Talks with
Sri Nisarga Datta Maharaj
Q: The mantra is traditional. Must it be so?
M: Since times immemorial a link was created between certain words and corresponding energies and reinforced by numberless repetitions. It is just like a road to walk on. It is an easy way -- only faith is needed. You trust the road to take you to your destination.
Q: In Europe there is no tradition of a mantra, except in some contemplative orders. Of what use is it to a modern young Westerner?
M: None, unless he is very much attracted. For him the right procedure is to adhere to the thought that he is the ground of all knowledge, the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and the mind. If he keeps it in mind all the time, aware and alert, he is bound to break the bounds of non awareness and emerge into pure life, light and love. The idea -- 'I am the witness only' will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disappears in space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness (chidakash), then into pure being (paramakash), which is beyond all existence and non existence.
Q: The realized man eats, drinks and sleeps. What makes him do so?
M: The same power that moves the universe, rnoves him too.
Q: All are moved by the same power: what is the difference?
M: This only: The realized man knows what others merely hear; but don't experience. Intellectually they may seem convinced, but in action they betray their bondage, while the realized man is always right.
Q: Everybody says 'I am'. The realized man too says 'I am'. Where is the difference?
M: The difference is in the meaning attached to the words 'I am'. With the realized man the experience: 'I am the world, the world is mine' is supremely valid -- he thinks, feels and acts integrally and in unity with all that lives. He may not even know the theory and practice of self realization, and be born and bred free of religious and metaphysical notions. But there will not be the least flaw in his understanding and compassion.
Q: I may come across a beggar, naked and hungry and ask him 'Who are you?' He may answer: 'I am the Supreme Self'. 'Well', I say, 'suffice you are the Supreme, change your present state'. What will he do?
M: He will ask you: 'Which state? What is there that needs changing? What is wrong with me?
Q: Why should he answer so?
M: Because he is no longer bound by appearances, he does not identify himself with the name and shape. He uses memory, but memory cannot use him.
Q: Is not all knowledge based on memory?
M: Lower knowledge -- yes. Higher knowledge, knowledge of Reality, is inherent in man's true nature.
Q: Can I say that I am not what I am conscious of, nor am I consciousness itself?
M: As long as you are a seeker, better cling to the idea that you are pure consciousness, free from all content. To go beyond consciousness is the supreme state.
Q: The desire for realization, dces it originate in consciousness or beyond?
M: In consciousness, of course. All desire is born from memory and is within the realm of consciousness. What is beyond is clear of all striving. The very desire to go beyond consciousness is still in consciousness.
Q: Is there any trace, or imprint, of the beyond on consciousness?
M: No, there cannot be.
Q: Then, what is the link between the two? How can a passage be found between two states which have nothing in common? Is not pure awareness the link between the two?
M: Even pure awareness is a form of consciousness.
Q: Then what is beyond? Emptiness?
M: Emptiness again refers only to consciousness. Fullness and emptiness are relative terms. The Real is really beyond -- beyond not in relation to consciousness, but beyond all relations of whatever kind. The difficulty comes with the word 'state'. The Real is not a state of something else -- it Is not a state of mind or consciousness or psyche -- nor is it something that has a beginning and an end, being and not being. All opposites are contained in it -- but it is not in the play of opposites. You must not take it to be the end of a transition. It is itself, after the consciousness as such is no more. Then words 'I am man', or 'I am God' have no meaning. Only in silence and in darkness can it be heard and seen.
Maharaj: You are all drenched for it is raining hard. In my world it is always fine weather. There is no night or day, no heat or cold. No worries beset me there, nor regrets. My mind is free of thoughts, for there are no desires to slave for.
Questioner: Are there two worlds?
M: Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless. You can tell me what you like about your world -- I shall listen carefully, even with interest, yet not for a moment shall I forget that your world is not, that you are dreaming.
Q: What distinguishes your world from mine?
M: My world has no characteristics by which it can be identified. You can say nothing about it. I am my world. My world is myself. It is complete and perfect. Every impression is erased, every experience -- rejected. I need nothing, not even myself, for myself I cannot lose.
Q: Not even God?
M: All these ideas and distinctions exist in your world; in mine there is nothing of the kind. My world is single and very simple.
Q: Nothing happens there?
M: Whatever happens in your world, only there it has valldity and evokes response. In my world nothing happens.
Q: The very fact of your experiencing your own world implies duality inherent in all experience.
M: Verbally -- yes. But your words do not reach me. Mine is a non verbal world. In your world the unspoken has no existence. In mine -- the words and their contents have no being. In your world nothing stays, in mine -- nothing changes. My world is real, while yours is made of dreams.
Q: Yet we are talking.
M: The talk is in your world. In mine -- there is eternal silence. My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there.
Q: It seems as if you alone are in your world.
M: How can you say alone or not alone, when words do not apply? Of course, I am alone for I am all.
Q: Are you ever coming into our world?
M: What is coming and going to me? These again are words. I am. Whence am I to come from and where to go?
Q: Of what use is your world to me?
M: You should consider more closely your own world, examine it critically and, sudden!y, one day you will find yourself in mine.
Q: What do we gain by it?
M: You gain nothing. You leave behind what is not your own and find what you have never lost -- your own being.
Q: Who is the ruler of your world?
M: There are no ruler and ruled here. There is no duality whatsoever. You are merely projecting your own ideas. Your scriptures and your gods have no meaning here.
Q: Still you have a name and shape, display consciousness and activity.
M: In your world I appear so. In mine I have being only. Nothing else. You people are rich with your ideas of possession, of quantity and quality. I am completely without ideas.
Q: In my world there is disturbance, distress and despair. You seem to be living on some hidden income, while I must slave for a living.
M: Do as you please. You are free to leave your world for mine.
Q: How is the crossing done?
M: See your world as it is, not as you imagine it to be. Discrimination will lead to detachment; detachment will ensure right action; right action will build the inner bridge to your real being. Action is a proof of earnestness. Do what you are told diligently and faithfully and all obstacles will dissolve.
Q: Are you happy?
M: In your world I would be most miserable. To wake up, to eat, to talk, to sleep again -- what a bother!
Q: So you do not want to live even?
M: To live, to die -- what meaningless words are these! When you see me alive, I am dead. When you think me dead, I am alive. How muddled up you are!
Q: How indifferent you are? All the sorrows of our world are as nothing to you.
M: I am quite conscious of your troubles.
Q: Then what are you doing about them?
M: There is nothing I need doing. They come and go.
Q: Do they go by the very act of your giving them attention?
M: Yes. The difficulty may be physical, emotional or mental; but it is always individual. Large scale calamities are the sum of numberless individual destinies and take time to settle. But death is never a calamity?
Q: Even when a man is killed?
M: The calamity is of the killer.
Q: Still, it seems there are two worlds, mine and yours.
M: Mine is real, yours is of the mind.
Q: Imagine a rock and a hole in the rock and a frog in the hole. The frog may spend its life in perfect bliss, undistracted, undisturbed. Outside the rock the world goes on. If the frog in the hole were told about the outside world, he would say: 'There is no such thing. My world is of peace and bliss. Your world is a word structure only, it has no existence'. It is the same with you. When you tell us that our world simply does not exist, there is no common ground for discussion. Or, take another example. I go to a doctor and complain of stomach ache. He examines me and says: 'You are all right'. 'But it pains' I say. 'Your pain is mental' he asserts. I say 'It does not help me to know that my pain is mental. You are a doctor, cure me of my pain. If you cannot cure me, you are not my doctor.'
M: Quite right.
Q: You have built the railroad, but for lack of a bridge no train can pass. Build the bridge.
M: There is no need of a bridge.
Q: There must be some link between your world and mine.
M: There is no need of a link between a real world and an imaginary world, for there cannot be any.
Q: So what are we to do?
M: Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically, scrutinize every idea about it; that will do.
Q: The world is too big for investigation. All I know is that I am the world is, the world troubles me and I trouble the world.
M: My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed of pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.
Q: Why should pleasure be the seed of pain?
M: Because for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death.
Q: You say the world is of no use to us -- only a tribulation. I feel it cannot be so. God is not such a fool. The world seems to me a big enterprise for brinsing the potential into actual, matter into life, the unconscious into full awareness. To realize the supreme we need the experience of the opposites. Just as for building a temple we need stone and mortar, wood and iron, glass and tiles, so for making a man into a divine sage, a master of iife and death, one needs the material of every experience. As a woman goes to the market, buys provisions of every sort, comes home, cooks, bakes arid feeds her lord, so we bake ourselves nicely in the fire of life and feed our God.
M: Well, if you think So, act on it. Feed your God, by all means.
Q: A child goes to school and learns many things, which will be of no use to it later. But in the course of learning it grows. So do we pass through experiences without number and forget them all, but in the meantime we grow all the time. And what is a gnani but a man with a genius for reality! This world of mine cannot be an accident. It makes sense, there must be a plan behind it. My God has a plan.
M: If the world is false, then the plan and its creator are also false.
Q: Again, you deny the world. There is no bridge between us.
M: There is no need of a bridge. Your mistake lies in your belief that you are born. You were never born nor will you ever die, but you believe that you were born at a certain date and place and that a particular body is your own.
Q: The world is, I am. These are facts.
M: Why do you worry about the world before taking care of yourself? You want to save the world, don't you? Can you save the world before saving yourself? And what means being saved? Saved from what? From illusion. Salvation is to see things as they are. I really do not see myself related to anybody and anything. Not even to a self, whatever that self may be. I remain forever -- undefined. I am - within and beyond -- intimate and unapproachable.
Q: How did you come to it?
M: By my trust in my Guru. He told me"You alone are' and I did not doubt him. I was merely puzzling over it, until I realized that it is absolutely true.
Q: Conviction by repetition?
M: By self realization. I found that I am conscious and happy absolutely and only by mistake I thought I owed being consciousness bliss to the body and the world of bodies.
Q: You are not a learned man. You have not read much and what you read, or heard did perhaps not contradict itself. I am fairly well educated and have read a lot and I found that books and teachers contradict each other hopelessly. Hence whatever I read or hear, I take it in a state of doubt. 'It may be so, it may not be so' is my first reaction. And as my mind is unable to decide what is true and what is not, I am left high and dry with my doubts. In Yoga a doubting mind is at a tremendous disadvantage.
M: I am glad to hear it; but my Guru too taught me to doubt -- everything and absolutely. He said: 'deny existence to everything except your self.' Through desire you have created the world with its pains and pleasures.
Q: Must it be also painful?
M: What else? By its very nature pleasure is limited and transitory. Out of pain desire is born, in pain it seeks fulfilment, and it ends in the pain of frustration and despair. Pain is the background of pleasure, all seeking of pleasure is born in pain and ends in pain.
Q: All you say is clear to me. But when some physical or mental trouble comes, my mind goes dull and grey, or seeks frantically for relief.
M: What does it matter? It is the mind that is dull or restless, not you. Look, all kinds of things happen in this room. Do I cause them to happen? They just happen. So it is with you -- the roll of destiny urfolds itself and actualizes the inevitable. You cannot change the course of events, but you can change your attitude and what really matters is the attitude and not the bare event. The world is the abode of desires and fears. You cannot find peace in it. For peace you must go beyond the world. The root cause of the world is self love. Because of it we seek pleasure and avoid pain. Replace self love by love of the Self and the picture changes. Brahma the Creator is the sum total of all desires. The world is the instrument for their fulfilment. Souls take whatever pleasure they desire and pay for them in tears. Time squares all accounts. The law of balance reigns supreme.
Q: To be a superman one must be a man first. Manhood is the fruit of innumerable experiences: Desire drives to experience. Hence at its own time and level desire is right.
M: All this is true in a way. But a day comes when you have amassed enough and must begin to build. Then sorting out and discarding (viveka vairagya) are absolutely necessary. Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For in reality nothing is of value. Be passionately dispassionate -- that is all. God is the All doer, the Gnani a Non doer
Questioner: Some Mahatmas (enlightened beings) maintained that the world is neither an accident nor a play of God, but the result and expression of a mighty plan of work aiming at awakening and developing consciousness throughout the universe. From lifelessness to life, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from dullness to bright intelligence, from misapprehension to clarity -- that is the direction in which the world moves ceaselessly and relentlessly. Of course, there are moments of rest and apparent darkness, when the universe seems to be dormant, but the rest comes to an end and the work on consciousness is resumed. From our point of view the world is a dale of tears, a place to escape from, as soon as possible and by every possible means. To enlightened beings the world is good and it serves a good purpose. They do not deny that the world is a mental structure and that ultimately all is one, but they see and say that the structure has meaning and serves a supremely desirable purpose. What we call the will of God is not a capricious whim of a playful deity, but the expression of an absolute necessity to grow in love and wisdom and power, to actualize the infinite potentials of life and consciousness. Just as a gardener grows flowers from a tiny seed to glorious perfection, so does God in His own garden grow, among other beings, men to supermen, who know and love and wqrk along with Him. When God takes rest (pra/aya), those whose growth was not completed, become unconscious for a time, while the perfect ones, who have gone beyond all forms and contents of consciousness, remain aware of the universal silence. When the time comes for the emergence of a new universe, the sleepers wake up and their work starts. The more advanced wake up first and prepare the ground for the less advanced -- who thus find forms and patterns of behaviour suitable for their further growth. Thus runs the story. The difference with your teaching is this: you insist that the world is no good and should be shunned. They say that distaste for the world is a passing stage, necessary, yet temporary, and is soon replaced by an all pervading love, and a steady will to work with God.
Maharaj: All you say is right for the outgoing (pravritti) path. For the path of return (nivritti) naughting oneself is necessary. My stand I take where nothing (paramakash) is; words do not reach there, nor thoughts. To the mind it is all darkness and silence. Then consciousness begins to stir and wakes up the mind (chidakash), which projects the world (mahaakash), built of memory and imagination. Once the world comes into being, all you say may be so. It is in the nature of the mind to imagine goals, to strive towards them, to seek out means and ways, to display vision, energy and courage. These are divine attributes and I do not deny them. But I take my stand where no difference exists, where things are not, nor the minds that create them. There I am at home. Whatever happens, does not affect me -- things act on things, that is all. Free from memory and expectation, I am fresh, innocent and wholehearted. Mind is the great worker (mahakarta) and it needs rest. Needing nothing, I am unafraid. Whom to be afraid of? There is no separation, we are not separate selves. There is only one Self, the Supreme Reality, in which the personal and the impersonal are one.
Q: All I want is to be able to help the world.
M: Who says you cannot help? You made up your mind about what help means and needs and got your self into a conflict between what you should and what you can, between necessity and ability.
Q: But why do we do so?
M: Your mind projects a structure and you identify yourself with it. It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfilment. Even a small desire can start a long line of action; what about a strong desire? Desire can produce a uni verse; its powers are miraculous. Just as a small matchstick can set a huge forest on fire, so does a desire light the fires of manifestation. The very purpose of creation is the fulfilment of desire. The desire may be noble, or ignoble, space (akash) is neutral -- one can fill it with what one likes: You must be very careful as to what you desire. And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires. You can only teach them to have right desires so that they may rise above them and be free from the urge to create and re create worIds of desires, abodes of pain and pleasure.
Q: A day must come when the show is wound up; a man must die, a universe come to an end.
M: Just as a sleeping man forgets all and wakes up for another day, or he dies and emerges into another life, so do the worlds of desire and fear dissolve and disappear. But the universal witness, the Supreme Self never sleeps and never dies. Eternally the Great Heart beats and at each beat a new universe comes into being.
Q: Is he conscious?
M: He is beyond all that the mind conceives. He is beyond being and not being. He is the Yes and No to everything, beyond and within, creating and destroying, unimaginably real.
Q: God and the Mahatma are they one or two?
M: They are one.
Q: There must be some difference.
M: God is the All Doer, the gnani is a non doer. God himself does not say: 'I am doing all.' To Him things happen by their own nature. To the gnani all is done by God. He sees no difference between God and nature. Both God and the gnani know hemselves to be the immovable centre of the movable, the eternal witness of the transient. The centre is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing, therefore nothing can resist them.
Q: How does this look and feel in your personal experience?
M: Being nothing, I am all. Everything is me, everything is mind. Just as my body moves by my mere thinking of the movement, so do things happen as I think of them. Mind you, I do nothing. I just see them happen.
Q: Do things happen as you want them to happen, or do you want them to happen as they happen?
M: Both. I accept and am accepted. I am all and all is me. Being the world I am not afraid of the world. Being a!l, what am I to be afraid of? Water is not afraid of water, nor fire of fire. Also I am not afraid because I am nothing that can experience fear, or can be in danger. I have no shape, nor name. It is attachment to a name and shape that breeds fear. I am not attached. I am nothing, and nothing is afraid of no thing. On the contrary, everything is afraid of the Nothing, for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes nothing. It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it, disappears.
Q: Isn't God a person?
M: As long as you think yourself to be a person, He too is a person. When you are all, you see Him as all.
Q: Can I change facts by changing attitude?
M: The attitude is the fact. Take anger. I may be furious, pacing the room up and down; at the same time I know what I am, a centre of wisdom and love, an atom of pure existence. All subsides and the mind merges into silence.
Q: Still, you are angry sometimes.
M: With whom am l to be angry and for what? Anger came and dissolved on my remembering myself. It is all a play of gunas (qualities of cosmic matter). When I identify myself with them, I am their slave. When I stand apart, I am their master.
Q: Can you influence the world by your attitude? By separating yourself from the world you lose all hope of helping it.
M: How can it be? All is myself -- can't I help myself? I do not identify myself with anybody in particular, for I am all -- both the particular and the universal.
Q: Can you then help me, the particular person?
M: But I do help you always -- from within. My self and your self are one. I know it, but you don't. That is all the difference -- and it cannot last.
Q: And how do you help the entire world?
M: Gandhi is dead, yet his mind pervades the earth. The thought of a gnani pervades humanity and works ceaselessly for good. Being anonymous, coming from within, it is the more powerful and compelling. That is how the world improves -- the inner aiding and blessing the outer. When a gnani dies, he is no more, in the same sense in which a river is no more when it merges in the sea, the name, the shape, are no more, but the water remains and becomes one with the ocean. When a gnani joins the universal mind, all his goodness and wisdom become the heritage of humanity and uplift every human being.
Q: We are attached to our personality. Our individuality, our being unlike others, we value very much. You seem to denounce both as useless. Your unmanifested, of what use is it to us?
M: Unmanifested, manifested, individuality, personality (nirguna, saguna, vyakta, vyakti); all these are mere words, points of view, mental attitudes. There is no reality in them. The real is experienced in silence. You cling to personality -- but you are conscious of being a person only when you are in trouble -- when you are not in trouble you do not think of yourself.
Q: You did not tell me the uses of the Unmanifested.
M: Surely, you must sleep in order to wake up. You must die in order to live, you must melt down to shape anew. You must destroy to build, annihilate before creation. The Supreme is the universal sqlvent, it corrodes every container, it burns through every obstacle. Without the absolute denial of everything the tyranny of things would be absolute. The Supreme is the great harmonizer, the guarantee of the ultimate and perfect balance -- of life in freedom. It dissolves you and thus re asserts your true being.
Q: It is all well on its own level. But how does it work in daily life?
M: The daily life is a life of action. Whether you like it or not, you must function. Whatever you do for your own sake accumulates and becomes explosive; one day it goes off and plays havoc with you and your world. When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous.
Q: How is one to work then?
M: Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work's own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning, Make nothing a means to something else. Bind not. God does not create one thing to serve another. Each is made for its own sake. Because it is made for itself, it does not interfere. You' are using things and people for purposes alien to them and you play havoc with the world and yourself.
Q: Our real being is all the time with us, you say. How is it that we do not notice it?
M: Yes, you are always the Supreme. But your attention is fixed on things, physical or mental. When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When thrcugh the practice of discrimination and de:tachment (viveka vairagya), you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state.
Q: How does one bring to an end this sense of separateness?
M: By focussing the mind on 'I am', on the sense of being, 'I am so and so' dissolves; "I am a witness only" remains and that too submerges in 'I am all'. Then the all becomes the One and the One -- yourself, not to be separate from me. Abandon the idea of a separate 'I' and the question of 'whose experience?' will not arise.
Q: You speak from your own experience. How can I make it mine?
M: You speak of my experience as different from your experience, because you believe we are separate. But we are not. On a deeper level my experience is your experience. Dive deep within yourself and you will find it easily and simply. Go in the direction of 'I am'. Hold on to 'I am.
Questioner: Are you ever glad or sad? Do you know joy and sorrow?
Maharaj: Call them as you please. To me they are states of mind only, and I am not the mind.
Q: Is love a state of mind?
M: Again, it depends what you mean by love. Desire is, of course, a state of mind. But the realization of unity is beyond mind. To me, nothing exists by itself. All is the Self, all is myself. To see myself in everybody and everybody in myself most certainly is love.
Q: When I see something pleasant, I want it. Who exactly wants it? The self or the mind?
M: The question is wrongly put. There is no 'who'. There is desire, fear, anger, and the mind says -- this is me, this is mine. There is no thing which could be called 'me' or 'mine'. Desire is a state of the mind, perceived and named by the mind. Without the mind perceiving and naming, where is desire?
Q: But is there such a thing as perceiving without naming?
M: Of course. Naming cannot go beyond the mind, while perceiving is consciousness itself.
Q: When somebody dies what exactly happens?
M: Nothing happens. Something becomes nothing. Nothing was, nothing remains.
Q: Surely there is a difference between the living and the dead. You speak of the living as dead and of the dead as living.
M: Why do you fret at one man dying and care little for the millions dying every day? Entire universes are imploding and exploding every moment -- am I to cry over them? One thing is quite clear to me: all that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the witness. I am beyond it as Being.
Q: Surely, you care when your child is ill, don't you?
M: I don't get flustered. I just do the needful. I do not worry about the future. A right response to every situation is in my nature. I do not stop to think what to do. I act and move on. Results do not affect me. I do not even care, whether they are good or bad. Whatever they are, they are -- if they come back to me, I deal with them afresh. Or, rather, I happen to deal with them afresh. There is no sense of purpose in my doing anything. Things happens as they happen -- not because I make them happen, but it is because I am that they happen. In reality nothing ever happens. When the mind is restless, it makes Shiva dance, like the restless waters of the lake make the moon dance. It is all appearance, due to wrong ideas.
Q: Surely, you are aware of many things and behave according to their nature. You treat a child as a child and an adult as an adult.
M: Just as the taste of salt pervades the great ocean and every single drop of sea water carries the same flavour, so every experience gives me the touch of reality, the ever fresh realization of my own being.
Q: Do I exist in your world, as you exist in mine?
M: Of course, you are and I am. But only as points in consciousness; we are nothing apart from consciousness. This must be well grasped: the world hangs on the thread of consciousness; no consciousness, no world.
Q: There are many points in consciousness; are there as many worlds?
M: Take dream for an example. In a hospital there may be many patients, all sleeping, all dreaming, each dreaming his own private, personal dreams unrelated, unaffected, having one single factor in common -- illness. Similarly, we have divorced ourselves in our imagination from the real world of common experience and enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desire and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.
Q: This I can understand. But what could be the cause of the tremendous variety of the personal worlds?
M: The variety is not so great. All the dreams are superimposed over a common world. To some extent they shape and influence each other. The basic unity operates in spite of all. At the root of it all lies self forgetfulness; not knowing who I am.
Q: To forget, one must know. Did I know who I am, before I forgot it?
M: Of course. Self forgetting is inherent in self knowing. Consciousness and unconsciousness are two aspects of one life. They co exist. To know the world you forget the self -- to know the self you forget the world. What is world after all? A collection of memories. Cling to one thing, that matters, hold on to 'I am' and let go all else. This is sadhana. In realization there is nothing to hold on to and nothing to forget. Everything is known, nothing is remembered.
Q: What is the cause of self forgetting?
M: There is no cause, because there is no forgetting. Mental states succeed one another, and each obliterates the previous one. Self remembering is a mental state and self forgetting is another. They alternate like day and night. Reality is beyond both.
Q: Surely there must be a difference between forgetting and not knowing. Not knowing needs no cause. Forgetting presupposes previous knowledge and also the tendency or ability to forget. I admit I cannot enquire into the reason for not knowing, but forgetting must have some ground.
M: There is no such thing as not knowing. There is only forgetting. What is wrong with forgetting? It is as simple to forget as to remember.
Q: Is it not a calamity to forget oneself?
M: As bad as to remember oneself continuously. There is a state beyond forgetting and not forgetting -- the natural state. To remember, to forget -- these are all states of mind, thought-bound, word bound. Take for example, the idea of being born. I am told I was born. I do not remember. I am told I shall die I do not expect it. You tell me I have forgotten, or I lack imagination. But I just cannot remember what never happened, nor expect the patently impossible. Bodies are born and bodies die, but what is it to me? Bodies come and go in consciousness and consciousness itself has its roots in me. I am life and mine are mind and body.
Q: You say at the root of the world is self forgetfulness. To forget I must remember What did I forget to remember? I have not forgotten that I am.
M: This 'I am' too may be a part of the illusion. Q. How can it be? You cannot prove to me that I am not. Even when convinced that I am not -- I am.
M: Reality can neither be proved nor disproved. Within the mind you cannot, beyond the mind you need not. In the real, the question 'what is real?' does not arise. The manifested (saguna) and unmanifested (nirguna) are not different.
Q: In that case all is real.
M: I am all. As myself all is real. Apart from me, nothing is real.
Q: I do not feel that the world is the result of a mistake.
M: You may say so only after a full investigation, not before. Of course, when you discern and let go all that is unreal, what remains is real.
Q: Does anything remain?
M: The real remains. But don't be mislead by words !
Q: Since immemorial time, during innumerable births, I build and improve and beautify my world. It is neither perfect, nor unreal. It is a process.
M: You are mistaken. The world has no existence apart from you. At every moment it is but a reflection of yourself. You create it, you destroy it.
Q: And build it again, improved.
M: To improve it, you must disprove it. One must die to live. There is no rebirth, except through death.
Q: Your universe may be perfect. My personal universe is improving.
M: Your personal universe does not exist by itself. It is merely a limited and distorted view of the real. It is not the universe that needs improving, but your way of looking.
Q: How do you view it?
M: It is a stage on which a world drama is being played. The quality of the performance is all that matters; not what the actors say and do, but how they say and do it.
Q: I do not like this lila (play) idea I would rather compare the world to a work yard in which we are the builders.
M: You take it too seriously. What is wrong with play? You have a purpose only as long as you are not cornplete (purna); till then completeness, perfection, is the purpose. But when you are complete in yourself, fully integrated within and without, then you enjoy the universe; you do not labour at it. To the disintegrated you may seem working hard, but that is their illusion. Sportsmen seem to make tremendous efforts: yet their sole motive is to play and display.
Q: Do you mean to say that God is just having fun, that he is engaged in purposeless action?
M: God is not only true and good, he is also beautiful (satyam shivam sundaram). He creates beauty -- for the joy of It
Q: Well, then beauty is his purpose!
M: Why do you introduce purpose? Purpose implies movement, change, a sense of imperfection. God does not aim at beauty -- whatever he does is beautiful. Would you say that a flower is trying to be beautiful? It is beautiful by its very nature. Similarly God is perfection itself, not an effort at perfection.
Q: The purpose fulfils itself in beauty.
M: What is beautiful? Whatever is perceived blissfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty.
Q: You speak of Sat Chit Ananda. That I am is obvious. That I know is obvious. That I am happy is not at all obvious. Where has my happiness gone?
M: Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss consciously. Because you take your mind off yourself and make it dwell on what you are not, you lose your sense of well being of being well.
Q: There are two paths before us -- the path of effort (yoga marga), and the path of ease (bhoga marga). Both lead to the same goal -- liberation.
M: Why do you call bhoga a path? How can ease bring you perfection?
Q: The perfect renouncer (yogi) will find reality. The perfect enjoyer (bhogi) also will come to it.
M: How can it be? Aren't they contradictory?
Q: The extremes meet. To be a perfect Bhogi is more difficult than to be a perfect Yogi. I am a humble man and cannot venture judgements of value. Both the Yogi and the Bhogi, after all, are concerned with the search for happiness. The Yogi wants it permanent, the Bhogi is satisfied with the intermittent. Often the Bhogi strives harder than the Yogi.
M: What is your happiness worth when you have to strive and labour for it? True happiness is spontaneous and effortless.
M: Since times immemorial a link was created between certain words and corresponding energies and reinforced by numberless repetitions. It is just like a road to walk on. It is an easy way -- only faith is needed. You trust the road to take you to your destination.
Q: In Europe there is no tradition of a mantra, except in some contemplative orders. Of what use is it to a modern young Westerner?
M: None, unless he is very much attracted. For him the right procedure is to adhere to the thought that he is the ground of all knowledge, the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and the mind. If he keeps it in mind all the time, aware and alert, he is bound to break the bounds of non awareness and emerge into pure life, light and love. The idea -- 'I am the witness only' will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disappears in space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness (chidakash), then into pure being (paramakash), which is beyond all existence and non existence.
Q: The realized man eats, drinks and sleeps. What makes him do so?
M: The same power that moves the universe, rnoves him too.
Q: All are moved by the same power: what is the difference?
M: This only: The realized man knows what others merely hear; but don't experience. Intellectually they may seem convinced, but in action they betray their bondage, while the realized man is always right.
Q: Everybody says 'I am'. The realized man too says 'I am'. Where is the difference?
M: The difference is in the meaning attached to the words 'I am'. With the realized man the experience: 'I am the world, the world is mine' is supremely valid -- he thinks, feels and acts integrally and in unity with all that lives. He may not even know the theory and practice of self realization, and be born and bred free of religious and metaphysical notions. But there will not be the least flaw in his understanding and compassion.
Q: I may come across a beggar, naked and hungry and ask him 'Who are you?' He may answer: 'I am the Supreme Self'. 'Well', I say, 'suffice you are the Supreme, change your present state'. What will he do?
M: He will ask you: 'Which state? What is there that needs changing? What is wrong with me?
Q: Why should he answer so?
M: Because he is no longer bound by appearances, he does not identify himself with the name and shape. He uses memory, but memory cannot use him.
Q: Is not all knowledge based on memory?
M: Lower knowledge -- yes. Higher knowledge, knowledge of Reality, is inherent in man's true nature.
Q: Can I say that I am not what I am conscious of, nor am I consciousness itself?
M: As long as you are a seeker, better cling to the idea that you are pure consciousness, free from all content. To go beyond consciousness is the supreme state.
Q: The desire for realization, dces it originate in consciousness or beyond?
M: In consciousness, of course. All desire is born from memory and is within the realm of consciousness. What is beyond is clear of all striving. The very desire to go beyond consciousness is still in consciousness.
Q: Is there any trace, or imprint, of the beyond on consciousness?
M: No, there cannot be.
Q: Then, what is the link between the two? How can a passage be found between two states which have nothing in common? Is not pure awareness the link between the two?
M: Even pure awareness is a form of consciousness.
Q: Then what is beyond? Emptiness?
M: Emptiness again refers only to consciousness. Fullness and emptiness are relative terms. The Real is really beyond -- beyond not in relation to consciousness, but beyond all relations of whatever kind. The difficulty comes with the word 'state'. The Real is not a state of something else -- it Is not a state of mind or consciousness or psyche -- nor is it something that has a beginning and an end, being and not being. All opposites are contained in it -- but it is not in the play of opposites. You must not take it to be the end of a transition. It is itself, after the consciousness as such is no more. Then words 'I am man', or 'I am God' have no meaning. Only in silence and in darkness can it be heard and seen.
Maharaj: You are all drenched for it is raining hard. In my world it is always fine weather. There is no night or day, no heat or cold. No worries beset me there, nor regrets. My mind is free of thoughts, for there are no desires to slave for.
Questioner: Are there two worlds?
M: Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless. You can tell me what you like about your world -- I shall listen carefully, even with interest, yet not for a moment shall I forget that your world is not, that you are dreaming.
Q: What distinguishes your world from mine?
M: My world has no characteristics by which it can be identified. You can say nothing about it. I am my world. My world is myself. It is complete and perfect. Every impression is erased, every experience -- rejected. I need nothing, not even myself, for myself I cannot lose.
Q: Not even God?
M: All these ideas and distinctions exist in your world; in mine there is nothing of the kind. My world is single and very simple.
Q: Nothing happens there?
M: Whatever happens in your world, only there it has valldity and evokes response. In my world nothing happens.
Q: The very fact of your experiencing your own world implies duality inherent in all experience.
M: Verbally -- yes. But your words do not reach me. Mine is a non verbal world. In your world the unspoken has no existence. In mine -- the words and their contents have no being. In your world nothing stays, in mine -- nothing changes. My world is real, while yours is made of dreams.
Q: Yet we are talking.
M: The talk is in your world. In mine -- there is eternal silence. My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there.
Q: It seems as if you alone are in your world.
M: How can you say alone or not alone, when words do not apply? Of course, I am alone for I am all.
Q: Are you ever coming into our world?
M: What is coming and going to me? These again are words. I am. Whence am I to come from and where to go?
Q: Of what use is your world to me?
M: You should consider more closely your own world, examine it critically and, sudden!y, one day you will find yourself in mine.
Q: What do we gain by it?
M: You gain nothing. You leave behind what is not your own and find what you have never lost -- your own being.
Q: Who is the ruler of your world?
M: There are no ruler and ruled here. There is no duality whatsoever. You are merely projecting your own ideas. Your scriptures and your gods have no meaning here.
Q: Still you have a name and shape, display consciousness and activity.
M: In your world I appear so. In mine I have being only. Nothing else. You people are rich with your ideas of possession, of quantity and quality. I am completely without ideas.
Q: In my world there is disturbance, distress and despair. You seem to be living on some hidden income, while I must slave for a living.
M: Do as you please. You are free to leave your world for mine.
Q: How is the crossing done?
M: See your world as it is, not as you imagine it to be. Discrimination will lead to detachment; detachment will ensure right action; right action will build the inner bridge to your real being. Action is a proof of earnestness. Do what you are told diligently and faithfully and all obstacles will dissolve.
Q: Are you happy?
M: In your world I would be most miserable. To wake up, to eat, to talk, to sleep again -- what a bother!
Q: So you do not want to live even?
M: To live, to die -- what meaningless words are these! When you see me alive, I am dead. When you think me dead, I am alive. How muddled up you are!
Q: How indifferent you are? All the sorrows of our world are as nothing to you.
M: I am quite conscious of your troubles.
Q: Then what are you doing about them?
M: There is nothing I need doing. They come and go.
Q: Do they go by the very act of your giving them attention?
M: Yes. The difficulty may be physical, emotional or mental; but it is always individual. Large scale calamities are the sum of numberless individual destinies and take time to settle. But death is never a calamity?
Q: Even when a man is killed?
M: The calamity is of the killer.
Q: Still, it seems there are two worlds, mine and yours.
M: Mine is real, yours is of the mind.
Q: Imagine a rock and a hole in the rock and a frog in the hole. The frog may spend its life in perfect bliss, undistracted, undisturbed. Outside the rock the world goes on. If the frog in the hole were told about the outside world, he would say: 'There is no such thing. My world is of peace and bliss. Your world is a word structure only, it has no existence'. It is the same with you. When you tell us that our world simply does not exist, there is no common ground for discussion. Or, take another example. I go to a doctor and complain of stomach ache. He examines me and says: 'You are all right'. 'But it pains' I say. 'Your pain is mental' he asserts. I say 'It does not help me to know that my pain is mental. You are a doctor, cure me of my pain. If you cannot cure me, you are not my doctor.'
M: Quite right.
Q: You have built the railroad, but for lack of a bridge no train can pass. Build the bridge.
M: There is no need of a bridge.
Q: There must be some link between your world and mine.
M: There is no need of a link between a real world and an imaginary world, for there cannot be any.
Q: So what are we to do?
M: Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically, scrutinize every idea about it; that will do.
Q: The world is too big for investigation. All I know is that I am the world is, the world troubles me and I trouble the world.
M: My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed of pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.
Q: Why should pleasure be the seed of pain?
M: Because for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death.
Q: You say the world is of no use to us -- only a tribulation. I feel it cannot be so. God is not such a fool. The world seems to me a big enterprise for brinsing the potential into actual, matter into life, the unconscious into full awareness. To realize the supreme we need the experience of the opposites. Just as for building a temple we need stone and mortar, wood and iron, glass and tiles, so for making a man into a divine sage, a master of iife and death, one needs the material of every experience. As a woman goes to the market, buys provisions of every sort, comes home, cooks, bakes arid feeds her lord, so we bake ourselves nicely in the fire of life and feed our God.
M: Well, if you think So, act on it. Feed your God, by all means.
Q: A child goes to school and learns many things, which will be of no use to it later. But in the course of learning it grows. So do we pass through experiences without number and forget them all, but in the meantime we grow all the time. And what is a gnani but a man with a genius for reality! This world of mine cannot be an accident. It makes sense, there must be a plan behind it. My God has a plan.
M: If the world is false, then the plan and its creator are also false.
Q: Again, you deny the world. There is no bridge between us.
M: There is no need of a bridge. Your mistake lies in your belief that you are born. You were never born nor will you ever die, but you believe that you were born at a certain date and place and that a particular body is your own.
Q: The world is, I am. These are facts.
M: Why do you worry about the world before taking care of yourself? You want to save the world, don't you? Can you save the world before saving yourself? And what means being saved? Saved from what? From illusion. Salvation is to see things as they are. I really do not see myself related to anybody and anything. Not even to a self, whatever that self may be. I remain forever -- undefined. I am - within and beyond -- intimate and unapproachable.
Q: How did you come to it?
M: By my trust in my Guru. He told me"You alone are' and I did not doubt him. I was merely puzzling over it, until I realized that it is absolutely true.
Q: Conviction by repetition?
M: By self realization. I found that I am conscious and happy absolutely and only by mistake I thought I owed being consciousness bliss to the body and the world of bodies.
Q: You are not a learned man. You have not read much and what you read, or heard did perhaps not contradict itself. I am fairly well educated and have read a lot and I found that books and teachers contradict each other hopelessly. Hence whatever I read or hear, I take it in a state of doubt. 'It may be so, it may not be so' is my first reaction. And as my mind is unable to decide what is true and what is not, I am left high and dry with my doubts. In Yoga a doubting mind is at a tremendous disadvantage.
M: I am glad to hear it; but my Guru too taught me to doubt -- everything and absolutely. He said: 'deny existence to everything except your self.' Through desire you have created the world with its pains and pleasures.
Q: Must it be also painful?
M: What else? By its very nature pleasure is limited and transitory. Out of pain desire is born, in pain it seeks fulfilment, and it ends in the pain of frustration and despair. Pain is the background of pleasure, all seeking of pleasure is born in pain and ends in pain.
Q: All you say is clear to me. But when some physical or mental trouble comes, my mind goes dull and grey, or seeks frantically for relief.
M: What does it matter? It is the mind that is dull or restless, not you. Look, all kinds of things happen in this room. Do I cause them to happen? They just happen. So it is with you -- the roll of destiny urfolds itself and actualizes the inevitable. You cannot change the course of events, but you can change your attitude and what really matters is the attitude and not the bare event. The world is the abode of desires and fears. You cannot find peace in it. For peace you must go beyond the world. The root cause of the world is self love. Because of it we seek pleasure and avoid pain. Replace self love by love of the Self and the picture changes. Brahma the Creator is the sum total of all desires. The world is the instrument for their fulfilment. Souls take whatever pleasure they desire and pay for them in tears. Time squares all accounts. The law of balance reigns supreme.
Q: To be a superman one must be a man first. Manhood is the fruit of innumerable experiences: Desire drives to experience. Hence at its own time and level desire is right.
M: All this is true in a way. But a day comes when you have amassed enough and must begin to build. Then sorting out and discarding (viveka vairagya) are absolutely necessary. Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For in reality nothing is of value. Be passionately dispassionate -- that is all. God is the All doer, the Gnani a Non doer
Questioner: Some Mahatmas (enlightened beings) maintained that the world is neither an accident nor a play of God, but the result and expression of a mighty plan of work aiming at awakening and developing consciousness throughout the universe. From lifelessness to life, from unconsciousness to consciousness, from dullness to bright intelligence, from misapprehension to clarity -- that is the direction in which the world moves ceaselessly and relentlessly. Of course, there are moments of rest and apparent darkness, when the universe seems to be dormant, but the rest comes to an end and the work on consciousness is resumed. From our point of view the world is a dale of tears, a place to escape from, as soon as possible and by every possible means. To enlightened beings the world is good and it serves a good purpose. They do not deny that the world is a mental structure and that ultimately all is one, but they see and say that the structure has meaning and serves a supremely desirable purpose. What we call the will of God is not a capricious whim of a playful deity, but the expression of an absolute necessity to grow in love and wisdom and power, to actualize the infinite potentials of life and consciousness. Just as a gardener grows flowers from a tiny seed to glorious perfection, so does God in His own garden grow, among other beings, men to supermen, who know and love and wqrk along with Him. When God takes rest (pra/aya), those whose growth was not completed, become unconscious for a time, while the perfect ones, who have gone beyond all forms and contents of consciousness, remain aware of the universal silence. When the time comes for the emergence of a new universe, the sleepers wake up and their work starts. The more advanced wake up first and prepare the ground for the less advanced -- who thus find forms and patterns of behaviour suitable for their further growth. Thus runs the story. The difference with your teaching is this: you insist that the world is no good and should be shunned. They say that distaste for the world is a passing stage, necessary, yet temporary, and is soon replaced by an all pervading love, and a steady will to work with God.
Maharaj: All you say is right for the outgoing (pravritti) path. For the path of return (nivritti) naughting oneself is necessary. My stand I take where nothing (paramakash) is; words do not reach there, nor thoughts. To the mind it is all darkness and silence. Then consciousness begins to stir and wakes up the mind (chidakash), which projects the world (mahaakash), built of memory and imagination. Once the world comes into being, all you say may be so. It is in the nature of the mind to imagine goals, to strive towards them, to seek out means and ways, to display vision, energy and courage. These are divine attributes and I do not deny them. But I take my stand where no difference exists, where things are not, nor the minds that create them. There I am at home. Whatever happens, does not affect me -- things act on things, that is all. Free from memory and expectation, I am fresh, innocent and wholehearted. Mind is the great worker (mahakarta) and it needs rest. Needing nothing, I am unafraid. Whom to be afraid of? There is no separation, we are not separate selves. There is only one Self, the Supreme Reality, in which the personal and the impersonal are one.
Q: All I want is to be able to help the world.
M: Who says you cannot help? You made up your mind about what help means and needs and got your self into a conflict between what you should and what you can, between necessity and ability.
Q: But why do we do so?
M: Your mind projects a structure and you identify yourself with it. It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfilment. Even a small desire can start a long line of action; what about a strong desire? Desire can produce a uni verse; its powers are miraculous. Just as a small matchstick can set a huge forest on fire, so does a desire light the fires of manifestation. The very purpose of creation is the fulfilment of desire. The desire may be noble, or ignoble, space (akash) is neutral -- one can fill it with what one likes: You must be very careful as to what you desire. And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires. You can only teach them to have right desires so that they may rise above them and be free from the urge to create and re create worIds of desires, abodes of pain and pleasure.
Q: A day must come when the show is wound up; a man must die, a universe come to an end.
M: Just as a sleeping man forgets all and wakes up for another day, or he dies and emerges into another life, so do the worlds of desire and fear dissolve and disappear. But the universal witness, the Supreme Self never sleeps and never dies. Eternally the Great Heart beats and at each beat a new universe comes into being.
Q: Is he conscious?
M: He is beyond all that the mind conceives. He is beyond being and not being. He is the Yes and No to everything, beyond and within, creating and destroying, unimaginably real.
Q: God and the Mahatma are they one or two?
M: They are one.
Q: There must be some difference.
M: God is the All Doer, the gnani is a non doer. God himself does not say: 'I am doing all.' To Him things happen by their own nature. To the gnani all is done by God. He sees no difference between God and nature. Both God and the gnani know hemselves to be the immovable centre of the movable, the eternal witness of the transient. The centre is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing, therefore nothing can resist them.
Q: How does this look and feel in your personal experience?
M: Being nothing, I am all. Everything is me, everything is mind. Just as my body moves by my mere thinking of the movement, so do things happen as I think of them. Mind you, I do nothing. I just see them happen.
Q: Do things happen as you want them to happen, or do you want them to happen as they happen?
M: Both. I accept and am accepted. I am all and all is me. Being the world I am not afraid of the world. Being a!l, what am I to be afraid of? Water is not afraid of water, nor fire of fire. Also I am not afraid because I am nothing that can experience fear, or can be in danger. I have no shape, nor name. It is attachment to a name and shape that breeds fear. I am not attached. I am nothing, and nothing is afraid of no thing. On the contrary, everything is afraid of the Nothing, for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes nothing. It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it, disappears.
Q: Isn't God a person?
M: As long as you think yourself to be a person, He too is a person. When you are all, you see Him as all.
Q: Can I change facts by changing attitude?
M: The attitude is the fact. Take anger. I may be furious, pacing the room up and down; at the same time I know what I am, a centre of wisdom and love, an atom of pure existence. All subsides and the mind merges into silence.
Q: Still, you are angry sometimes.
M: With whom am l to be angry and for what? Anger came and dissolved on my remembering myself. It is all a play of gunas (qualities of cosmic matter). When I identify myself with them, I am their slave. When I stand apart, I am their master.
Q: Can you influence the world by your attitude? By separating yourself from the world you lose all hope of helping it.
M: How can it be? All is myself -- can't I help myself? I do not identify myself with anybody in particular, for I am all -- both the particular and the universal.
Q: Can you then help me, the particular person?
M: But I do help you always -- from within. My self and your self are one. I know it, but you don't. That is all the difference -- and it cannot last.
Q: And how do you help the entire world?
M: Gandhi is dead, yet his mind pervades the earth. The thought of a gnani pervades humanity and works ceaselessly for good. Being anonymous, coming from within, it is the more powerful and compelling. That is how the world improves -- the inner aiding and blessing the outer. When a gnani dies, he is no more, in the same sense in which a river is no more when it merges in the sea, the name, the shape, are no more, but the water remains and becomes one with the ocean. When a gnani joins the universal mind, all his goodness and wisdom become the heritage of humanity and uplift every human being.
Q: We are attached to our personality. Our individuality, our being unlike others, we value very much. You seem to denounce both as useless. Your unmanifested, of what use is it to us?
M: Unmanifested, manifested, individuality, personality (nirguna, saguna, vyakta, vyakti); all these are mere words, points of view, mental attitudes. There is no reality in them. The real is experienced in silence. You cling to personality -- but you are conscious of being a person only when you are in trouble -- when you are not in trouble you do not think of yourself.
Q: You did not tell me the uses of the Unmanifested.
M: Surely, you must sleep in order to wake up. You must die in order to live, you must melt down to shape anew. You must destroy to build, annihilate before creation. The Supreme is the universal sqlvent, it corrodes every container, it burns through every obstacle. Without the absolute denial of everything the tyranny of things would be absolute. The Supreme is the great harmonizer, the guarantee of the ultimate and perfect balance -- of life in freedom. It dissolves you and thus re asserts your true being.
Q: It is all well on its own level. But how does it work in daily life?
M: The daily life is a life of action. Whether you like it or not, you must function. Whatever you do for your own sake accumulates and becomes explosive; one day it goes off and plays havoc with you and your world. When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous.
Q: How is one to work then?
M: Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work's own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning, Make nothing a means to something else. Bind not. God does not create one thing to serve another. Each is made for its own sake. Because it is made for itself, it does not interfere. You' are using things and people for purposes alien to them and you play havoc with the world and yourself.
Q: Our real being is all the time with us, you say. How is it that we do not notice it?
M: Yes, you are always the Supreme. But your attention is fixed on things, physical or mental. When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When thrcugh the practice of discrimination and de:tachment (viveka vairagya), you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state.
Q: How does one bring to an end this sense of separateness?
M: By focussing the mind on 'I am', on the sense of being, 'I am so and so' dissolves; "I am a witness only" remains and that too submerges in 'I am all'. Then the all becomes the One and the One -- yourself, not to be separate from me. Abandon the idea of a separate 'I' and the question of 'whose experience?' will not arise.
Q: You speak from your own experience. How can I make it mine?
M: You speak of my experience as different from your experience, because you believe we are separate. But we are not. On a deeper level my experience is your experience. Dive deep within yourself and you will find it easily and simply. Go in the direction of 'I am'. Hold on to 'I am.
Questioner: Are you ever glad or sad? Do you know joy and sorrow?
Maharaj: Call them as you please. To me they are states of mind only, and I am not the mind.
Q: Is love a state of mind?
M: Again, it depends what you mean by love. Desire is, of course, a state of mind. But the realization of unity is beyond mind. To me, nothing exists by itself. All is the Self, all is myself. To see myself in everybody and everybody in myself most certainly is love.
Q: When I see something pleasant, I want it. Who exactly wants it? The self or the mind?
M: The question is wrongly put. There is no 'who'. There is desire, fear, anger, and the mind says -- this is me, this is mine. There is no thing which could be called 'me' or 'mine'. Desire is a state of the mind, perceived and named by the mind. Without the mind perceiving and naming, where is desire?
Q: But is there such a thing as perceiving without naming?
M: Of course. Naming cannot go beyond the mind, while perceiving is consciousness itself.
Q: When somebody dies what exactly happens?
M: Nothing happens. Something becomes nothing. Nothing was, nothing remains.
Q: Surely there is a difference between the living and the dead. You speak of the living as dead and of the dead as living.
M: Why do you fret at one man dying and care little for the millions dying every day? Entire universes are imploding and exploding every moment -- am I to cry over them? One thing is quite clear to me: all that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the witness. I am beyond it as Being.
Q: Surely, you care when your child is ill, don't you?
M: I don't get flustered. I just do the needful. I do not worry about the future. A right response to every situation is in my nature. I do not stop to think what to do. I act and move on. Results do not affect me. I do not even care, whether they are good or bad. Whatever they are, they are -- if they come back to me, I deal with them afresh. Or, rather, I happen to deal with them afresh. There is no sense of purpose in my doing anything. Things happens as they happen -- not because I make them happen, but it is because I am that they happen. In reality nothing ever happens. When the mind is restless, it makes Shiva dance, like the restless waters of the lake make the moon dance. It is all appearance, due to wrong ideas.
Q: Surely, you are aware of many things and behave according to their nature. You treat a child as a child and an adult as an adult.
M: Just as the taste of salt pervades the great ocean and every single drop of sea water carries the same flavour, so every experience gives me the touch of reality, the ever fresh realization of my own being.
Q: Do I exist in your world, as you exist in mine?
M: Of course, you are and I am. But only as points in consciousness; we are nothing apart from consciousness. This must be well grasped: the world hangs on the thread of consciousness; no consciousness, no world.
Q: There are many points in consciousness; are there as many worlds?
M: Take dream for an example. In a hospital there may be many patients, all sleeping, all dreaming, each dreaming his own private, personal dreams unrelated, unaffected, having one single factor in common -- illness. Similarly, we have divorced ourselves in our imagination from the real world of common experience and enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desire and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.
Q: This I can understand. But what could be the cause of the tremendous variety of the personal worlds?
M: The variety is not so great. All the dreams are superimposed over a common world. To some extent they shape and influence each other. The basic unity operates in spite of all. At the root of it all lies self forgetfulness; not knowing who I am.
Q: To forget, one must know. Did I know who I am, before I forgot it?
M: Of course. Self forgetting is inherent in self knowing. Consciousness and unconsciousness are two aspects of one life. They co exist. To know the world you forget the self -- to know the self you forget the world. What is world after all? A collection of memories. Cling to one thing, that matters, hold on to 'I am' and let go all else. This is sadhana. In realization there is nothing to hold on to and nothing to forget. Everything is known, nothing is remembered.
Q: What is the cause of self forgetting?
M: There is no cause, because there is no forgetting. Mental states succeed one another, and each obliterates the previous one. Self remembering is a mental state and self forgetting is another. They alternate like day and night. Reality is beyond both.
Q: Surely there must be a difference between forgetting and not knowing. Not knowing needs no cause. Forgetting presupposes previous knowledge and also the tendency or ability to forget. I admit I cannot enquire into the reason for not knowing, but forgetting must have some ground.
M: There is no such thing as not knowing. There is only forgetting. What is wrong with forgetting? It is as simple to forget as to remember.
Q: Is it not a calamity to forget oneself?
M: As bad as to remember oneself continuously. There is a state beyond forgetting and not forgetting -- the natural state. To remember, to forget -- these are all states of mind, thought-bound, word bound. Take for example, the idea of being born. I am told I was born. I do not remember. I am told I shall die I do not expect it. You tell me I have forgotten, or I lack imagination. But I just cannot remember what never happened, nor expect the patently impossible. Bodies are born and bodies die, but what is it to me? Bodies come and go in consciousness and consciousness itself has its roots in me. I am life and mine are mind and body.
Q: You say at the root of the world is self forgetfulness. To forget I must remember What did I forget to remember? I have not forgotten that I am.
M: This 'I am' too may be a part of the illusion. Q. How can it be? You cannot prove to me that I am not. Even when convinced that I am not -- I am.
M: Reality can neither be proved nor disproved. Within the mind you cannot, beyond the mind you need not. In the real, the question 'what is real?' does not arise. The manifested (saguna) and unmanifested (nirguna) are not different.
Q: In that case all is real.
M: I am all. As myself all is real. Apart from me, nothing is real.
Q: I do not feel that the world is the result of a mistake.
M: You may say so only after a full investigation, not before. Of course, when you discern and let go all that is unreal, what remains is real.
Q: Does anything remain?
M: The real remains. But don't be mislead by words !
Q: Since immemorial time, during innumerable births, I build and improve and beautify my world. It is neither perfect, nor unreal. It is a process.
M: You are mistaken. The world has no existence apart from you. At every moment it is but a reflection of yourself. You create it, you destroy it.
Q: And build it again, improved.
M: To improve it, you must disprove it. One must die to live. There is no rebirth, except through death.
Q: Your universe may be perfect. My personal universe is improving.
M: Your personal universe does not exist by itself. It is merely a limited and distorted view of the real. It is not the universe that needs improving, but your way of looking.
Q: How do you view it?
M: It is a stage on which a world drama is being played. The quality of the performance is all that matters; not what the actors say and do, but how they say and do it.
Q: I do not like this lila (play) idea I would rather compare the world to a work yard in which we are the builders.
M: You take it too seriously. What is wrong with play? You have a purpose only as long as you are not cornplete (purna); till then completeness, perfection, is the purpose. But when you are complete in yourself, fully integrated within and without, then you enjoy the universe; you do not labour at it. To the disintegrated you may seem working hard, but that is their illusion. Sportsmen seem to make tremendous efforts: yet their sole motive is to play and display.
Q: Do you mean to say that God is just having fun, that he is engaged in purposeless action?
M: God is not only true and good, he is also beautiful (satyam shivam sundaram). He creates beauty -- for the joy of It
Q: Well, then beauty is his purpose!
M: Why do you introduce purpose? Purpose implies movement, change, a sense of imperfection. God does not aim at beauty -- whatever he does is beautiful. Would you say that a flower is trying to be beautiful? It is beautiful by its very nature. Similarly God is perfection itself, not an effort at perfection.
Q: The purpose fulfils itself in beauty.
M: What is beautiful? Whatever is perceived blissfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty.
Q: You speak of Sat Chit Ananda. That I am is obvious. That I know is obvious. That I am happy is not at all obvious. Where has my happiness gone?
M: Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss consciously. Because you take your mind off yourself and make it dwell on what you are not, you lose your sense of well being of being well.
Q: There are two paths before us -- the path of effort (yoga marga), and the path of ease (bhoga marga). Both lead to the same goal -- liberation.
M: Why do you call bhoga a path? How can ease bring you perfection?
Q: The perfect renouncer (yogi) will find reality. The perfect enjoyer (bhogi) also will come to it.
M: How can it be? Aren't they contradictory?
Q: The extremes meet. To be a perfect Bhogi is more difficult than to be a perfect Yogi. I am a humble man and cannot venture judgements of value. Both the Yogi and the Bhogi, after all, are concerned with the search for happiness. The Yogi wants it permanent, the Bhogi is satisfied with the intermittent. Often the Bhogi strives harder than the Yogi.
M: What is your happiness worth when you have to strive and labour for it? True happiness is spontaneous and effortless.
(My humble salutations to Advaita Vedanta Library for the collection)
Note: This text may have spelling and grammatical mistakes.
(Continued .......)
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