Navel Gazing and Letting Go

kãrye hi kãrnam pasyet pascãt kãryam visarjayet

kãrnatvam tato gacchedavistam bhavenmunih

The cause, or action, must indeed be seen in the effect, but then the effect must be let go completely, and the causality then dissipates, and what is left, that is what the See-er becomes.

In the Aparokshãnubhuti or the "Self Awareness" of Shankara, the aspirant of Advaita Vedanta must meditate deliberately upon Brahman, with the goal of realization that the individual Atman, or Soul, cannot be dis-entangled from the Universal Atman.

However, the very act of this meditation necessitates that very dis-entangling, for how else can one mediate on an object if one is that very object?

A paradox. A conundrum. An Enigma.

We can sit all day long, gazing at a navel orange, and ultimately, at the end of the day, that orange is just an orange. We can trace the entire chain of cause and effects to get us to that moment of gazing upon that orange. The rain that caused the seed to grow, the sun that helped the tree to grow, the caterpillar that ate the buds of other oranges that did not have the chance to blossom to become that particular orange, the person who plucked the orange, the transportation needed to get to the store, the impetus to go to the store to buy food, the action of buying the orange, the action of contemplating the orange, the action of eating the orange, the feces that the orange becomes that is flushed away to re-join the world, to become the soil in which a new orange tree will grow one day, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum, ad astera...

But, so what?

At some point, such contemplation will get us nowhere. We have to Let Go of the chain of Cause and Effect, and to gaze inwardly, into our Self, to view the Quality behind the gaze.

We will all do things in Life, some things we will take great pride in, others, shame and guilt. However, those events are transitory, they are fleeting.

When we are able to let that go, to step back, to see who is the Gazer, we can see that actions that we do, the karma that we enact, will have consequences, but we cannot know them, nor can we control the effects, nor the reactions of others. What we can do, is to know that we are part of a much, much larger whole, that such actions are merely just a drop in the Ocean of Time, and how we live our lives after the Orange becomes an simple orange again, and not the chain of cause and effect that got it there, then we can enjoy The Orange for the sake of being just an orange.

Without such awareness though, there is no sweetness.