Nisargadatta Maharaj – Page 3

Keep the Mind Silent and You Shall Discover – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: Once I had a strange experience. I was not, nor was the world, there was only light — within and without — and immense peace. This lasted for four days and then I returned to the every-day consciousness.

Now I have a feeling that all I know is merely a scaffolding, covering and hiding the building under construction. The architect, the design, the plans, the purpose — nothing I know; some activity is going on, things are happening; that is all I can say. I am that scaffolding, some thing very flimsy and short-lived; when the building is ready, the scaffolding will be dismantled and removed. The ‘I am’ and the ‘What am I’ are of no importance, because once the building is ready, the ‘I’ will go as a matter of course, leaving no questions about itself to answer.

Maharaj: Are you not aware of all this? Is not the fact of awareness the constant factor?

Q: My sense of permanency and identity is due to memory, which is so evanescent and unreliable. How little I remember, even of the recent past! I have lived a life-time, and now what is left with me? A bundle of events, at best a short story.

M: All this takes place within your consciousness.

Q: Within and without. In daytime — within; in the night — without. Consciousness is not all. So many things happen beyond its reach. To say that what I am not conscious of does not exist, is altogether wrong.

M: What you say is logical, but actually you know only what is in your consciousness. What you claim exists outside conscious experience is inferred.

Q: It may be inferred and yet it is more real than the sensory.

M: Be careful. The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and inter-dependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent.

Q: When you talk, I hear you. Is it not a fact?

M: That you hear is a fact. What you hear — is not. The fact can be experienced, and in that sense the sound of the word and the mental ripples it causes are experienced. There is no other reality behind it. Its meaning is purely conventional, to be remembered; a language can be easily forgotten, unless practiced.

Q: If words have no reality in them why talk at all?

M: They serve their limited purpose of inter-personal communication. Words do not convey facts, they signal them. Once you are beyond the person, you need no words.

Q: What can take me beyond the person? How to go beyond consciousness?

M: Words and questions come from the mind and hold you there. To go beyond the mind, you must be silent and quiet. Peace and silence, silence and peace — this is the way beyond. Stop asking questions.

Q: Once I give up asking questions, what am I to do?

M: What can you do but wait and watch?

Q: What am I to wait for?

M: For the centre of your being to emerge into consciousness. The three states — sleeping, dreaming and waking are all in consciousness, the manifested; what you call unconsciousness will also be manifested — in time; beyond consciousness altogether lies the unmanifested. And beyond all, and pervading all, is the heart of being which beats steadily — manifested-unmanifested; manifested-unmanifested (saguna-nirguna).

Q: On the verbal level it sounds all right. I can visualise myself as the seed of being, a point in consciousness, with my sense ‘I am’ pulsating, appearing and disappearing alternately. But what am I to do to realise it as a fact, to go beyond into the changeless, wordless Reality?

M: You can do nothing. What time has brought about, time will take away.

Q: Why then all these exhortations to practice Yoga and seek reality? They make me feel empowered and responsible, while in fact it is time that does all.

M: This is the end of Yoga — to realise independence. All that happens, happens in and to the mind, not to the source of the ‘I am’. Once you realise that all happens by itself, (call it destiny, or the will of God or mere accident), you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed.

Q: If I cease trusting words altogether, what will be my condition?

M: There is a season for trusting and for distrusting. Let the seasons do their work, why worry?

Q: Somehow I feel responsible for what happens around me.

M: You are responsible only for what you can change. All you can change is only your attitude. There lies your responsibility.

Q: You are advising me to remain indifferent to the sorrows of others!

M: It is not that you are indifferent. All the sufferings of mankind do not prevent you from enjoying your next meal. The witness is not indifferent. He is the fullness of understanding and compassion. Only as the witness you can help another.

Q: All my life I was fed on words. The number of words I have heard and read go into the billions. Did it benefit me? Not at all!

M: The mind shapes the language and the language shapes the mind. Both are tools, use them but don’t misuse them. Words can bring you only unto their own limit; to go beyond, you must abandon them. Remain as the silent witness only.

Q: How can I? The world disturbs me greatly.

M: It is because you think yourself big enough to be affected by the world. It is not so. You are so small that nothing can pin you down. It is your mind that gets caught, not you. Know yourself as you are — a mere point in consciousness, dimensionless and timeless. You are like the point of the pencil — by mere contact with you the mind draws its picture of the world. You are single and simple — the picture is complex and extensive. Don’t be misled by the picture — remain aware of the tiny point — which is everywhere in the picture.

What is, can cease to be; what is not, can come to be; but what neither is nor is not, but on which being and non-being depend, is unassailable; know yourself to be the cause of desire and fear, itself free from both.

Q: How am I the cause of fear?

M: All depends on you. It is by your consent that the world exists. Withdraw your belief in its reality and it will dissolve like a dream. Time can bring down mountains; much more you, who are the timeless source of time. For without memory and expectation there can be no time.

Q: Is the ‘I am’ the Ultimate?

M: Before you can say: ‘I am’, you must be there to say it. Being need not be self-conscious. You need not know to be, but you must be to know.

Q: Sir, I am getting drowned in a sea of words! I can see that all depends on how the words are out together, but there must be somebody to put them together — meaningfully. By drawing words at random the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagavata could never be produced. The theory of accidental emergence is not tenable. The origin of the meaningful must be beyond it. What is the power that creates order out of chaos? Living is more than being, and consciousness is more than living. Who is the conscious living being?

M: Your question contains the answer: a conscious living being is a conscious living being. The words are most appropriate, but you do not grasp their full import. Go deep into the meaning of the words: being, living, conscious, and you will stop running in circles, asking questions, but missing answers. Do understand that you cannot ask a valid question about yourself, because you do not know whom you are asking about. In the question ‘Who am I?’ the ‘I’ is not known and the question can be worded as: “I do not know what I mean by ‘I’” What you are, you must find out. I can only tell you what you are not. You are not of the world, you are not even in the world. The world is not, you alone are. You create the world in your imagination like a dream. As you cannot separate the dream from yourself, so you cannot have an outer world independent of yourself. You are independent, not the world. Don’t be afraid of a world you yourself have created. Cease from looking for happiness and reality in a dream and you will wake up. You need not know ‘why’ and ‘how’, there is no end to questions. Abandon all desires, keep your mind silent and you shall discover.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 87

You can download a PDF of the entire book here.

Surrender to Your Own Self – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: I was born in the United States, and the last fourteen months I have spent in Sri Ramanashram; now I am on my way back to the States where my mother is expecting me.

Maharaj: What are your plans?

Q: I may qualify as a nurse, or just marry and have babies.

M: What makes you want to marry?

Q: Providing a spiritual home is the highest form of social service I can think of. But, of course, life may shape otherwise. I am ready for whatever comes.

M: These fourteen months at Sri Ramanashram, what did they give you? In what way are you different from what you were when you arrived there?

Q: I am no longer afraid. I have found some peace.

M: What kind of peace is it? The peace of having what you want, or not wanting what you do not have?

Q: A little of both, I believe. It was not easy at all. While the Ashram is a very peaceful place, inwardly I was in agonies.

M: When you realise that the distinction between inner and outer is in the mind only, you are no longer afraid.

Q: Such realisation comes and goes with me. I have not yet reached the immutability of absolute completeness.

M: Well, as long as you believe so, you must go on with your sadhana, to disperse the false idea of not being complete. Sadhana removes the super-impositions. When you realise yourself as less than a point in space and time, something too small to be cut and too short-lived to be killed, then, and then only, all fear goes. When you are smaller than the point of a needle, then the needle cannot pierce you — you pierce the needle!

Q: Yes, that is how I feel sometimes — indomitable. I am more than fearless — I am fearlessness itself.

M: What made you go to the Ashram?

Q: I had an unhappy love affair and suffered hell. Neither drink nor drugs could help me. I was groping and came across some books on Yoga. From book to book, from clue to clue — I came to Ramanashram.

M: Were the same tragedy to happen to you again, would you suffer as much, considering your present state of mind?

Q: Oh no, I would not let myself suffer again. I would kill myself.

M: So you are not afraid to die!

Q: I am afraid of dying, not of death itself. I imagine the dying process to be painful and ugly.

M: How do you know? It need not be so. It may be beautiful and peaceful. Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment.

Q: I am fully aware that my fear of death is due to apprehension and not knowledge.

M: Human beings die every second, the fear and the agony of dying hangs over the world like a cloud. No wonder you too are afraid. But once you know that the body alone dies and not the continuity of memory and the sense of ‘I am’ reflected in it, you are afraid no longer.

Q: Well, let us die and see.

M: Give attention and you will find that birth and death are one, that life pulsates between being and non-being, and that each needs the other for completeness. You are born to die and you die to be reborn.

Q: Does not detachment stop the process?

M: With detachment the fear goes, but not the fact.

Q: Shall I be compelled to be reborn? How dreadful!

M: There is no compulsion. You get what you want. You make your own plans and you carry them out.

Q: Do we condemn ourselves to suffer?

M: We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood. If we are sensitive and intelligent, we need not suffer. Pain is a call for attention and the penalty of carelessness. Intelligent and compassionate action is the only remedy.

Q: It is because I have grown in intelligence that I would not tolerate my suffering again. What is wrong with suicide?

M: Nothing wrong, if it solves the problem. What, if it does not? Suffering caused by extraneous factors — some painful and incurable disease, or unbearable calamity — may provide some justification, but where wisdom and compassion are lacking, suicide cannot help. A foolish death means foolishness reborn. Besides there is the question of karma to consider. Endurance is usually the wisest course.

Q: Must one endure suffering, however acute and hopeless?

M: Endurance is one thing and helpless agony is another. Endurance is meaningful and fruitful, while agony is useless.

Q: Why worry about karma? It takes care of itself anyhow.

M: Most of our karma is collective. We suffer for the sins of others, as others suffer for ours. Humanity is one. Ignorance of this fact does not change it. We could have been much happier people ourselves, but for our indifference to the sufferings of others.

Q: I find I have grown much more responsive.

M: Good. When you say it, what do you have in mind? Yourself, as a responsive person within a female body?

Q: There is a body and there is compassion and there is memory and a number of things and attitudes; collectively they may be called a person.

M: Including the ‘I am’ idea?

Q: The ‘I am’ is like a basket that holds the many things that make a person.

M: Or, rather, it is the willow of which the basket is woven. When you think of yourself as a women, do you mean that you are a women, or that your body is described as female?

Q: It depends on my mood. Sometimes I feel myself to be a mere centre of awareness.

M: Or, an ocean of awareness. But are there moments when you are neither man nor women, not the accidental, occasioned by circumstances and conditions?

Q: Yes, there are, but I feel shy to talk about it.

M: A hint is all that one can expect. You need not say more.

Q: Am I allowed to smoke in your presence? I know that it is not the custom to smoke before a sage and more so for a women.

M: By all means, smoke, nobody will mind. We understand.

Q: I feel the need of cooling down.

M: It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of sadhana they become charged with energy and frantically seek an outlet. They organise communities, become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books — anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control.

Q: I admit that now I want to go back and live a very active life, because I feel full of energy.

M: You can do what you like, as long as you do not take yourself to be the body and the mind. It is not so much a question of actual giving up the body and all that goes with it, as a clear understanding that you are not the body. A sense of aloofness, of emotional non-involvement.

Q: I know what you mean. Some four years ago I passed through a period of rejection of the physical; I would not buy myself clothes, would eat the simplest foods, sleep on bare planks. It is the acceptance of the privations that matters, not the actual discomfort. Now I have realised that welcoming life as it comes and loving all it offers, is best of it. I shall accept with glad heart whatever comes and make the best of it. If I can do nothing more than give life and true culture to a few children — good enough; though my heart goes out to every child, I cannot reach all.

M: You are married and a mother only when you are man-women conscious. When you do not take yourself to be the body, then the family life of the body, however intense and interesting, is seen only as a play on the screen of the mind, with the light of awareness as the only reality.

Q: Why do you insist on awareness as the only real? Is not the object of awareness as real, while it lasts?

M: But it does not last! Momentary reality is secondary; it depends on the timeless.

Q: Do you mean continuous, or permanent?

M: There can be no continuity in existence. Continuity implies identity in past, present and future. No such identity is possible, for the very means of identification fluctuate and change. Continuity, permanency, these are illusions created by memory, mere mental projections of a pattern where no pattern can be; Abandon all ideas of temporary or permanent, body or mind, man or women; what remains? What is the state of your mind when all separation is given up? I am not talking of giving up distinctions, for without them there is no manifestation.

Q: When I do not separate, I am happily at peace. But somehow I lose my bearings again and again and begin to seek happiness in outer things. Why is my inner peace not steady, I cannot understand.

M: Peace, after all, is also a condition of the mind.

Q: Beyond the mind is silence. There is nothing to be said about it.

M: Yes, all talk about silence is mere noise.

Q: Why do we seek worldly happiness, even after having tasted one’s own natural spontaneous happiness?

M: When the mind is engaged in serving the body, happiness is lost. To regain it, it seeks pleasure. The urge to be happy is right, but the means of securing it are misleading, unreliable and destructive of true happiness.

Q: Is pleasure always wrong?

M: The right state and use of the body and the mind are intensely pleasant. It is the search for pleasure that is wrong. Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. Because you are not happy you seek happiness in pleasure; pleasure brings in pain and therefore you call it worldly; you then long for some other pleasure, without pain, which you call divine. In reality, pleasure is but a respite from pain. Happiness is both worldly and unworldly, within and beyond all that happens. Make no distinction, don’t separate the inseparable and do not alienate yourself from life.

Q: How well I understand you now! Before my stay at Ramanashram I was tyrannised by conscience, always sitting in judgment of myself. Now I am completely relaxed, fully accepting myself as I am. When I return to the States, I shall take life as it comes, as Bhagavan’s grace, and enjoy the bitter along with the sweet. This is one of the things I have learnt in the Ashram — to trust Bhagavan. I was not like this before. I could not trust.

M: Trusting Bhagavan is trusting yourself. Be aware that whatever happens, happens to you, by you, through you, that you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive and you will not be afraid. Unafraid, you will not be unhappy, nor will you seek happiness.

In the mirror of your mind all kinds of pictures appear and disappear. Knowing that they are entirely your own creations, watch them silently come and go, be alert, but not perturbed. This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of Yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.

Q: I find that the thought of death frightens me because I do not want to be reborn. I know that none compels, yet the pressure of unsatisfied desires is overwhelming and I may not be able to resist.

M: The question of resistance does not arise. What is born and reborn is not you. Let it happen, watch it happen.

Q: Why then be at all concerned?

M: But you are concerned! And you will be concerned as long as the picture clashes with your own sense of truth, love and beauty. The desire for harmony and peace is in eradicable. But once it is fulfilled, the concern ceases and physical life becomes effortless and below the level of attention. Then, even in the body you are not born. To be embodied or bodyless is the same to you. You reach a point when nothing can happen to you. Without body, you cannot be killed; without possessions you cannot be robbed; without mind, you cannot be deceived. There is no point where a desire or fear can hook on. As long as no change can happen to you, what else matters?

Q: Somehow I do not like the idea of dying.

M: It is because you are so young. The more you know yourself the less you are afraid. Of course, the agony of dying is never pleasant to look at, but the dying man is rarely conscious.

Q: Does he return to consciousness?

M: It is very much like sleep. For a time the person is out of focus and then it returns.

Q: The same person?

M: The person, being a creature of circumstances, necessarily changes along with them, like the flame that changes with the fuel. Only the process goes on and on, creating time and space.

Q: Well, God will look after me. I can leave everything to Him.

M: Even faith in God is only a stage on the way. Ultimately you abandon all, for you come to something so simple that there are no words to express it.

Q: I am just beginning. At the start I had no faith, no trust; I was afraid to let things happen. The world seemed to be a very dangerous and inimical place. Now, at least I can talk of trusting the Guru or God. Let me grow. Don’t drive me on. Let me proceed at my own pace.

M: By all means proceed. But you don’t. You are still stuck in the ideas of man and women, old and young, life and death. Go on, go beyond. A thing recognised is a thing transcended.

Q: Sir, wherever I go people take it to be their duty to find faults with me and goad me on. I am fed up with this spiritual fortune making. What is wrong with my present that it should be sacrificed to a future, however glorious? You say reality is in the now. I want it. I do not want to be eternally anxious about my stature and its future. I do not want to chase the more and the better. Let me love what I have.

M: You are quite right; do it. Only be honest — just love what you love — don’t strive and strain.

Q: This is what I call surrender to the Guru.

M: Why exteriorise? Surrender to your own self, of which everything is an expression.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 90

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The Reverse Path – Siddharameshwar Maharaj

The “King of Knowledge” (“I Am”) influences all of the senses, and seems to grant these senses “lordship” over the sense objects. It is because of this externalization that the fact that He is present prior to the senses does not attract anyone’s attention. Over many births, the mind and the intellect have acquired the habit of only looking outwards. Therefore to “turn within” has become a very difficult task. This is called “the reverse path” which the Saints follow when they turn in the opposite direction, and behold the mind completely giving up seeing all that is external. Where an ordinary man is asleep, the Saints are awake, and where an ordinary man is awake, the Saints doze off. All beings find themselves awakened to external objects, and have become extremely skillful in this type of awakening. The Saints however, have closed their eyes to external things, and it is the Self, to which other beings are asleep, that keeps the Saints wide awake.

-Siddharameshwar Maharaj

From Master Key to Self-Realization, Chapter One

Self-Awareness is the Witness – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: You told me that I can be considered under three aspects: the personal (vyakti), the super-personal (vyakta) and the impersonal (avyakta). The Avyakta is the universal and real pure ‘I’; the Vyakta is its reflection in consciousness as ‘I am’; the Vyakti is the totality of physical and vital processes. Within the narrow confines of the present moment, the super-personal is aware of the person, both in space and time; not only one person, but the long series of persons strung together on the thread of karma. It is essentially the witness as well as the residue of the accumulated experiences, the seat of memory, the connecting link (sutratma). It is man’s character which life builds and shapes from birth to birth. The universal is beyond all name and shape, beyond consciousness and character, pure unselfconscious being. Did I put down your views rightly?

Maharaj: On the level of the mind — yes. Beyond the mental level not a word applies.

Q: I can understand that the person is a mental construct, a collective noun for a set of memories and habits. But, he to whom the person happens, the witnessing centre, is it mental too?

M: The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a colour needs a surface to appear on. The seeing of the colour is independent of the colour — it is the same whatever the colour. One needs an eye to see a colour. The colours are many, the eye is single. The personal is like the light in the colour and also in the eye, yet simple, single, indivisible and unperceivable, except in its manifestations. Not unknowable, but unperceivable, un-objectival, inseparable. Neither material nor mental, neither objective nor subjective, it is the root of matter and the source of consciousness. Beyond mere living and dying, it is the all-inclusive, all-exclusive Life, in which birth is death and death is birth.

Q: The Absolute or Life you talk about, is it real, or a mere theory to cover up our ignorance?

M: Both. To the mind, a theory; in itself — a reality. It is reality in its spontaneous and total rejection of the false. Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination. To see that all knowledge is a form of ignorance is itself a movement of reality. The witness is not a person. The person comes into being when there is a basis for it, an organism, a body. In it the absolute is reflected as awareness. Pure awareness becomes self-awareness. When there is a self, self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self to witness, there is no witnessing either. It is all very simple; it is the presence of the person that complicates. See that there is no such thing as a permanently separate person and all becomes clear. Awareness — mind — matter — they are one reality in its two aspects as immovable and movable, and the three attributes of inertia, energy and harmony.

Q: What comes first: consciousness or awareness?

M: Awareness becomes consciousness when it has an object. The object changes all the time. In consciousness there is movement; awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now.

Q: There is suffering and bloodshed in East Pakistan at the present moment. How do you look at it? How does it appear to you, how do you react to it?

M: In pure consciousness nothing ever happens.

Q: Please come down from these metaphysical heights! Of what use is it to a suffering man to be told that nobody is aware of his suffering but himself? To relegate everything to illusion is insult added to injury. The Bengali of East Pakistan is a fact and his suffering is a fact. Please, do not analyse them out of existence! You are reading newspapers, you hear people talking about it. You cannot plead ignorance. Now, what is your attitude to what is happening?

M: No attitude. Nothing is happening.

Q: Any day there may be a riot right in front of you, perhaps people killing each other. Surely you cannot say: nothing is happening and remain aloof.

M: I never talked of remaining aloof. You could as well see me jumping into the fray to save somebody and getting killed. Yet to me nothing happened. Imagine a big building collapsing. Some rooms are in ruins, some are intact. But can you speak of the space as ruined or intact? It is only the structure that suffered and the people who happened to live in it. Nothing happened to space itself. Similarly, nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out. The goldsmith melts down old ornaments to make new. Sometimes a good piece goes with the bad. He takes it in his stride, for he knows that no gold is lost.

Q: It is not death that I rebel against. It is the manner of dying.

M: Death is natural, the manner of dying is man-made. Separateness causes fear and aggression, which again cause violence. Do away with man-made separations and all this horror of people killing each other will surely end. But in reality there is no killing and no dying. The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Set your mind right and all will be right. When you know that the world is one, that humanity is one, you will act accordingly. But first of all you must attend to the way you feel, think and live. Unless there is order in yourself, there can be no order in the world.

In reality nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go — light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.

Q: What a callous way of looking at things! People are killing and getting killed and here you talk of pictures.

M: By all means go and get killed yourself — if that is what you think you should do. Or even go and kill, if you take it to be your duty. But that is not the way to end the evil. Evil is the stench of a mind that is diseased. Heal your mind and it will cease to project distorted, ugly pictures.

Q: What you say I understand, but emotionally I cannot accept it. This merely idealistic view of life repels me deeply. I just cannot think myself to be permanently in a state of dream.

M: How can anybody be permanently in a state caused by an impermanent body? The misunderstanding is based on your idea that you are the body. Examine the idea, see its inherent contradictions, realise that your present existence is like a shower of sparks, each spark lasting a second and the shower itself — a minute or two. Surely a thing of which the beginning is the end, can have no middle. Respect your terms. Reality cannot be momentary. It is timeless, but timelessness is not duration.

Q: I admit that the world in which I live is not the real world. But there is a real world, of which I see a distorted picture. The distortion may be due to some blemish in my body or mind. But when you say there is no real world, only a dream world in my mind, I just cannot take it. I wish I could believe that all horrors of existence are due to my having a body. Suicide would be the way out.

M: As long as you pay attention to ideas, your own or of others, you will be in trouble. But if you disregard all teachings, all books, anything out into words and dive deeply within yourself and find yourself, this alone will solve all your problems and leave you in full mastery of every situation, because you will not be dominated by your ideas about the situation. Take an example. You are in the company of an attractive woman. You get ideas about her and this creates a sexual situation. A problem is created and you start looking for books on continence, or enjoyment. Were you a baby, both of you could be naked and together without any problem arising. Just stop thinking you are the bodies and the problems of love and sex will lose their meaning. With all sense of limitation gone, fear, pain and the search for pleasure — all cease. Only awareness remains.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 50

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Awareness is Free – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: I have just arrived from Sri Ramanashram. I have spent seven months there.

Maharaj: What practice were you following at the Ashram?

Q: As far as I could, I concentrated on the ‘Who am l’?

M: Which way were you doing it? Verbally?

Q: In my free moments during the course of the day. Sometimes I was murmuring to myself ‘Who am l?’ ‘I am, but who am l?’ Or, I did it mentally. Occasionally I would have some nice feeling, or get into moods of quiet happiness. On the whole I was trying to be quiet and receptive, rather than labouring for experiences.

M: What were you actually experiencing when you were in the right mood?

Q: A sense of inner stillness, peace and silence.

M: Did you notice yourself becoming unconscious?

Q: Yes, occasionally and for a very short time. Otherwise I was just quiet, inwardly and outwardly.

M: What kind of quiet was it? Something akin to deep sleep, yet conscious all the same. A sort of wakeful sleep?

Q: Yes. Alertly asleep. (jagrit-sushupti).

M: The main thing is to be free of negative emotions — desire, fear etc., the ‘six enemies’ of the mind. Once the mind is free of them, the rest will come easily. Just as cloth kept in soap water will become clean, so will the mind get purified in the stream of pure feeling.

When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don’t react to them; as they have come so will they go, by themselves. All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of oneself or rather, of one’s mind.

Q: By ‘oneself’ do you mean the daily self?

M: Yes, the person, which alone is objectively observable. The observer is beyond observation. What is observable is not the real self.

Q: I can always observe the observer, in endless recession.

M: You can observe the observation, but not the observer. You know you are the ultimate observer by direct insight, not by a logical process based on observation. You are what you are, but you know what you are not. The self is known as being, the not-self is known as transient. But in reality all is in the mind. The observed, observation and observer are mental constructs. The self alone is.

Q: Why does the mind create all these divisions?

M: To divide and particularise is in the mind’s very nature. There is no harm in dividing. But separation goes against fact. Things and people are different, but they are not separate. Nature is one, reality is one. There are opposites, but no opposition.

Q: I find that by nature I am very active. Here I am advised to avoid activity. The more I try to remain inactive, the greater the urge to do something. This makes me not only active outwardly, but also struggling inwardly to be what by nature I am not. Is there a remedy against longing for work?

M: There is a difference between work and mere activity. All nature works. Work is nature, nature is work. On the other hand, activity is based on desire and fear, on longing to possess and enjoy, on fear of pain and annihilation. Work is by the whole for the whole, activity is by oneself for oneself.

Q: Is there a remedy against activity?

M: Watch it, and it shall cease. Use every opportunity to remind yourself that you are in bondage, that whatever happens to you is due to the fact of your bodily existence. Desire, fear, trouble, joy, they cannot appear unless you are there to appear to. Yet, whatever happens, points to your existence as a perceiving centre. Disregard the pointers and be aware of what they are pointing to. It is quite simple, but it needs be done. What matters is the persistence with which you keep on returning to yourself.

Q: I do get into peculiar states of deep absorption into myself, but unpredictably and momentarily. I do not feel myself to be in control of such states.

M: The body is a material thing and needs time to change. The mind is but a set of mental habits, of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must be brought to the surface and examined. This also takes time. Just resolve and persevere, the rest will take care of itself.

Q: I seem to have a clear idea of what needs be done, but I find myself getting tired and depressed and seeking human company and thus wasting time that should be given to solitude and meditation.

M: Do what you feel like doing. Don’t bully yourself. Violence will make you hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way. Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen — good or bad. But don’t let yourself be submerged by what happens.

Q: What is the purpose in reminding oneself all the time that one is the watcher?

M: The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background of awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self and respect it and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun during solar eclipse. Just realise that nothing observable or experienceable is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself.

Q: To do what you tell me I must be ceaselessly aware.

M: To be aware is to be awake. Unaware means asleep. You are aware anyhow; you need not try to be. What you need is to be aware of being aware. Be aware deliberately and consciously, broaden and deepen the field of awareness. You are always conscious of the mind, but you are not aware of yourself as being conscious.

Q: As I can make out, you give distinct meanings to the words ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘awareness’.

M: Look at it this way. The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when you do not look at them. When you know what is going on in your mind, you call it consciousness. This is your waking state — your consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession. Then comes awareness, the direct insight into the whole of consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself for a moment with some particular ripple and call it: ‘my thought’. All you are conscious of is your mind; awareness is the cognisance of consciousness as a whole.

Q: Everybody is conscious, but not everybody is aware.

M: Don’t say: ‘everybody is conscious’. Say: ‘there is consciousness’, in which everything appears and disappears. Our minds are just waves on the ocean of consciousness. As waves they come and go. As ocean they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence. These are all metaphors of course; the reality is beyond description. You can know it only by being it.

Q: Is the search for it worth the trouble?

M: Without it all is trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are.

While the mind is centred in the body and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness is free. The body has its urges and mind its pains and pleasures. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire and fear. Meditate on it as your true being and try to be it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in its fullness.

Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy.

By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty and with that emptiness all came back to me except the mind. I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.

Q: As you talk to us just now, are you unconscious?

M: I am neither conscious nor unconscious; I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions. Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. I am pure Consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. I am in a more real state than yours. I am undistracted by the distinctions and separations which constitute a person. As long as the body lasts, it has its needs like any other, but my mental process has come to an end.

Q: You behave like a person who thinks.

M: Why not? But my thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and purposeful.

Q: If your thinking is unconscious, how do you know that it is right?

M: There is no desire, nor fear to thwart it. What can make it wrong? Once I know myself and what I stand for, I do not need to check on myself all the time. When you know that your watch shows correct time, you do not hesitate each time you consult it.

Q: At this very moment who talks, if not the mind?

M: That which hears the question, answers it.

Q: But who is it?

M: Not who, but what. I’m not a person in your sense of the word, though I may appear a person to you. I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. No thing is me, so I am nothing.

The same power that makes the fire burn and the water flow, the seeds sprout and the trees grow, makes me answer your questions. There is nothing personal about me, though the language and the style may appear personal. A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no such pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear — how can there be a pattern?

Q: Surely, you will die.

M: Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. Beyond space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of existence.

Q: May I be permitted to ask how did you arrive at your present condition?

M: My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realised within myself the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am — unbound.

Q: Was your realisation sudden or gradual.

M: Neither. One is what one is timelessly. It is the mind that realises as and when it gets cleared of desires and fears.

Q: Even the desire for realisation?

M: The desire to put an end to all desires is a most peculiar desire, just like the fear of being afraid is a most peculiar fear. One stops you from grabbing and the other from running. You may use the same words, but the states are not the same. The man who seeks realisation is not addicted to desires; he is a seeker who goes against desire, not with it. A general longing for liberation is only the beginning; to find the proper means and use them is the next step. The seeker has only one goal in view: to find his own true being. Of all desires it is the most ambitious, for nothing and nobody can satisfy it; the seeker and the sought are one and the search alone matters.

Q: The search will come to an end. The seeker will remain.

M: No, the seeker will dissolve, the search will remain. The search is the ultimate and timeless reality.

Q: Search means lacking, wanting, incompleteness and imperfection.

M: No, it means refusal and rejection of the incomplete and the imperfect. The search for reality is itself the movement of reality. In a way all search is for the real bliss, or the bliss of the real. But here we mean by search the search for oneself as the root of being conscious, as the light beyond the mind. This search will never end, while the restless craving for all else must end, for real progress to take place.

One has to understand that the search for reality, or God, or Guru and the search for the self are the same; when one is found, all are found. When ‘I am’ and ‘God is’ become in your mind indistinguishable, then something will happen and you will know without a trace of doubt that God is because you are, you are because God is. The two are one.

Q: Since all is preordained, is our self-realisation also preordained? Or are we free there at least?

M: Destiny refers only to name and shape. Since you are neither body nor mind, destiny has no control over you. You are completely free. The cup is conditioned by its shape, material, use and so on. But the space within the cup is free. It happens to be in the cup only when viewed in connection with the cup. Otherwise it is just space. As long as there is a body, you appear to be embodied. Without the body you are not disembodied — you Just are.

Even destiny is but an idea. Words can be put together in so many ways! Statements can differ, but do they make any change in the actual? There are so many theories devised for explaining things — all are plausible, none is true. When you drive a car, you are subjected to the laws of mechanics and chemistry: step out of the car and you are under the laws of physiology and biochemistry.

Q: What is meditation and what are its uses?

M: As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations or prayers may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation — the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself meditation.

Q: How is it done?

M: You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don’t get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.

Q: I heard of holding on to one thought in order to keep other thoughts away. But how to keep all thoughts away? The very idea is also a thought.

M: Experiment anew, don’t go by past experience. Watch your thoughts and watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognise it.

Q: Are you not at all concerned about the state of the world? Look at the horrors in East Pakistan [1971, now Bangladesh]. Do they not touch you at all?

M: I am reading newspapers; I know what is going on! But my reaction is not like yours. You are looking for a cure, while I am concerned with prevention. As long as there are causes, there must also be results. As long as people are bent on dividing and separating, as long as they are selfish and aggressive, such things will happen. If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed; it must come from within. Those who abhor war must get war out of their system. Without peaceful people how can you have peace in the world? As long as people are as they are, the world must be as it is. I am doing my part in trying to help people to know themselves as the only cause of their own misery. In that sense I am a useful man. But what I am in myself, what is my normal state cannot be expressed in terms of social consciousness and usefulness.

I may talk about it, use metaphors or parables, but I am acutely aware that it is just not so. Not that it cannot be experienced. It is experiencing itself! But it cannot be described in the terms of a mind that must separate and oppose in order to know.

The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind — the impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left.

Q: Why do you sit here talking to people? What is your real motive?

M: No motive. You say I must have a motive. I am not sitting here, nor talking: no need to search for motives. Don’t confuse me with the body. I have no work to do, no duties to perform. That part of me which you may call God will look after the world. This world of yours, that so much needs looking after, lives and moves in your mind. Delve into it, you will find your answers there and there only. Where else do you expect them to come from? Outside your consciousness does anything exist?

Q: It may exist without my ever knowing it.

M: What kind of existence would it be? Can being be divorced from knowing? All being, like all knowing, relates to you. A thing is because you know it to be either in your experience or in your being. Your body and your mind exist as long as you believe so. Cease to think that they are yours and they will just dissolve. By all means let your body and mind function, but do not let them limit you. If you notice imperfections, just keep on noticing: your very giving attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.

Q: Can I cure myself of a serious illness by merely taking cognisance of it?

M: Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only of the outer symptoms. All illness begins in the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and eliminating all wrong ideas and emotions. Then live and work disregarding illness and think no more of it. With the removal of causes the effect is bound to depart.

Man becomes what he believes himself to be. Abandon all ideas about yourself and you will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen to the body or the mind.

Q: If I become anything I think myself to be, and I start thinking that I am the Supreme Reality, will not my Supreme Reality remain a mere idea?

M: First reach that state and then ask the question.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 48

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What Comes and Goes Has No Being – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner: I have come to be with you, rather than to listen. Little can be said in words, much more can be conveyed in silence.

Maharaj: First words, then silence. One must be ripe for silence.

Q: Can I live in silence?

M: Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly, you don’t need to ask for help. Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance. You just do what needs be done, leaving success and failure to the unknown. For everything is caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavour is but one. Yet such is the magic of man’s mind and heart that the most improbable happens when human will and love pull together.

Q: What is wrong with asking for help when the work is worthy?

M: Where is the need of asking? It merely shows weakness and anxiety. Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the unknown. Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go through the necessary movements. You are merely one of the links in the long chain of causation. Fundamentally, all happens in the mind only. When you work for something whole-heartedly and steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen. In reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths there is perfect peace. All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.

Q: A person is naturally limited.

M: There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don’t be too lazy to think.

Q: Activity is the essence of reality. There is no virtue in not working. Along with thinking something must be done.

M: To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

Q: For the person I am all this seems impossible.

M: What do you know about yourself? You can only be what you are in reality; you can only appear what you are not. You have never moved away from perfection. All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal. As the sun knows not darkness, so does the self know not the non-self. It is the mind, which by knowing the other, becomes the other. Yet the mind is nothing else but the self. It is the self that becomes the other, the not-self, and yet remains the self. All else is an assumption. Just as a cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it, so does assumption obscure reality without destroying it. The very idea of destruction of reality is ridiculous; the destroyer is always more real than the destroyed. Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one — this is the ultimate solution of every conflict.

Q: How is it that in spite of so much instruction and assistance we make no progress?

M: As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realise that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small and separate person, one amongst many.

M: Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time; you imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your self-identification with the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession, they have their span in time and make you imagine yourself, because of memory, as having duration. In reality time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. How old are you?

Q: Forty-eight!

M: What makes you say forty-eight? What makes you say: I am here? Verbal habits born from assumptions. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of ‘else’ is a disaster and a calamity.

Q: What is the cause of personification, of self-limitation in time and space?

M: That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no such thing as a separate person. Even taking the empirical point of view, it is obvious that everything is the cause of everything, that everything is as it is, because the entire universe is as it is.

Q: Yet personality must have a cause.

M: How does personality, come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.

Q: Does not ‘I am’ remain?

M: The word ‘remain’ does not apply. ‘I am’ is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be. As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms. Self-limitation is the very essence of personality.

Q: How can I become universal?

M: But you are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Only cease imagining yourself to be the particular. What comes and goes has no being. It owes its very appearance to reality. You know that there is a world, but does the world know you? All knowledge flows from you, as all being and all joy. Realise that you are the eternal source and accept all as your own. Such acceptance is true love.

Q: All you say sounds very beautiful. But how has one to make it into a way of living?

M: Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.

Q: It is not a matter of achievement, but of understanding.

M: Don’t try to understand! Enough if you do not misunderstand. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.

What is beginningless cannot have a cause. It is not that you knew what you are and then you have forgotten. Once you know, you cannot forget. Ignorance has no beginning, but can have an end. Enquire: who is ignorant and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body — no world. First enquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will come later.

Q: What you say sounds convincing, but of what use is it to the private person, who knows itself to be in the world and of the world?

M: Millions eat bread, but few know all about wheat. And only those who know can improve the bread. Similarly, only those who know the self, who have seen beyond the world, can improve the world. Their value to private persons is immense, for they are their only hope of salvation. What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world you must step out of it.

Q: But can one step out of the world?

M: Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it. All scriptures say that before the world was, the Creator was. Who knows the Creator? He alone who was before the Creator, your own real being, the source of all the worlds with their creators.

Q: All you say is held together by your assumption that the world is your own projection. You admit that you mean your personal, subjective world, the world given you through your senses and your mind. In that sense each one of us lives in a world of his own projection. These private worlds hardly touch each other and they arise from and merge into the ‘I am’ at their centre. But surely behind these private worlds there must be a common objective world, of which the private worlds are mere shadows. Do you deny the existence of such an objective world, common to all?

M: Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to whom to happen, a conscious separate centre. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose your self in it. When you deny reality to anything, you come to a residue which cannot be denied. All talk of jnana is a sign of ignorance. It is the mind that imagines that it does not know and then comes to know. Reality knows nothing of these contortions. Even the idea of God as the Creator is false. Do I owe my being to any other being? Because I am, all is.

Q: How can it be? A child is born into the world, not the world into the child. The world is old and the child is new.

M: The child is born into your world. Now, were you born into your world, or did your world appear to you? To be born means to create a world round yourself as the centre. But do you ever create yourself? Or did anyone create you? Everyone creates a world for himself and lives in it, imprisoned by one’s ignorance. All we have to do is to deny reality to our prison.

Q: Just as the waking state exists in seed form during sleep, so does the world the child creates on being born exist before its birth. With whom does the seed lie?

M: With him who is the witness of birth and death, but is neither born nor dies. He alone is the seed of creation as well as its residue. Don’t ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 45

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‘I Am’ is True, All Else is Inference – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Maharaj: The perceiver of the world, is he prior to the world, or does he come into being along with the world?

Questioner: What a strange question! Why do you ask such questions?

M: Unless you know the correct answer, you will not find peace.

Q: When I wake up in the morning, the world is already there, waiting for me. Surely the world comes into being first. I do, but much later, at the earliest at my birth. The body mediates between me and the world. Without the body there would be neither me nor the world.

M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all the little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.

Q: We call it God.

M: God is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: ‘here and now I am’. Remove, the ‘here and now’ the ‘I am’ remains, unassailable. The word exists in memory, memory comes into consciousness; consciousness exists in awareness and awareness is the reflection of the light on the waters of existence.

Q: Still I do not see how can the world be in me when the opposite ‘I am in the world’ is so obvious.

M: Even to say ‘I am the world, the world is me’, is a sign of ignorance. But when I keep in mind and confirm in life my identity with the world, a power arises in me which destroys the ignorance, burns it up completely.

Q: Is the witness of ignorance separate from ignorance? Is not to say: ‘I am ignorant’ a part of ignorance?

M: Of course. All I can say truly is: ‘I am’, all else is inference. But the inference has become a habit. Destroy all habits of thinking and seeing. The sense ‘I am’ is the manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call self, God, reality or by any other name. The ‘I am’ is in the world; but it is the key which can open the door out of the world. The moon dancing on the water is seen in the water, but it is caused by the moon in the sky and not by the water.

Q: Still the main point seems to escape me. l can admit that the world in which I live and move and have my being is of my own creation, a projection of myself, of my imagination, on the unknown world, the world as it is, the world of ‘absolute matter’, whatever this matter may be. The world of my own creation may be quite unlike the ultimate, the real world, just like the cinema screen is quite unlike the pictures projected onto it. Nevertheless, this absolute world exists, quite independent of myself.

M: Quite so, the world of Absolute Reality, onto which your mind has projected a world of relative unreality is independent of yourself, for the very simple reason that it is yourself.

Q: Is there no contradiction in terms? How can independence prove identity?

M: Examine the motion of change and you will see. What can change while you do not change, can be said to be independent of you. But what is changeless must be one with whatever else is changeless. For, duality implies interaction and interaction meats change. In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essence.

Q: Like in a tri-dimensional picture, the light forms its own screen.

M: Any comparison will do. The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.

Q: How does one break the spell?

M: Assert your independence in thought and action. After all, all hangs on your faith in yourself, on the conviction that what you see and hear, think and feel is real. Why not question your faith? No doubt, this world is painted by you on the screen of consciousness and is entirely your own private world. Only your sense ‘I am’, though in the world, is not of the world. By no effort of logic or imagination can you change the ‘I am’ into ‘I am not’. In the very denial of your being you assert it. Once you realise that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. realise that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the Imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear.

Just as the colours in this carpet are brought out by light but light is not the colour, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world.

That which creates and sustains the world, you may call it God or providence, but ultimately you are the proof that God exists, not the other way round. For, before any question about God can be put, you must be there to put it.

Q: God is an experience in time, but the experiencer is timeless.

M: Even the experiencer is secondary. Primary is the infinite expanse of consciousness, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be. When you look at anything, it is the ultimate you see, but you imagine that you see a cloud or a tree.

Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realise that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.

Even the sense of ‘I am’ is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The ‘I’ is there even without the ‘am’. So is the pure light there whether you say ‘I’ or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The beingness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience — that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else.

Q: You talk of reality directly — as the all-pervading, ever-present, eternal, all-knowing, all-energizing first cause. There are other teachers, who refuse to discuss reality at all. They say reality is beyond the mind while all discussions are within the realm of the mind, which is the home of the unreal. Their approach is negative; they pinpoint the unreal and thus go beyond it into the real.

M: The difference lies in the words only. After all, when l talk of the real, I describe it as not-unreal, space-less, time-less, cause-less, beginning-less and end-less. It comes to the same. As long as it leads to enlightenment, what does the wording matter? Does it matter whether you pull the cart or push it, as long as it is kept rolling? You may feel attracted to reality at one time and repelled from the false at another; these are only moods which alternate; both are needed for perfect freedom. You may go one way or another — but each time it will be the right way at the moment; just go whole-heartedly, don’t waste time on doubting or hesitating. Many kinds of food are needed to make the child grow, but the act of eating is the same. Theoretically — all approaches are good. In practice, and at a given moment, you proceed by one road only. Sooner or later you are bound to discover that if you really want to find, you must dig at one place only — within.

Neither your body nor mind can give you what you seek — the being and knowing your self and the great peace that comes with it.

Q: Surely there is something valid and valuable in every approach.

M: In each case the value lies in bringing you to the need of seeking within. Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular. To find water you do not dig small pits all over the place, but drill deep in one place only. Similarly, to find your self you have to explore yourself. When you realise that you are the light of the world, you will also realise that you are the love of it; that to know is to love and to love is to know.

Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is of your own creation. Light and love are impersonal, but they are reflected in your mind as knowing and wishing oneself well. We are always friendly towards ourselves, but not always wise. A Yogi is a man whose goodwill is allied to wisdom.

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

From I Am That, Chapter 44

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I Am a Dream that Can Wake You Up – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Maharaj: The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self the world is but a colourful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear he enjoys it, as it happens.

Questioner: The person immersed in the world has a life of many flavours. He weeps, he laughs, loves and hates, desires and fears, suffers and rejoices. The desireless and fearless jnani, what life has he? Is he not left high and dry in his aloofness?

M: His state is not so desolate. It tastes of the pure, uncaused, undiluted bliss. He is happy and fully aware that happiness is his very nature and that he need not do anything, nor strive for anything to secure it. It follows him, more real than the body, nearer than the mind itself. You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me dependence on anything for hap-piness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused. independent, unassailable.

Q: Like a play on the stage?

M: The play was written, planned and rehearsed. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing.

Q: Is there no creator? Was not the world in the mind of Brahma, before it was created?

M: As long as you are outside my state, you will have Creators, Preservers and Destroyers, but once with me you will know the Self only and see yourself in all.

Q: You function nevertheless.

M: When you are giddy, you see the world running circles round you. Obsessed with the idea of means and end, of work and purpose, you see me apparently functioning. In reality I only look. Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.
I may perceive the world just like you. But you believe to be in it, while I see it as an iridescent drop in the vast expanse of consciousness.

Q: We are all getting old. Old age is not pleasant — all aches and pains, weakness and the approaching end. How does a jnani feel as an old man? How does his inner self look at his own senility?

M: As he gets older he grows more and more happy and peaceful. After all, he is going home. Like a traveller nearing his destination and collecting his luggage, he leaves the train with-out regret.

Q: Surely there is a contradiction. We are told the jnani is beyond all change. His happiness neither grows nor wanes. How can he grow happier because older, and that in spite of physical weakness and so on?

M: There is no contradiction. The reel of destiny is coming to its end — the mind is happy. The mist of bodily existence is lifting — the burden of the body is growing less from day to day.

Q: Let us say, the jnani is ill. He has caught some flu and every joint aches and burns. What is his state of mind?

M: Every sensation is contemplated in perfect equanimity. There is no desire for it, nor refusal. It is as it is and the he looks at it with a smile of affectionate detachment.

Q: He may be detached from his own suffering, but still it is there.

M: It is there, but it does not matter. Whatever state I am in, I see it as a state of mind to be accepted as it is.

Q: Pain is pain. You experience it all the same.

M: He who experiences the body, experiences its pains and pleasures. I am neither the body, nor the experiencer of the body.

Q: Let us say you are twenty-five years old. Your marriage is arranged and performed and the household duties crowd upon you. How would you feel?

M: Just as I feel now. You keep on insisting that my inner state is moulded by outer events. It is just not so. Whatever happens, I remain. At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its very nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time — effortlessly and spontaneously. As long as it is merely aware there are no problems. But when the discriminative mind comes into being and creates distinctions, pleasure and pain arise. During sleep the mind is in abeyance and so are pain and pleasure. The process of creation continues, but no notice is taken. The mind is a form of consciousness, and consciousness is an aspect of life. Life creates everything, but the Supreme is beyond all.

Q: The Supreme is the master and consciousness — his servant.

M: The master is in consciousness, not beyond it. In terms of consciousness the Supreme is both creation and dissolution, concretion and abstraction, the focal and the universal. It is also neither. Words do not reach there, nor mind.

Q: The jnani seems to be a very lonely being, all by himself.

M: He is alone, but he is all. He is not even a being; He is the beingness of all beings. Not even that. No words apply. He is what he is, the ground from which all grows.

Q: Are you not afraid to die?

M: I shall tell you how my Guru’s Guru died. After announcing that his end was nearing, he stopped eating, without changing the routine of his daily life. On the eleventh day, at prayer time he was singing and clapping vigorously and suddenly died! Just like that, between two movements, like a blown out candle. Everybody dies as he lives. I am not afraid of death, because I am not afraid of life. I live a happy life and shall die a happy death. Misery is to be born, not to die. All depends how you look at it.

Q: There can be no evidence of your state. All I know about it is what you say. All I see is a very interesting old man.

M: You are the interesting old man, not me! I was never born. How can I grow old? What I appear to be to you exists only in your mind. I am not concerned with it.

Q: Even as a dream you are a most unusual dream.

M: I am a dream that can wake you up. You will have the proof of it in your very waking up.

Q: Imagine, news reach you that I have died. Somebody tells you: ‘You know so-and-so? He died’. What would be your reaction?

M: I would be very happy to have you back home, really glad to see you out of this foolishness.

Q: Which foolishness?

M: Of thinking that you were born and will die, that you are a body displaying a mind and all such nonsense. In my world no-body is born and nobody dies. Some people go on a journey and come back, some never leave. What difference does it make since they travel in dreamlands, each wrapped up in his own dream. Only the waking up is important. It is enough to know the ‘I am’ as reality and also love.

Q: My approach is not so absolute, hence my question. Throughout the West people are in search of something real. They turn to science, which tells them a lot about matter, a little about the mind, and nothing about the nature and purpose of consciousness. To them reality is objective, outside the observable and describable, directly or by inference; about the subjective aspect of reality they know nothing. It is extremely important to let them know that there is reality and it is to be found in the freedom of consciousness from matter and its limitations and distortions. Most of the people in the world just do not know that there is reality which can be found and experienced in consciousness. It seems very important that they should hear the good news from somebody who has actually experienced. Such witnesses have always existed and their testimony is precious.

M: Of course. The gospel of self-realization, once heard, will never be forgotten. Like a seed left in the ground, it will wait for the right season and sprout and grow into a mighty tree.

Taken from I Am That

A pdf file of the entire book can be downloaded from: https://pgoodnight.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/i_am_that.pdf

This was first seen on the following site: http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/teachers/self_nisargadatta.htm

The Person Is The Past – Alexander Smit

Alexander: There was a moment in your life, probably when you were three of four years old, when you began to experience yourself as something different from the perceivingness. A moment in which you made a swingover to an “I,” that is to say, to a “person,” a self consciousness.

What you know about yourself is what you remember about yourself. The person, the “I,” consists of nothing but memory pictures from the past. Unlike the images which you make of yourself, awareness does not need any memory. Therefore, all that you know about yourself, and that which you take yourself to be, is old; it is the past. Memory cannot perceive anything new, whereas awareness can. That which you take yourself to be and with which you may identify yourself, are curdled experiences consisting purely and simply of memory pictures. Your so-called experiences are always past. Necessarily the past, for what you know about yourself is derived from memory and is memory. The memory is able to retrieve through images that which is past. But something that is past is not the reality. At best, it is a mental reality. That reality, however, is only short-lived and will eventually dissolve in the awareness.

What sort of reality does the person, composed by you from the past, possess? The reality which you attribute to that past consists of thoughts, mental images, ideas, and concepts. Those images seem to overshadow the reality that you are actually living. Because of that you are living in a world of delusion instead of in the reality. Only the power of discrimination can free you from that. That is why Advaita emphasizes viveka so much, the ability to discriminate between what is delusion and what is reality.

The person, that “somebody” which you have created, cannot be replaced by the concept of “nobody.”

Visitor: That is precisely the point. What I have done is to replace the “somebody” by a “nobody.”

A: It is sufficient to see that what you call the “somebody” or the “person”—that is to say, all the material with which you could identify yourself—is the old, the memory, pictures, and that these do not have any reality. They do have some form of reality, but that reality, in turn, is being attributed by other images again. The reality you are actually living is free from delusion.

V: I can see that.

A: It isn’t a question of your seeing it: It’s a question of your being there—always.

V: I remember quite well, when I first came here, that you said, “There has got to be a knowing.” My question is: Who knows it?

A: Do you need a “who” in order to know that? At best, the knowing is conscious of a “who,” but there certainly isn’t a “who” that is conscious of the knowing.

V: That knowing happens through the body.

A: Now, if the body is dead, then what does the body know?

V: Then the knowing also isn’t there.

A: So the knowing is the body? The body is still there after death, but the knowing has gone. The knowing does have something to do with the body, but it is not the body. When someone dies, the one who is afraid of dying will disappear. For then it is actually happening, so he needn’t be afraid of it anymore. The one who has the fear of passing away will disappear along with the passing away. It can never take long. You needn’t be afraid of death—the fear will go together with death. If you are afraid to lose your finger, then the fear will have disappeared the moment that you have actually lost it. Those fears are not substantial, not real. In the reality fear disappears. More people have died from the fear of death that through death itself…

V: I am still left with the question of whether the knowing isn’t actually tied up with a “somebody.”

A: No, it isn’t.

V: You are saying. Things happen within the consciousness.

A: Yes, but you can’t make consciousness into an object, into a thing. By making a noun of it, it would seem as if qualities may be attributed to it.

V: When Self realization takes place, will there be a “somebody” then who knows it?

A: It is that very “somebody” which will disappear with Self realization. But there isn’t going to be a “nobody” to take its place.

V: Then who knows?

A: There is only the knowing. There isn’t a “somebody” who knows, nor is there a “nobody” who knows. There is only knowingness, love, consciousness. Once a person came here. After one meeting he said, “I know enough. I get it.” “All right,” I said, and I never saw him again.

To see it only once is sufficient. Knowing is sufficient unto itself. Then there is always something that has to go with it—stories, dramas, ideas, philosophy, etc. Ignorance always needs to be supported, because it cannot stand on its own. The knowing-ness which you are, doesn’t need any support. No guru, no disciple, no commentary, no confirmation, not a single reflection.

Self realization is self-sufficient; that is the beauty of it. The whole guru-disciple relationship also is transcended along with it. The reality—that which you really are—is sufficient unto itself. It doesn’t need anyone’s confirmation, not even the confirmation of the teacher or the guru. But until the last moment you will not stop to seek the grace, the blessing, the approval, the confirmation of the guru as the father.

Only the reality which you are actually living suffices. Self realization is self sufficient. That realization can never be confirmed by anything from outside, by an authority, by an outsider. Someone who is truly Self realized doesn’t run into the trap of self complacency, thinking, “I’m enlightened, I don’t need anybody anymore.” It is very subtle . . . Profound knowing will ultimately become silence.

You have to understand that the “person” is obsessive. You can’t tell the memory, “Stop producing images!” Memory simply produces what it produces. In fact, it is producing a three-dimensional delusion. There is only one thing which is staying out of the delusion, and that is the perceivingness. No wonder that is where the emphasis needs to be put. From the delusion you will never be able to realize what that perceivingness is. The will has no grip on the memory and, therefore, not on the “person,” either. They can’t just disappear. Memory simply continues to deliver. You may forgive but not forget. To forget is not an act of the will. The brains are simply doing their job. That is how it works; that’s the reality.

Thus I see only one possibility, and I’m asking you: Are you able to see that which is beyond memory? That is the perceivingness, the knowingness. That is why Advaita would like to see you moving into that direction.

V: What matters—looking at it from the subject—is to shift the point of gravity.

A: To shift the point of gravity from constantly trying to get a grip on the knowingness from the delusion—to the knowingness itself, to the real essence. That is what matters in these meetings.

V: And all the whirlings produced by the memory are to be viewed from the perceivingness as being more or less irrelevant.

A: No, no, no! That again is a judgment, and undesirable involvement. What matters is the fact that you are choicelessly aware. The word “choiceless” isn’t just anything: It means to be without discrimination, without preference or aversion. Without judgment, for the perceivingness is choiceless.

V: So you let everything pass by?

A: Let me put it this way: Whoever realizes the perceivingness cannot but live and look from that. The possibility to judge remains completely available, but condemnation will prove to be impossible.

V: Everybody is pushing you into the reality value of the person. Is it possible to avoid that?

A: No, it isn’t. Try to see that you are not a person yourself. That is sufficient and that will do the job.

-Alexander Smit

Taken from Consciousness

This excerpt was originally seen in Inner Directions Journal, Spring/Summer 2005.

The entire magazine can be downloaded from: http://www.innerdirections.org/catalog/journal/Spring-Summer_2005.pdf

For more from Alexander Smit look here.

Focused “I Am” Meditation – Nisargadatta Maharaj

Focused ‘I am’ Meditation

1. The ‘I am’ came first, it’s ever present, ever available, refuse all thoughts except ‘I am’, stay there.

2. Just stay put firmly and establish yourself in the ‘I am’, reject all that does not go with ‘I am’

3. Consistently and with perseverance separate the ‘I am’ from ‘this’ or ‘that’, just keep in mind the feeling ‘I am’

4. Only the ‘I am’ is certain, it’s impersonal, all knowledge stems from it, it’s the root, hold on to it and let all else go.

5. You are sure of the ‘I am’, it’s the totality of being, remember ‘I am’ and it’s enough to heal your mind and take you beyond.

6. The ‘I am’ is, it’s ever fresh, all else is inference, when the ‘I am’ goes all that remains is the Absolute.

7. Give all your attention to the ‘I am’, which is timeless presence, the ‘I am’ applies to all, come back to it repeatedly.

8. Hang on to the ‘I am’ and go beyond it, without the ‘I am’ you are at peace and happy.

9. Hold on to the ‘I am’ to the exclusion of everything else, the ‘I am’ in movement creates the world, the ‘I am’ at peace becomes the Absolute.

10. Immortality is freedom from the feeling ‘I am’, to have that freedom remain in the sense ‘I am’, it’s simple, it’s crude, yet it works!

11. The ‘I am’ is unreal and real, unreal when identified with body, real when wordless and used to go beyond.

12. The ‘I am’ has brought you in, the ‘I am’ will take you out, the ‘I am’ is the door, stay at it! It’s open!

13. You have to be there before you can say ‘I am’, the ‘I am’ is the root of all appearance.

14. The ‘I am’ is the permanent link in the succession of events called life, be at the link ‘I am’ only and go beyond it.

15. The ‘I am’ is the sum total of all that you perceive, it’s time‐bound, the ‘I am’ itself is an illusion, you are not the ‘I am’ you are prior to it.

16. The ‘I am’ is your greatest foe and greatest friend, foe when binding to the illusion as body, friend when taking out of the illusion as body.

17. The beginning and the end of knowledge is the ‘I am’, be attentive to the ‘I am’, once you understand it, you are apart from it.

18. You must meditate on the ‘I am’ without holding on to the body‐mind, the ‘I am’ is the first ignorance, persist on it and you will go beyond it.

19. Your Guru, your God, is the ‘I am’, with its coming came duality and all activity, stay on the ‘I am’, you are before the ‘I am’ appeared.

20. The ‘I am’ concept is the last outpost of the illusion, hold on to it, stabilize in the ‘I am’, then you are no more an individual.

21. Without doing anything you have the knowledge ‘I am’, it has come spontaneously and unwillingly on you, stay there and put an axe to the ‘I am’.

22. Your only capital is the ‘I am’, it’s the only tool you can use to solve the riddle of life, the ‘I am’ is in all and movement inherent in it.

23. Only be the ‘I am’, just be, the ‘I am’ has appeared on your homogeneous state, the one free of the ‘I am’ is liberated, you are prior to the ‘I am’.

24. Worship the indwelling ‘I am’ in you, it is the ‘I am’ that is born, it is the ‘I am’ that will die, you are not that ‘I am’.

25. Remain focused on the ‘I am’ till it goes into oblivion, then the eternal is, Absolute is, Parabrahman is.

26. The knowledge ‘I am’ is the birth principle, investigate it and you’ll finally stabilize in the Absolute Parabrahman.

27. All knowledge including the ‘I am’ is formless, throw out the ‘I am’ and stay put in quietude

28. Prior to birth where was the ‘I am’? Don’t contaminate the ‘I am’ with the body idea, I as the Absolute am not the ‘I am’

29. In the absence of ‘I am’ nothing is required, the ‘I am’ will go with the body, what remains is the Absolute.

30. You must not only have the conviction that ‘I am’ but also that you are free from the ‘I am’.

31. Remember the knowledge ‘I am’ only and give up the rest, staying in the ‘I am’ you would realize that it is unreal.

32. Understand that the knowledge ‘I am’ has dawned on you and all are its manifestations, in this understanding you realize you are not the ‘I am’.

33. When this concept ‘I am’ departs there would be no memory left that ‘I was’ and ‘I had’ those experiences, the very memory will be erased.

34. With the arrival of the primary concept ‘I am’, time began, with its departure time would end, you the Absolute are not the primary concept ‘I am.

35. When you know both the ‘I am’ and the ‘I am not’ then you are the Absolute which transcends both knowingness and no‐knowingness.

36. Appearance and disappearance, birth and death these are qualities of ‘I am’, they do not belong to you, the Absolute.

37. Out of the nothingness, the ‘I am ‘ or beingness has come, there is no individual, the knowledge ‘I am’‐ not the individual – has to go back to its source.

38. By meditating on the knowledge ‘I am’ it gradually settles down at its source and disappears, then, you are the Absolute.

39. Go on to know the ‘I am’ without words, you must be that and not deviate from it for even a moment, and then it would disappear.

40. With the dropping off of the primary experience ‘I am’ all experiences would vanish and only the Absolute remains.

41. On your true state has arisen this subtle principle ‘I am’, which is the cause of all mischief, no ‘I am’, and no question of mischief.

42. Whatever you try to become that is not you, before even the words ‘I am’ were said, that is you.

43. The root habit is the ‘I am’ and it has arisen from the domain five elements and three qualities which are unreal.

44. Abide in the knowledge ‘I am’ without identifying with the body, how did you function before the arrival of the knowledge ‘I am’?

45. The state of being, that is the message ‘I am’, without words, is common to all, change begins only with the mind‐flow.

46. The belief in the ‘I am’ to be something as a body, as an individual is the cause of all fear, in the absence of the ‘I am’, who is to fear what?

47. Try to stabilize in the primary concept ‘I am’ in order to lose that and be free from all other concepts, in understating the unreality of the ‘I am’ you are totally free.

48. Sitting quietly, being one with the knowledge ‘I am’, you would lose all concern with the world, then the ‘I am’ would also go, leaving you as the Absolute.

49. Putting aside everything, stabilize in the ‘I am’ ‐ as you continue with this practice – in the process you will transcend the ‘I am’.

50. The very core of this consciousness is the quality ‘I am’, there is no personality or individual there, reside there and transcend it.

51. Worship the knowledge ‘I am’ as God, as your Guru, the message ‘I am’ is there, the mind‐flow is there, stay in the ‘I am’ realize you are neither.

52. Presently you are sustaining the memory ‘I am’, you are not that ‘I am’, you are the Absolute, prior to that ‘I am’.

53. You feel the ‘I am’ due to the five elements and three qualities, when they go the ‘I am’ goes but you are still there.

54. Keep focused on the ‘I am’ till you become a witness to it, then you stand apart, you have reached the highest.

55. This knowledge ‘I am’ has come out of the state prior to it and now is the cause of all suffering, before the ‘I am’ came you were happy, so revert.

56. When you remain in the ‘I am’ you will realize everything else is useless, then you are Parabrahman, the Absolute.

57. One who abides in that principle by which he knows ‘I am’, then he knows all and does not require anything.

58. Just sit and know that ‘you are’, the ‘I am’ without words, nothing else has to be done, shortly you will arrive to your natural Absolute state.

59. Erroneously you have handed over this knowledge’ I am’ to the body thereby reduced the limitless to the limited, hence you are afraid of dying.

60. You have to realize that you are not the body nor the knowledge ‘I am’, you as the Absolute are neither nor do you require them.

61. Inquire into the validity of the fundamental concept of your individuality the ‘I am’ and it will disappear, then you are Parabrahman, the Absolute.

62. The essential thing to be convinced about is that the original concept ‘I am’ is false, only accept that which is conducive to this development.

63. Before you occurred to yourself as ‘I am’ you were the highest ‐ Parabrahman – now, until the impurity of ‘I am the body’ goes stay put in the ‘I am’ quietude.

64. Your fall started with the appearance of ‘I am’, then you blundered by embracing the body as ‘I am’, all that gathered thereafter is unreal.

65. This is no joke, but you can become Parabrahman right now! You are Parabrahman right now! Just focus your attention on the ‘I am’.

66.Who has the knowledge ‘I am’? Somebody in you knows the knowledge ‘I am’, ‘you are’, who is it?

67. Who can know the illusory state ‘I am’? Only a non‐illusory state can do so, it’s the Awareness, the Parabrahman, the Absolute.

68. The primary concept ‘I am’ is dishonest, a cheat, it has deceived you, into believing what is not, sharply focus on the ‘I am’ and it’ll disappear.

69. Finally you have to transcend the ‘I am’ to enter the concept‐free Parabrahman state, where you do not even know you are!

70. The Absolute or the Parabrahman is prior to the ‘I am’, it’s the unborn state, so how can it have the knowledge ‘I am’?

71. Presently whatever you know is the ‘I am’ which is a product of the five elements, three qualities or the food body, but you are none of these.

72. One who has realized the knowledge ‘I am’ which means transcending it as well, for him there is no birth or death nor any karma.

73. The primary illusion is only this knowingness ‘I am’; it is liberation when the knowingness is transformed to non‐knowingness.

74. You are even before even you could say the words ‘I am’, witnessing happens to the state prior to your saying the words ‘I am’.

75. When the body dies the ‘I am’ goes into oblivion, only the Absolute remains, stay put there, nothing happens to you the Absolute.

76. From non‐being to being, how is it known? It’s by the knowledge ‘I am’, stay there in the ‘I am’, then you’ll revert from being to non‐being.

77. Right now, here, you are the Absolute, the Parabrahman, very firmly hold on to the ‘I am’, ever abide in it and it’ll dissolve, then you are as you are.

78. On the state of non‐beingness, beingness as the ‘I am’ has occurred, who is that is not important, the ‘I am’ is important, stay there.

79. First came the ‘aham’ as ‘I am’, then ‘aham‐akar’ (identification with body, ego), now revert back to ‘aham’, dwelling there realize ‘aham‐brahmasmi’

80. You are neither the ‘I am’ nor the activities carried out by the beingness, you as the Absolute are none of these.

81. With the transcendence of the knowledge ‘I am’, the Absolute prevails. The state is called Parabrahman, while the knowledge ‘I am’ is Brahman.

82. How were you prior to the message ‘I am’? In the absence of the message ‘I am’ only my eternal Absolute state prevails.

83. Who would have witnessed the message ‘I am’, if your prior state of non‐beingness were not there?

84. A true devotee, by abiding in the knowledge ‘I am’, transcends the experience of death and attains immortality.

85. Hold on to this knowingness ‘I am’ without words and every secret of your existence would be revealed to you.

86. What is it in you that understands this knowledge ‘I am’ without a name, title or word? Subside in that innermost center and witness the knowledge ‘I am’.

87. Totally accept the knowledge ‘I am’ as oneself and with full conviction and faith and firmly believe in the dictum ‘I am that by which I know I am’.

88. Reality prevails prior to the knowledge ‘I am’; you must stay put at the source of your creation, at the beginning of the knowledge ‘I am’.

89. When one is established in the final free Absolute state, the knowledge ‘I am’ becomes ‘non‐knowledge’.

90. The first witnessing is that of ‘I am’, the primary prerequisite for all further witnessing, but to whom is the first witnessing of ‘I am’ occurring?

91. The borderline of ‘I am’ (beingness) and ‘I am not’ (non‐beingness} is the precise location where the intellect subsides, its’ the ‘maha‐yoga’ state, be there.

92. Recognize the Atman by understanding the knowledge ‘I am’, the Atma‐jnana, which is all pervading, limitless and infinite.

93. To abide in the knowledge ‘I am’ is one’s true religion, give the highest honor due to it, doing so you will not undergo suffering or death.

94. Who says ‘I was not’ and ‘I would not be’ like the present ‘I am’? He is the one who was, is, and would be forever.

95. When you say ‘I was not prior to conception’ you actually mean not like the present ‘I am’, but the one to discern the absence of the present ‘I am’ was there.

96. Catch hold of the knowledge ‘I am’ in meditation and the realization would occur that ‘I ‘ the Absolute am not the ‘guna’ ‘I am’.

97. Do nothing but stay in the knowledge ‘I am’ – the ‘moolmaya’ – the primary illusion, then it will release its stranglehold on you and get lost.

98. In deep meditation, infused only with the knowledge ‘I am’, it would be intuitively revealed to you as to how this ‘I amness’ came to be.

99. The knowledge ‘I am’ means consciousness, God, Guru, Ishwara, but you the Absolute are none of these.

100. There is no ‘I am’ anymore, It’s the Parabrahman only…

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For more posts on Nisargadatta Maharaj see: https://o-meditation.com/category/nisargadatta-maharaj/

To read more from Nisargadatta Maharaj see: https://o-meditation.com/jai-guru-deva/some-good-books/downloadable-books/nisargadatta-maharaj/

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