[Jyotir]

There seems to be a misunderstanding that should be looked at more closely.

Within the path of jnana yoga, ’net-neti’ is simply a shorthand term for the discrimination or discernment of Source consciousness by negating all ignorant, separative, false cognition of ego/sense, desire-mind, etc., thus facilitating by direct identification, entering, knowing, and becoming one with Source consciousness in life.

As such it is neither a negation of life, nor is it wasting the opportunity of life. If anything, it is a method for the affirmation of life’s true purpose and potential as the evolution of consciousness, because neti-neti leads to That which subsumes all by the negation of partial, limited (false) self with its limiting and limited cognition, separative, dualistic consciousness of ego which necessarily excludes all by its nature - thus allowing for the real purpose of life to be fulfilled: the realization of true Self and therefore the subjective becoming of all life in and through the individuated human life which is a microcosm of the ALL.

It is indeed a strange inversion of truth which says that the discovery of true self is somehow an aversion from and evasion of life and its greatest potential. That is the prior accomplishment of a conditional ignorance in life which is the basis of its evolution. Without the accelerated evolution provided by human spirituality in and through methods such as neti-neti (one of many) life remains a conditional ignorance and continues to perpetuate it (samsara).

Neti-neti (‘not this - not that’) is one method of continuous re-orientation, similar to the exclusion of extraneous thought in meditation - only in the form of a dynamic life-practice, as if the principle employed in meditation were extended into active life. It’s the practice of discriminating the quality of consciousness encountered in life and importantly, within oneself, and rejecting that which is undivine by an ongoing process of intuitive self-examination.

Otherwise, without this discrimination and realization of the divine, life - even at its ’best’, becomes simply a blind connoissuership of ignorance and a circuitous indefinite entrapment within it.

In the self-misleading belief that it is the warden, the ego sense doesn’t realize it is still an inmate of the prison, no matter how much freedom it purports to have within its inherently limited scope of awareness. It is perpetuating its own recalcitrance and recidivism by its ceaseless activity of separation, believing that its (unconscious) self-incarceration puts it ‘in-charge’ of a very small world. In touring the self-created prison, however, the discriminating being finds none of it representing true freedom - not the best meal, not the conjugal visit, the stroll in the yard, cigarette, card game, ‘security’ - it’s all still within the limitation of the false ego-sense, unless and until it releases itself to what is beyond itself, thus bringing down the walls by ceasing to perpetuate them by cognitive posture of being ‘the warden‘. No walls, no warden. No warden, no walls.

Neti-neti is a means of realizing the expansion of self into the infinity and will of true Self that is and contains all within Itself, the Real Self, not the illusory shadow of that Self.

~ J