to motivate a person to go ahead and actually taste the real thing.  I’ve tried to make this essay a good photograph.  But you all know of course that it can’t do more than be pathetic in comparison to the real taste of direct experience.

Much Love,

Ben Gilberti

B7gilberti@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Vichara_Conversation/

http://www.johnsherman.org/john_sherman_podcast/