Question:
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. Then, what exactly happened between?
While trying to understand this, what is the reason that I am not able to take up any task. What to do with my fear of inaction at times?
Sri Prabhuji:
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Unenlightened mind is full of noise, emotional disturbances.
After enlightenment chop wood, carry water. Enlightened mind is serene, full of peace and love.
What happened ? The false sense of “I” got dropped. The false sense of self causes emotional disturbance.
Need to know difference between action, inaction, reaction and unaction.
Conscious action, deliberate action for a specific purpose and result is called –
Action.
Unconcious actions out of emotional disturbance are called reactions.
Conscious or unconscious non-doing is called inaction.
In general actions, reactions or inaction – all result in mental impressions and consequently “noisy mind”.
A conscious action/reaction/inaction has favourable result or unfavorable result. The result causes “mental noise” leaving behind impressions.
Unaction is the solution. Unaction means non-doership. Any action/reaction/inaction involves a doer-doing-deed. Doer has a motivation, deed is the favourable or unfavorable result. If we can remove doer and result of deed then doing alone remains. This doing without doership is called unaction or non-doership.
Non-doership or unaction is the action of enlightened mind. Enlightened one can be fully engaged in any activity as non-doer. Can we learn the art of unaction ? Following are the guidelines :
a) Any action natural to your SELF is unaction. For example bird sings as expression of self. Take up actions as expression of your SELF – it becomes unaction. For example you love singing, sing out of joy. However, if you sing for appreciation from audience you will be doing “action”. Then response from audience will cause mental impressions/noise in you.
b) Acts of love, compassion and service without expecting anything in return are unactions. selfless service helps.
c) Doing your duty – work as worship – Karma yoga helps in purification of mind for enlightened wisdom.
d) Learn mindufulness in action. It will help in reducing unconscious actions.
e) SELF enquiry – who am I ? helps you to free from the false sense of doership.
The body and mind is the “doer”. False sense of self “I” identifies with the body and claims ‘I am doer’. Through the process outlined above in a) to e) we can get rid of pseudo “I”.