Aatma Sutra (Unveiling The Soul)

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Through this book, it is my endeavour to present some relevant spiritual concepts interspersed with incidents experienced by several of my spiritual friends and me. The purpose is to make you fall in love with yourself. Of course, it would be too colloquial to say –learn to accept, respect and revere yourself, nut this in no mean task.

Here, I will be briefly talking about the various stages of my spiritual journey.

The story of my self-evaluation has been one of a jigsaw puzzle of likes, dislikes, acceptance, non –acceptance, and the rise and fall of self –worth. Being an adopted child, who was acquired with great difficulty from within the family, I was handled with kid gloves. The first half of my school life was spent being mollycoddled. The second half was spent in a boarding school. Since I joined midway, I was a misfit in class, average at a few subjects at best, but bad at most. Naturally, I saw myself as a loser with nothing to be proud of.

College presented an opportunity to show off and get attention. I dressed up in a way that attracted attention. In fact, I often went overboard and made a spectacle of myself and got away with it. I also won college elections; after all, who would not vote for a jester! And a jester I was! “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit,” as Shakespeare rightly said. I honed my debating and acting skills that won many trophies. Fortunately, I was not too unpopular with the girls either. Maybe, I was better than I thought! Self-evaluation was very confusing, but what was I evaluating myself on? Social success?

It was during my early college days that I got an attack of rheumatoid arthritis. For years, I met Gurudev who cured me in a minute. Eventually, he accepted me as a disciple.

It thought to ‘discover yourself meant understanding yourself psychoanalytically. Actually, it meant a lot more. It has been a spiritual journey of 35 year of no disliking myself, and learning to love myself instead, and more. Join me in this endeavour of understanding self-worth and true nature while shedding all limitations.

Tat Twam Asi - That You Are This book deconstructs the phrase in and informal manner. ‘that’ stands for the Consciousness Supreme, which all human beings are a part of . ‘You’ stands for the body, the spirit, and the jivaatma or individual soul. ‘Are’ means you are a part of the Consciousness Supreme even of you do not know it, even if you do not feed it, even if you do not want to believe it.

It is intriguing but impressive! The idea is to understand and take it up as a practice. Highlight the concepts that interest you. After ding a couple of readings, re-read the highlighted texts and see if they work for you.

My spiritual associate Rajeev, after reading the book, asked me a question I least expected, “why should I love myself” On reading this text I hope most of you will know, if you do not already that ‘yourself’ is a component of many entities and ‘you’ reading this book is just one of them, mainly the physical incarnation. But ‘myself’ does not stop there. It includes all the components that go along with your individual self and ends ‘you’ the physical body at the outermost level. Rajeev should learn to love the Consciousness Supreme, which at the subtlest level is only a few steps away from his outer self.

Unfortunately, putting theory into writing will not fill many pages. I could redesign the philosophy of the world in 30 odd pages, but what good would that do?

My humble request is to move together through the pages of the book (and its illustrations) and reach some life-changing conclusions. Firstly, we are no who we think we are and secondly, we must look at some introspective mirrors that show us reflections beyond our outer selves.

This book is a deconstruction of the concept Tat Twam Asi. We need to examine why most of us find it difficult to believe this phrase. Event if we do, why do we think ourselves incapable of living it

This book start with understanding patterns of disbelief and breaking them down step by step. Through examples and anecdotes it takes you to a stage where you question your disbelief.

To quote Albert Einstein, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the person by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.