Nine Golden Rules of Viveka

Viveka talks – exercise 16.

Read the 16^th Chapter from the book “Viveka – the Voice of Inner Guru” entitled “Nine Golden Rules of Viveka” on Mirror.

Remember: this article/chapter is tokenized, and you may buy it as “writer’s NFT!”

Points to consider

It would be great if one could describe, write down and give all the tools necessary for deconstructing the illusion. Unfortunately, that is not possible. Ramana Maharishi once answered a student’s question about giving enlightenment to someone with “I could give, but they could not receive.”

Nevertheless, in this chapter, you’ll find the list and the description of the most potent tools for deconstructing the illusion. You’ll find them as given, but you’ll also find that you cannot receive them. Those rules are not worth much if you don’t discover them by yourself.

A quote from the chapter as a reminder of our situation:

“The mind is making a mistake in the interpretation of reality. Enchanted by Maya, it hides and sometimes replicates what is truly real. But mostly, the mind projects its own false reality, making discerning between the truth and an illusion difficult for itself. The mechanic of those transgressions is the mechanic of language or thinking. The mind is forced to construct complex ideas and automatically jumps from one to another. That enables it to think quickly and builds further constructions based on previous ones. Without that mechanism, we would be unable to understand the universe of ideas, create new experiences, make conclusions, learn, and investigate new possibilities of conscious living. Also, without that, it would not be possible for us to turn our attention to ourselves and start the new conscious wave of creation as fully awakened beings.

The bad news is that in the meantime, under the spell of illusion, we live an impaired life. At the present state of our evolution, that is the human condition, with all its drama and suffering. Anyway, the mind makes a mistake, and the mind should correct that mistake.”

The Sanskrit expression for it is pragya aparadha. Literary, it could be translated as „the mistake in cognition“, which is a little wider than the „mistake of the mind“, but can also be used. In the previous exercise, we took an idea of the car and deconstructed it all the way down to “reality”, “existence”, and, in the end, to… well, did you find out the answer to the puzzle? ?

What is next? What should we do (or not do) to correct the mistake of the mind?

If you continue on the path of viveka, there are a lot of doings in the future and even more undoings.

In Chapter 16^th, I made my best effort to describe all nine tools of viveka. There is no point in repeating the description here. Please read the full chapter.

Here is a list of viveka rules:

1. Rejection due to construction
2. Rejection due to exclusion
3. Rejection due to learned knowledge
4. Rejection due to allegoric expressions
5. Rejection due to false premise
6. Rejection due to complexity
7. Rejection due to redundancy
8. Acceptance due to opposition
9. Acceptance of the most precise meaning

Basically, those rules describe a form of acceptable viveka answer (in viveka, acceptable is, by default – correct). As you can see, seven of them are rules for rejection – they describe what SHOULD NOT be in an acceptable viveka answer. The last two are affirmative, but only if the previous seven are not found.

Without „walking the path“, which means the practice of viveka, you’ll probably find those rules quite abstract. This book is not supposed to be a manual. I don’t think it is possible to write a manual of viveka in the way our western mind would prefer. Shankara didn’t do it, and it is evident to me why. To you, it may be a little disappointing, but the disappointment comes from a habit of taking in information from somebody or something outside you. Viveka can make your consciousness the field of exploration – by you, using what you are, to find out everything about the universe of ideas, about that mess of things you call your reality. To commence such an enterprise, you’ll have to become a scientist. A real one, true scientists. Not the one who believes in something without proof. In a way, viveka can start a whole different science with different technology. There is a massive amount of work ahead, and the beginning – like all beginnings – is not easy.

Questions for thinking

There are no special questions, but two firm suggestions for a kind of tryout viveka exercises:

1. Spend some time studying the nine rules of viveka. Try to understand them the best you can according to your current information.
2. Here and there, listen to how people are talking around you. Or you can spend some time on social networks and read how they write. Try to implement some of the viveka rules, and see if you can find one sentence (spoken or written) which is viveka acceptable or even almost viveka acceptable. (It is not a mistake – find ONE almost viveka acceptable sentence in the language-induced noise around you, and I’ll congratulate you for discovering a diamond among an enormous pile of garbage.)

It is your turn now. Write your thoughts, comments, or questions.

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