Man, as well as anything else in the Being Universe, is just a copy, a symbol among endless others. The living process, which is All-That-IT-Is in T/S, cannot be but a copy of Reality. We have seen this already in the prior chapter. The very characteristic of any symbol is emptiness, not having a self-efficient status. Our life, and the being universe as a whole, is just a mindscape (simulation) of a Reality which stays beyond as a matrix of all living. Man, as a particular life symbol, is permanently "nourished" by this beyond Reality. This is actually the meaning of being created in the first place! If man would have not been created he would not live and die like he does! Please realize this! A Valid Reality never lives, dies, or changes!

And for the same reason a Valid Reality cannot BE!

A VALID REALITY HAS TO REMAIN UNKNOWN!

Without this self-realization of man's symbolic condition inside of a cosmic condition -- which are both continuously sustained from beyond -- man will mistakenly start to believe he is a valid reality by himself, when he is actually just a sustained reality of ITSelf. When IT turns ITSelf, the living starts to function as a sustained reality. All the selves in the universe have this sustained condition! In short, everything that is has no valid substance, being just a mirroring image/symbol/yidam of IT! Yoga said IT millennia ago:

LIFE IS NOT REALITY, JUST A MIRRORED IMAGE OF IT!

THIS IS AN AXIOMATIC TRUTH!

Man can create a symbolic reality in the same way everything in the universe can, but they are all just copies/symbols of something which resides beyond and remains unknown. This is not an easy concept to comprehend, but it will come to you in all necessary T/S you need. Once achieved, you won't BE man anymore, realizing that: " man's reality is what his sensoriality forces him to be! "

Even if you have new sensors to be in place and start to believe of you as divine, you will discover soon enough even this divine you is still an illusion. Then you will finally realize all life is actually a play of boxes inside boxes, all just illusory dreams of an unknown dreamer. Isn't that nice? IT is for me, and if you don't agree, please find a better way to BE! If our teachers will teach in schools about this today, man will turn wiser and our future will be a lot better. Try to realize this and make a good use of IT!

Man's mind creates symbols in the same way the cosmic mind (Chit) does, but at the very core all those symbols are the same: sheer illusions! There is nothing real in the Being universe! This is why you should never be afraid of Kundalini's stunts and say NETI! (NO!) to any of Her tricks you encounter in your life and beyond. When you realize what they really are -- empty illusions -- you invalidate them instantly!

Buddha, and many, many others did achieve this. It wasn't easy for them, and when the believe is missing, it looks like "mission impossible" ! For us is impossible because we are brain-hacked to believe in solid ground, in drowning in water, and so on. We've been thought the living reality is “carved in stone”. Whoever is telling you otherwise is declared a "sissy". You see already how hard it is to really assimilate such a concept? Man has to get out of religio-scientific trance!

Life is a Lila (a game), and as such, is a Maya (an illusion), Yoga says. Please don't take Life seriously because wasn't ITs intention of being serious from the beginning. Look how much "show biz" is all round you, in social life, as well as in natural life, and even beyond those. When you look at life with nowadays eyes, can you really say life is a serious matter? You surely can't, just by looking at all those miss matches all around! But you get attached to object driven desires (including your body), giving them a real status by this very attachment! Man has 3 major attachments: 1) the love for himself, 2) the love for externals, and 3) the love for Mother Nature.........all selfish in nature and prone to suffering. To escape the cling to those three is to escape the cling to being (to live for suffering)! There is no being without a cling! 

Except for couple of pains or such you don't remember too much from your life except the "happy thoughts", like Peter Pan.  This is because we are dealing in life with empty symbols with no substance in them. If wouldn't be for the pain -- which by the way is the only way to keep your body integrity -- life will be like a continuous party. And so will be the dying event, if you only know how to look at IT. Unfortunately, our social life lacks such wise understanding, believing in solid religio-scientific matter!

It is our degenerated culture that stops us to be happy in life. Those dogmatic/restrictive "local traditions" -- and are so many of them -- are the ones to be blamed for all the misery in our life. Those taboo dogmas of the few having money as their god and telling you what to do, say, like and live upon, etc. They are all like poison oak thrown over your skin. You want to remove it and get rid of the rush, but there is always someone to throw more on you saying the poison is good for you, when actually is good just for them. The entire mankind needs to wake up and make appropriate changes about this. If not, Kundalini will do IT instead in an abrupt and deadly manner!

*** 

IT is our Life, our Existence an illusion then (a Maya), or IT is a Solid Rock Reality? The answer to this question -- according with all Mystic Traditions -- has a paradox in IT: YES! Life is Real, but is an illusion also! What kind of valid answer is this? Everything depends upon the T/S living perspective you are able to triangulate:

 ~  from where we stand the Life is Real and miserable at times. Only for a Jivanmukta/dead live is an illusion. In short, at physical level only the last stage yogis -- who are considered dead for life (in spite the fact they are still alive) -- perceive life as an illusion. But as you can see, they are dead to life, they don't participate in the living, being totally absorbed in other realms. They are sealed from life in their Samadhi. They have removed the veil of ignorance! Until you do the same you will stay in the realm of suffering and misery -- the kingdom of shit happens!

~  from the Astral plane the physical life is barely real  because the misery of living in dependency is gone. But IT could be some misery at times. For those short times life is real here!

~  from the Spiritual world physical life is a total illusion, the only "valid reality" here being the eternal ambrosiac flow of blissful symbols.

~  from the Causal world (the Void of All Plenitude) perspective all the above levels are illusions when IT is, and an emptiness when IT isn't.............Bliss and Abyss going for the Union Kiss.

~  in IT all the living resorbs and the Infinite Silence instates as a Wholesome Singularity..........the only Reality. 

As you can see, the "real" or "illusory" aspect of life is displayed according with the existential perspective you have. But as you can see also, at the very end perspective of all any living is an illusion. So when someone is telling you life is an illusion please realize what he really meant. He surely speaks for himself only and nobody else! Please be very much aware of this!  

*** 

Etymology is a science which is studying the true meaning of words by going back to the deepest roots of any word. The result of this work is shown in the books called Dictionaries. You have in them the meanings of any word a language has. But to your surprise, any word in a dictionary has several meanings to choose from, sending you to couple of other words to refer to in order to better understand the one you are looking for. What you end up with is a total mess because in spite of the fact that any symbol (word) has several other words to be explained by, every word has also a sound, an image to go by, a representation of your relationship with the word, a cosmic representation, etc.............plus the multi-lingual differentiation.

When you say "Sun" for example, you have an image in your brain, a symbolic relation in your brain, a lettered word, a cosmic phenomenon, etc. And if someone is asking you what the sun is, deep in your heart you don't have a clue. You probably have an image of an atomic blast because the image was suggested to you by the scientists. And the same thing is valid for any other symbol/word in existence. All symbols are nothing else but loops of non-senses as a source of other non-senses. Language is a virus indeed! And the Internet is making the language even more virulent!

The symbolic word "religion" for instance, is coming from the old Latin word "religare", meaning bind together, consciousness, union. In other words (you see the loop already), whoever has a conscience able to bind symbols together as a believed reality is a religious being. And we strongly believe that we as humans are the only ones. Please take a minute and concentrate upon the above meaning because IT is the main core concept of Yoga and all Esoteric Traditions -- as well as of most nowadays sciences. The concept agrees upon the fact the symbolic reality is not the reality ITSelf but a weak illusory surrogate of IT.

You can judge by yourself how illusory any word/symbol is from the following example: the word "kangaroo" is coming in our language from an English explorer who saw this animal in Australia for the first time, and curious asked an aborigine about the name of the animal. His answer was "kangaroo" -- as we all call this animal today. What the English explorer did not know at the time is the fact that the above word was equivalent with "I don't understand" in the local language. So the name of the most famous animal in Australia is "I don't understand" due to an old and childish misunderstanding. And you will be amazed how many words are of the same hilarious manner coming into our vocabulary, like the word "immune", coming from a city in the Roman Empire exempt to pay taxes.

What we should keep in mind from all this is the fact that everybody lives in his own reality by stressing more or less on certain core symbols which are defining him as a living person, as reality, as himself. That is why you can say for certain, as I already mentioned, there are not even two people in the entire world witnessing the same reality. And you can go even farther and say that not even the same person (you or me) has the same reality from one instance to another. This is the real meaning of the Babel Tower event: a virus spread in mankind for its own alienation.

But everybody has a "seeded core" of symbols is born with, and this core stays with you all your life, after death, and farther out. They are the ones shaping your future! They are of aeonic age, and are the ones responsible of your everyday behavior. These are the ones that make you sick, sad or happy, and if you can discover them you can cure yourself of sickness or other ailments you may have. Past Lives therapy is dealing with all this today! By knowing the symbolism of your past repressed desires, deeds, thoughts, and feelings, you eliminate the "short circuit" in the way of the "life current" (prana), allowing to flow freely again..........and the sickness is gone!

 The same thing applies to your be-coming (future), as the art of building your own symbolic life. By knowing how to focus your flowing bio-energy (prana), you can choose the most appropriate symbols to meet your desires in perfect harmony with the ones of others. And so IT will be your future! This is the main reason why the Past Lives therapy should be the real healing art of man, and the Future Lives therapy should be the subtle art of building up your future. Everybody would be able to use those two arts for his own benefit into a not too faraway future.

 In spite of so many branches of social activities like religion, science, entertainment, education, etc., the individual willing process of creating symbolic realities has not been subdued yet, and IT would never be until the complete surrender of this creative process to the totally uncreated Sunyatic state of IT. All those symbols are so deep seeded in you, so much over looked, and yet, so much defining you since aeonic times, that you can't detached from them for a moment to witness them with a keen eye, unless you open your third eye through Yoga practice.

The fact is, all those presumptive symbols are not truly real, as religious dogma and science are telling us, just symbols of IT going endlessly in mindful looping circles of T/S. When this looping process is discovered as such, and later on stopped, you are finally free of misery and open to Nirvana. Patanjali discovered this as CittaVrittiNirodhah (the stoppage of mind movements)!

The meaning of any symbol is totally private, as I said, and whoever is trying to level down this by creating rules, laws, standards, etc. ("patterns of living" in short), is cheating himself (very privately so). Symbols like Religion, Science, Society, etc., are all as meaningless as the ones less pretentious like eye, kiss, bread, etc. They are all expressions of human creative reality (which is looping eternally in T/S), and as such, just a silly labeling of the beyond reality that refuses to reveal ITs nature. This is the reason why a symbol cannot be higher or lower, better or worse, right or wrong, because the unknown reality will be always unchanged and transcendental to them all. They could be for you and me --  due to our different A/R --  but in the end they are all the same: empty illusions!

Please try to understand this and don't make wars because of a religious symbol appears to be closer to your heart in a certain moment of your life. Belonging to a certain religion or sect is as good as a rain can be after dry weather, but please don't make a flood out of this. Don't ever forget that the heart is not a perfect instrument to live by -- when the desire (A/R) dwells there -- though is far better than the reasoning mind. But when the heart is free of desires, the beyond reality shines!

In the meantime, letting someone else to give you his own  reality suggested to you as being yours -- either as a priest, a sect leader, a movie or a sport idol, a president, etc. -- is a futile sacrifice of your aeonic creativity to the alien creativity of others. In this respect the last savage in Africa is making a better use of his life than a Sunday church clone of any denomination, because nothing is more deplorable than leaving out your most private reality, forged throughout millennia of personal experiences and trials, for the alien reality of others. You do this out of ignorance and lack of trust in yourself.

I conclude this chapter by saying that any symbol is a weak expression of beyond, and from the weak you learn nothing else but how to be one. That is why the symbolizing processes like talking, thinking, experimenting, etc., are just indirect and weak ways of searching for the truth, distortional symbols of another symbols, of symbols...........an endless loop of illusions.

When farther on you start separating these symbols in you (as a subject), and they (as objects), you get into a catch which can be truly considered the Babel Tower of human race. This dualistic process has to stop and to reunite with ITs Silent Origin: the UNsymbolic and UNdetached Reality of IT!

When the mind movement stops.............so is the treachery!

Vritti