Bhagavad-Gita: Chapter 06

Notes: The unwavering lamp is a classic metaphor. While the lamp stands for unperturbed reflective awareness (citta), what exactly is the wind of our metaphor? It isn't the flux of manifest existence — the world of plurality is inherently in perpetual motion. The wind is the blowing of our awareness into the flux of dualities. Our fractured attention, followed by desire and attachment, are the pushings of the wind — the wavering of awareness, the loss of foundation, and the fall into identification with tumultuous substance. We ourselves are the makers and blowers of this wind — the dynamic world is innocent. When this fluctuation is stilled, with presence and awareness established in the self, the lamp of consciousness radiates undisturbed in union. While still living, the metaphor of "blowing out the lamp" is premature. Final liberation is preceded by embodied liberation, transcendence with presence — the "unwavering lamp" recollected here.

Notes: With mental fluctuations restrained, disowned, and decoupled from the self, the underlying field of mental processes becomes distinct and discernable. Established on a detached meta-cognitive plane of clear awareness, the contemplative yogi becomes a witness unto himself, examining and unraveling the composition and dynamics of the incarnated mind. The conditioned mind — once the untamed and unbridled sovereign, operating at will and whim, generating its matrix of misery — is subjugated, deconstructed and remediated by the witness at the summit of awareness with dominion over its creations. As the shackles, shadows, mirages and veils of the self are shattered, dispelled, evaporated and torn, the yogi witnesses the absolute self by means of the purified and luminous self. This is the plane of lasting satisfaction, the culminating ascension of the self.

Notes: The term buddhi, commonly translated as "intellect", here refers specifically to discernment, or the process of examination where illusions are deconstructed and eliminated. These illusions, the projections of a conditioned mind as a holographic overlay of reality, are dispelled and replaced by the establishment of an unshaking perception of the tattvas and the dharmas — the fundamental and self-neutral elements, characteristics, and processes of existence — the categories of actuality existing and operating independent of the relative and deluded subject. Established as the witness of this underlying actuality, the yogi abides and operates on a plane of endless ease and comfort, with the matrix of the world but a liberated pastime unfolding on the clear canvas of awareness. Transcending the bondage of hallucinations, seated in unwavering truth, he is reposed in a domain of perception beyond the senses, in supreme independence.

Notes: Ascension to union in the pristine self is the summit and supreme attainment of individual existence, the transcendence of its conditions and constraints. Just as one might conceive of a creator god generating the macrocosmic realm, so one should see the pure self as the creator of our subjective microcosm. Tragically, this "little creator" is fallen and lost amidst its own creations — as an unfortunate spider might be entangled in its own web — incarnating as a fragmented being into its own conjurations, dwelling lonely and distressed in a matrix of holographic mist. Dispelling the misconception of material identification and rising above the net of conditions, witnessing the actuality and steeped in the bliss of liberation, there is no pleasure or distress that would shake the consciousness apart from the purity of union. A return to the world of absurd hallucinations is inconceivable.