Sat. Chit. Ananda

Being. Consciousness. Bliss.

The ‘being’ part of being-consciousness-bliss is this isness that always is, whatever the circumstances, universal and cosmic, or right now in this moment, up front and personal.

At the same time this ‘being’ is exactly this ‘consciousness’ that we all partake in right here and now in the eternal present.

A Buddhist might put the emphasis on its ‘emptiness’ in the experience of Nirvana.

A lover might feel it in ecstatic mystical union with the Divine Beloved.

In its active and dynamic form it flows as the conscious shakti-force or Grace . . .

At any rate, what is important is that if this consistent and perennial testament by awakened realizers is true, then it is the central truth: there is a Divine Ground to our existence which all conscious beings have the capacity to realize.  If this is so, then it is the context of conscious existence.

Thus this satchitananda program is the program of existence itself . . . We are each one of us imperfect and provisional manifestations of consciousness-awakening-to-itself.

It is to this same process that Carl Jung was referring when he said that human individuation is the unfolding of the Self.

And while we can be ignorant of it . . . we cannot be other than it.

If we attempt to live as if we were other than it, then instead of living in Being (Sat) we live in dissociation from being.

Instead of living in Truth/Consciousness (Chit) we live in fictions.

Instead of in the delight (Ananda) of heartfelt living we live in egocentricity and alienation.

And yet this egocentric disconnection from reality is the ‘normal’ human condition . . . indeed it is this normalcy that is the goal of psychiatry.  Be adapted to your misery, says Freud, because this is as good as it gets.

Freud admitted that he had no personal experience of any transcendent or spiritual kind and so he could not bring himself to believe that there was any such reality.

But sadly this personal contraction away from the living flow of the Heart became the template for a reductionist psychology of instinct and appetite that set the tone for a twentieth century of psychological alienation.

Is it overblown and sacrilegious to say that our suffering comes from separation from the Divine?  Does it sound slightly crazy?

The fact is, we are embarrassed to speak in such terms these days.

It is easier to fit in with the clockwork and lazily resign ourselves to being cogs in the vastness . . . to agree that there are no eternal ‘truths’ that can be known . . . that there is no  meaning to be found . . . no purpose to life . . . to join the lazy chorus that we are inherently deluded, lost organisms cast adrift in a trackless, empty, randomly generated universe spawned by a meaningless Big Bang that happened out of nowhere and for absolutely no reason whatsoever . . .

Are we that dull and sheep-like and stupid?

For this too is a clockwork ‘mythology’ . . . and quite unsupported by the facts.

What facts?

Here is the scientifically irreducible fact, meaning that scientists can neither reduce it, explain it, account for it nor escape it (though they have tried all of these tacks):

Consciousness.

Consciousness is the embarrassing fact, the koan, the elephant in the room . . .

Science is no closer to explaining the ‘emergence’ of consciousness out of random cosmic debris than when humans first had the notion of it . . . the ‘crazy’ notion, to paraphrase Ken Wilber, that dirt randomly stood up and started spouting Shakespeare . . .

We are not clumps of matter that spawned consciousness.

We are consciousness from the beginning.

Everything is consciousness.

And what this means is: we are buddhas.

This understanding is not the end of our problems . . . but at least it gets us in touch with reality.

Consider this:  we come with an inbuilt program which registers as discontent if we don’t follow it.  This program is self-purposed to the awakening and actualizing of our own true nature . . . It is a program bigger than anything ‘dreamed of in our philosophy’, and one that we are inherently programmed both to intuit and strive to complete . . .

And anything less is unfulfillment . . .

Isn’t this suggestive of a deeper program?

Certainly we should not believe this just because we have read it somewhere and it sounds right . . .

If it sounds right we need to put it to the test.

How do we do that?

We need to get with the program . . .