Sanatan Dharma - Satya

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Rumpelteazer
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Sanatan Dharma - Satya

Postby Rumpelteazer » Sat Mar 03, 2012 1:34 pm

Cheltenham group meeting report - 1/03/2012
The meeting started with a discussion of the previous exercise, and sharing experiences. An account can be seen here posted as a reply to the meeting report on Sat-Chit-Ananda.

This week's topic was Satya which means Truth - the ninth principle of Sanatan Dharma.
20120301 Satya.doc
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We started with a discussion on whether it is possible to be truthful all the time in one’s normal day-to-day life. Comments included:
  • It’s very difficult. There are some circumstances when I don’t know how to do it.
  • I agree. For example, when you are asked to a boring party and you really don’t want to go. You can’t just say ‘No thank you – I don’t want to go’.
  • If you always tell the truth at work – you would get the sack. You have to tell lies, but they are just ‘white lies’. Otherwise you upset people. Their egos get bruised.
  • That’s true for people outside the Work, but isn’t it different for people in the group or in the Study Society? Surely if we are sincere in trying to practise what we have been taught, we would prefer others to be honest with us, and would accept a bruised ego as helpful rather than unkind?
  • I always tell the truth, but it sometimes gets me into trouble with my wife (who is also a member of the group)
  • Perhaps it’s because you are identified with what you are saying.
  • But in any case, you don’t have to say everything you think. Sometimes it’s best to keep quiet.
  • It’s nearly always best to keep quiet.
We moved on to discuss the different forms of lying. One group member gave such a wonderful explanation of how we lie all the time by speaking as though we know things that actually we don’t know, that it seemed unnecessary to read the quotes on the same subject from Mr Ouspensky. He went on to reiterate what he had said earlier about remaining quiet. “We do far too much talking”.

The first of the two quotes from Nisargadatta had resonated with the experience of one person who commented: “Sometimes you can just watch the mind and body doing what it habitually does, one particular ‘I’ communicating with the world, but at the same knowing and feeling that this isn’t ‘me’.”

Another member of the group does use the thought ‘I AM’ as a polishing cloth, as Nisargadatta suggests. And it does work, when he remembers it.

Several felt that this week’s exercise - to investigate one’s own particular form of lying - is a particularly good one.

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Rumpelteazer
Posts: 143
Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2009 5:30 pm
Group: Cheltenham
Location: Gloucestershire, UK

Re: Sanatan Dharma - Satya

Postby Rumpelteazer » Thu Mar 15, 2012 2:47 pm

This exercise, based on the paper, had been set by the group-taker:
Use self-observation to discover how ‘lying’ manifests in you. Experiment with ways of reducing your most frequent forms of lying.

At the start of the next meeting we discussed our experiences:

  • Two members had reached the same conclusion: we lie to ourselves much of the time, because whenever we are identified, we are claiming to be something we are not. We feel ourselves to be separate from Atman. So recognising the identification, remembering who we really are, is a good way of overcoming this.
  • A third person said she felt she had been lying to herself for much of her life. She had always seen herself as a little grey mouse, whereas in fact she was not really like this at all. Another group member suggested she was more like a lion.
  • A fourth person said that he never lied.


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