We are such at Ananda, but what is “such”?
Ananda, I thought I’d kind of break it down today, but it is three words: Sat, Chit, Ananda. So, there’s a difficulty with translating from one language to another. There are often several meanings, and it could have so… there’s a wholeness of meaning that has to be grasped. Because Sat could mean truth, as in “satsang” (a gathering in truth) or for the truth, you know, spiritual truth. Satsangs are sometimes spiritual gatherings. Sat can also mean being sought, it can also mean what is really, and that’s what the truth is. The truth is what is, a law is what is not, that is believed to be. What is being is what is. If it isn’t, it’s not being. So, there’s kind of a holistic sense you can hopefully get out of this. It’s being, it is truth, it is what is.
Chit is consciousness, it is awareness, and then Ananda is bliss. So, there’s love, bliss, joy. I think these all fall into the Ananda category. So, what there is and what we are is Sat-Chit-Ananda. We are being or truth, or what is. And we are consciousness, awareness, and we are joy and love and bliss. It’s kind of a profound thing to come from the standpoint of “this is what we are inherently, from the beginning and even now.” This idea is that we are all inherently good. We are all inherently good.
It is a different worldview than other religions that will say we are born sinful, we are born impure, or something’s wrong with us. But from the viewpoint of Sat-Chit-Ananda, we are inherently good. We are truth, bliss, awareness. The real trick is to discover, uncover what is already there, that we are already this. And what blocks much of the understanding or realization of this is ignorance. And that’s why in philosophy and religion, most everything comes down to dispelling ignorance. It is our misunderstanding, our not understanding, taking what is for something it is not. It is this illusion that we take to be something else. That’s why we don’t realize who and what we are, which is Sat-Chit-Ananda, because we believe we’re something else. We believe we’re impure, we believe there’s something wrong with us. We believe all these different things, much from our own upbringing.
I think one of the earliest things most of us internalize is that there’s something wrong with us. Mainly because of early childhood discipline, you know, “Why can’t you stop fidgeting? You should be better at doing this.” Or impatience from parents and society, kind of angering this, “You’re not quite there in terms of acceptability here. There’s something wrong with you.” And so, a lot of us have this core feeling of incompleteness or something wrong with us. And this is all the illusion, the ignorance, the misunderstanding. And it is seeing the falsity and untruth of this and realizing our own inherent light and goodness that is the real trick. Thank you
