I am That
Talks with
Sri Nisarga Datta Maharaj
Q: If the self is not the body nor the mind, can it exist without the body and the mind?
M: Yes, it can.(lt is a matter of actual experience that the self has being independent of mind and body. It is being--awareness--bliss. Awareness of beina is bliss.)
Q: It may be a matter of actual experience to you, but it is not my case. How can I come to the same experience? What practices to follow, what exercises to take up?
M: To know that you are neither body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.
Q: Dangerous!
M: I am not asking you to commit suicide. Nor can you. You can only kill the body, you cannot stop the mental process, nor can you put an end to the person you think you are. Just remain unaffected. This complete aloofness, unconcern with mind and body is the best proof that at the core of your being you are neither mind nor body. What happens to the body and the mind may not be within your power to change, but you can always put an end to your imagining yourself to be body and mind. Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself. The more earnest you are at remembering what needs to be remembered, the sooner will you be aware of yourself as you are, for memory will become experience. Earnestness reveals being. What is imagined and willed becomes actuality--here lies the danger as well as the way out. Tell me, what steps have you taken to separate your real self, that in you which is changeless, from your body and mind?
Q: I am a medical man, I have siudied a lot, I imposed on myself a strict discipline in the way of exercises and periodical fasts and I am a vegetarian.
M: But in the depth of your heart what is it that you want?
Q: I want to fino reality.
M: What price are you willing to pay for reality? Any price?
Q: While in theory I am ready to pay any price, in actual life again and again I am being prompted to behave in ways which come in between me and reality. Desire carries me away.
M: Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfil them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness~ Desire is devotion. By all means be qevoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love~ All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever thev may be, are expressions otyour longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourselt well.
Q: I know that I should not. . .
M: Waitl Who told you that you should not? What is wrong with wanting to be happy?
Q: The self must go,l know.
M: But the self is there. Your desires are there. Your longing to be happy is there. Why? Because you love yourself. By all means love yoursslf--wisely. What is wrong is to love yourself stupidly, so as to make yourself suffer. Love yourself wisely. ~Both indulgence and austerity have the same purpose in view --to make you happy. Indulgence is the stupid way, austerity is the wise way~
Q: What is austerity?
M:(Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is au 212 IAMTHAT sterity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain Is austerity. Having things under control at all times is austerity~Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge ~grow in knowledge and ex perience. It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing food. sex, power, fame will make you happy is to deceive yourself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.
Q: Since there is nothing basically wrong in desire as an expression of love of self, how should desire be managed?
M: Live your life intelligently, with the interests of your deepest self always in mind. After all, what do you really want? Not perfection; you are already perfect. What you seek is to express in action what you are. For this you have a body and a mind. Take them in hand and make them serve you.
Q: Who is the operator here? Who is to take the body mind in hand?
M: The purified mind is the faithful servant of the self. It takes charge of the instruments, inner and outer, and makes them serve their purpose.
Q: And what is their purpose?
M: The self is universal and its aims are universal. There is nothing personal about the self. Live an orderly life, but don't make it a goal by itself. It should be the starting point for high adventure.
Q: Do you advise me to come to India repeatedly?
M: If you are earnest, you don't need moving about. You are yourself wherever you are and you create your own climate. Locomotion and transportation will not give you salvation. You are not the body and dragging the body from place to place will take you nowhere. Your mind is free to roam the three worlds - make full use of it.
Q: If I am free, why am I in a body?
M:you are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that AWARENESS OF BEING IS BLISS 213 comes within its focus of awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil nor ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much you miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel nor the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws. That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge.~Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love your self absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self knowledge, not its cause. Without self realization, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But~when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self realization can break its Go for it resolutely. • WATCH YOUR MIND 47 Watch your Mind Quesbioner: In one's search for the essential, one soon realizes one's inadequacy and the need for a guide or a teacher. This implies a certain discipline for you are expected to trust your guide and follow implicitly his advice and instruction. Yet the social urgencies and pressures are so great, personal desires and fears so powerful, that the simplicity of mind and will, essential in obedience, are not forthcoming. How to strike z balance between the need for a Guru and the difficulty in obeying him implicitly? Maharaja: What is done under pressure of society and circums tances does not matter much, for it is mostly mechanical, mere reacting to impacts. It is enough to watch oneself dispassion ately to isolate oneself completely from what is going on. What has been done without minding, blindly, may add to one's karma (destiny), otherwise it hardly matters~the Guru demands one thing only; clarity and intensity of purpose, a sense of re sponsibility for oneself~ The very reality of the world must be questioned. Who is the Guru, after all? He who knows the state in which there is neither the world nor the thought of it, he is the Supreme Teacher. To find him means to reach the state in which imagination is no longer taken for reality. Please, understand that the Guru stands for reality, for truth, for what is. He is a realist in the highest sense of the term. He cannot and shall not come to terms with the mind and its delusions. He comes to take you to the real; don't expect him to do anything else. The Guru you have in mind, one who gives you information and instructions, is not the real Guru. The real Guru is he who knows the real, beyond the glamour of appearances. To him ~your questions about obedience and discipline do not make sense, for~in his eyes(the person you take yourself to be does not existyour questions are about a non existing person. What exists for you does not exist for himCWhat you take for granted, he denies absolutely. He wants you to see yourself as he sees you) Then you will not need a Guru to obey and follow, for you will obey and follow your own reality.(Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events~ that while all happens, comes and goes, you alone are, the changeless among the changeful, the self evident among the inferred. Separate the observed from the observer and Aberdeen false identifications.
Q: In order to find the reality, one should discard all that stands in the way. On the other hand, the need to survive within a given society compels one to do and endure many things. Does one need to abandon one's profession and one's social standing in order to find reality?
M: Do your work. When you have a moment free, look within. What isimportant is not to miss the opportunity when it presser,ls itself. If you are earnest you will use your leisure fully. That is enough .
Q: In my search for the essential and discarding the unessential, is there any scope for creative living? For instance, I love painting. Will it help me if I give my leisure hours to painting?
M: Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else. Your difficulty lies in your wanting reality and being afraid of it at the same time. You are afraid of it because you do not know it. The familiar things are known, you feel secure with them. The unknown is uncertain and therefore dangerous. But to know reality is to be in harmony with it. And in harmony there is no place for fear. on infant knows its body, but not the body based distinctions. It is just conscious and happy) After all, that was the purpose for which it was born. The pleasure to be is the simplest form of self love, which later grows into love of the self. Be like an infant with nothing standing between the body and the self. The con stant noise of the psychic life is absent. In deep silence the self 216 I AM THAT contemplates the body. It is like the white paper on which nothing is written yet~Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be. You will be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness. But there should be no feelings and ideas to stand between you and the fields
Q: To be content with mere being seems to be a most selfish way of passing time.
M: A most worthy way of being selfish! By all meats be sefflsh by foregoing everything but the Self. When you love the Self and nothing else, you go beyond the selfish and the unselfish. All distinctions lose their meaning. Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love, go deeper and deeper into it, ~investigate yourself and love the investigation and you will solve not only your own problems but also the problems of humanity~ You will know what to do. Do not ask superficial questions; ( apply yourself to fundamentals, to the very roots of your being:~
Q: Is there a way for me to speed up my self realization?
M: Of course there is.
Q: \I~who will do this speeding up? Will you do it for me?
M: Neither you will do it, nor me. It will just happen.
Q: My very coming here has proved it. Is this speeding up due to holy company? When I left vast time, I hoped to come back. And I did! Now I am desperate that so soon I have to leave for England.
M: You are like a newly born child. It was there before Bud not conscious of its being. At its birth a world arose in it, and with it the consciousness of being. Now you have just to grow in consciousness, that is all. The child is the king of the world - when it grows up, it takes charge of its kingdom. Imagine that in its infancy it fell seriously ill and the physician cured it. Does it mean that the young king owes his kingdom to the physician? Only, perhaps as one of the contributing factors. There were so many others; all contributed. But the main factor, the most crucial, was the fact of being born the son of a king. Similarly, the Guru may help. But the main thing that helps is to have reality wittlin. It will assert itself. Your coming here definitely helped WATCH YOUR MIND 217 you. It is not the only thing that is going to help you. The main thing is your own being. Your very earnestness testifies to it.
Q: Does my pursuing a vocation deny my earnestness?
M: I told you already. As long as you allow yourself an abundance of moments of peace, you can safely practice your most honorable profession. These moments of inner quiet will burn out all obstacles without fail. Don't doubt its efficacy. Try it.
Q: But, I did try!
M: Never faithfully, never steadily. Otherwise you would not be asking such questions. You are asking because you are not sure of yourself. And you are not sure of yourself because you never paid attention to yourself, only to your experiences. Be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with yourself, love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in self knowledge. The main thing is earnestness. Be honest with yourself and nothing will betray you. Virtues and powers are mere tokens for children to play with. They are useful in the world, but do not take you out of it. To go beyond, you need alert immobility, quiet attention.
Q: What then becomes of one's physical being?
M: As long as you are healthy, you live on.
Q: This life of inner immobility, will it not affect one's health?
M: Your body is food transformed. As your food, gross and subtle, so will be your health.
Q: And what happens to the sex instinct? How can it be controlled?
M: Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free. • 48 Awareness is Free
Questioner: I have just arrived from Sri Ramanashram. I have spent seven months there. Maharaja: 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 laboring 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? a: Yes, occasionally and for a very short time. Otherwise I was Jut 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 rain 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 feelings (When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don't react to AWARENESS IS FREE 219 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 particularize 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 anyhowration. 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 I AM THAT center. 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 realize that nothing observable, or experience able is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself . a To do what you tell me I rust 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 AWARENESS IS FREE 221 '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 cognizance 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 ju;,t waves on the ocean ot 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 cent red in the body and consciousness is cent red 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 realize 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? 222 i AM THAT
M: I am neither conscious nor unconscious, I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions. Distinctions are creates my 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. ! 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 wit die.
M: Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. Beyond space and time I am, encased, encasing, yet the very matrix of ;~ easiness AWARENESS IS FREE 223
Q: May I be permitted to ask how did you arrive at your present condition?
M: My teacher told me to holy 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 realized 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 realization sudden or gradual.
M: Neither. One is what one is timelessly. It is the mind that realizes as and when it get cleared of desires and fears.
Q: Even the desire for realization?
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 I but the states are not the same. The man who seeks realization 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 I AM THAT 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, than 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 realization also preordained? Or are we free there at least?
M: Destiny refers l~nly 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 ot 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 formalized 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 AWARENESS IS FREE 225 freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.
Q: Are you not at all concerned about the state of the world? Look at the horrors in East Pakistan.* 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 longwas 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 worth? 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 payables, 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. • This conversation and a Jew snore in the ~ollowlng pages took place in 1971~ whr~n a war was on in East Pakistan now known as Bangla Desh 226 1 AM THAT 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 cognizance of it?
M: Take cognizance of the whole of it, not only sf 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. . 49 Mind Causes Insecurity
Questioner: People come to you for advice. How do you know what to answer?
Maharaj: As I hear the question, so do I hear the answer.
Q: And how do you know that your answer is right?
M: Once I know the true source of the answers, I need not doubt them. From a pure source only pure water will flow. I am not concerned with people's desires and fears. I am in tune with facts, not with opinions. Man takes his name and shape to be himself, while I take nothing to be myself. Were I to think myself to be a body known by its name, I would not have been able to answer your questions. Were I to take you to be a mere body, there would be no benefit to you from my answers. No true teacher indulges in opinions. He sees things as they are and shows them as they are. If you take people to be what they think themselves to be, you will only hurt them, as they hurt themselves so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in reality, it will do them enormous good. If they ask you what to do, what practices to adopt, which way of life to follow, answer: 'Do nothing, just be. In being all happens naturally.'
Q: It seems to me that in your talks you use the words 'naturally' and 'accidentally' indiscriminately. I feel there is a deep difference in the meaning of the two words. The natural is orderly, subject to law; one can trust nature; the accidental is chaotic, unexpected, unpredictable. One could plead that everything is natural, subject to nature's laws; to maintain that everything is accidental, without any cause, is surely an exaggeration.
M: Would you like it better if I use the word 'spontaneous' instead of 'accidental'?
Q: You may use the word 'spontaneous' or 'natural' as opposed to 'accidental'. In the accidental there is the element of disorder, of chaos. An accident is always a breach of rules, an exception, a surprise.
M: Is not life itself a stream of surprises?
Q: There is harmony in nature. The accidental is a disturbance.
M: You speak as a person, limited in time and space, reduced to the contents of a body and a mind. What you like, you call 'natural' and what you dislike, you call 'accidental'.
Q: I like the natural, and the law abiding, the expected and I fear the law breaking, the disorderly, the unexpected, the meaningless. The accidental is always monstrous. There may be so called 'lucky accidents', but they only prove the rule that in an accident prone universe life would be impossible.
M: I feel there is a misunderstanding. By 'accidental' I mean something to which no known law applies. When I say everything is accidental, encased, I only mean that the causes and the laws according to which they operate are beyond our knowing, or even imagining. If you call what you take to be orderly, harmonious, predictable, to be natural, then what obeys higher laws and is moved by higher powers may Fe called spontaneous. Thus, we shall have two natural orders: the personal and predictable and the impersonal, or super personal, and unpredictable. Call it lower nature and higher nature and drop the word accidental. As you grow in knowledge and insight, the borderline between lower and higher nature keeps on receding, but the two remain until they are seen as one. For, in fact, everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!
Q: Science explains a lot.
M: Science deals with names and shapes, quantities and qualities, patterns and laws; it is all right in its own place. But life is to be lived; there is no time for analysis. The response must be instantaneous hence the importance of the spontaneous, the timeless. It is in the unknown that we live and move. the known is the past.
Q: I can take my stand on what I feel I am. I am an individual, a arisen among persons. Some people are integrated and harmonized, and some are not. Some live effortlessly, respond spontaneously to every situation correctly, doing full justice to the need of the moment, while others fumble, err and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The harmonized people may be called natural, ruled by law, while the disintegrated are chaotic and subject to accidents.
M: The very idea of chaos presupposes the sense of the orderly, the organic, the inter related.chaos and cosmos: are they not two aspects of the same state?
Q: But you seem to say that all is chaos, accidental, unpredictable.
M: Yes, in the sense that not all the laws of being are known and not all events are predictable. The more you are able to understand, the more the universe becomes satisfactory, emotionally and mentally. Reality is good and beautiful; we create the chaos.
Q: If you mean to say that it is the free will of man that causes accidents, I would agree. But we have not yet discussed free will.
M: Your order is what gives you pleasure and disorder is what gives you pain.
Q: You may put it that way, but do not tell me that the two are one. Talk to me in my own language the language of an individual in search of happiness. I do not want to be misled by non dualistic talks.
M: What makes you believe that you are a separate individual?
Q: I behave as an individual. I function on my own. I consider myself primarily, and others only in relation to myself. Ian short, I am busy with myself.
M: Well, go on being busy with yourself. On what business have you come here?
Q: On my old business of making myself safe and happy. I confess I have not been too successful. I am neither safe nor happy. Therefore, you find me here. This place is new to me, but my reason for coming here is old: the search Tom safe happiness, happy safety. So far I did not find it. Can you help me?
M: What was never lost can never be found. Your very search 230 1 AM THAT for safety and joy keeps you away from them. Stop searching, cease losing. The disease is simple and the remedy equally simple. It is your mind only that makes you insecure and unhappy. Anticipation makes you insecure, memory unhappy. Stop misusing your mind and all will be well with you. YGU need not set it right it will set itself right, as soon as you give up all concern with the past and the future and live entirely in the now.
Q: But the now has no dimension. I shall become a nobody, a nothing !
M: Exactly. As nothing Ann nobody you are safe and happy. You can have the experience for the asking. Just try. But let us go back to what is accidental and what is spontaneous, or natural. You said nature is orderly while accident iS a sign of chaos. I denied the difference and said that we call an event accidental when its causes are untraceable. There is no place for chaos in nature. Only in the mind of man there is chaos. The mind does not grasp the whole its focus IS very narrow. It sees fragments only and fails to perceive the picture. Just as a man who hears sounds, but does not understand the language, may accuse the speaker of meaningless jabbering, and be altogether wrong. What to one is a chaotic stream of sounds is a beautiful poem to another. King Janaka once dreamt that he was a beggar. On waking up he asked his Guru Vasishta: Am I a king dreaming of being a beggar, or a beggar dreaming of being a king? The Guru answered: You are neither, you are both. You are, and yet you are not what you think yourself to be. You are because you behave accordingly; you are not because it does not last. Can you be a king or a beggar for ever? All must change. You are what does not change. What are you? Tanaka said: Yes, I am neither king nor beggar, I am the dispassionate witness. The Guru said. This is your last illusion that you are a nanny, that you are different from, and superior to, the common man. Again you identify yourself with your mind, in this case a well behaved and in every way an exemplary mind. As long as you see the least difference, you are a stranger to reality. You are on the level of the mind. When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes. When the 'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes. When even 'I am' goes, reality alone is and in it every 'I am' is preserved and glorified. MINDCAUSES INSECURITY :~31 . Diversity without separateness is the Ultimate that the mind can touch. Beyond that all activity ceases, because in it all goals are reached and all purposes full d.
Q: Once the Supreme State is reached, can it be shared with others?
M: The Supreme State is universal, here and now; everybody already shares in it. It is the state of being knowing and liking. Who does not like to be, or does not know his own existence? But we take no advantage of this joy of being conscious, we do not go into it and purify it of all that is foreign to it. This work of mental self purification, the cleansing of the psyche, is essential. Just as a speck in the eye, by causing inflammation, may wipe out the world, so the mistaken idea: 'I am the body mind' causes the self concern, which obscures the universe. It is useless to fight the sense of being a limited and separate person unless the roots of it are laid bare. Selfishness is rooted in the mistaken ideas of oneself. Clarification of the mind is Yoga. ... 50 Self awareness is the Witness Qu,estioner: You told me that I can be considered under three aspects: the personal (vacuity), the super personal (vacuity) and the impersonal (avyakta). The Avyakta is the universal and real pure 'I'; the Vyakta is its reflection in consciousness as PI am'; the Vyakti is the totality of Physical and vital processes. Within 232 1 AM THAT 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? Maharaja: On the level of the mind yes. Beyond the mental level not aword 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 center, is it mental too?
M: The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a color needs a surface to appear on. The seeing of the color is independent of the color it is the same whatever the color. One needs an eye to see a color. The colors are many, the eye is single. The personal is like the light in the color 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 daisy 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 fact, 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 pyres SELF AWARENESS IS THE WITNESS 233 pence 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 attire 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 analyze 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. 238 I AM THAT say: I do not need oppose, or deny, because it is clear to me that I cannot be the opposite or denial of anything. I am just beyond, in a different dimension altogether. Do not look for me in identification with, or opposition to something: I am where desire,and fear are not. Now, what is your experience? Do you also feel that you stand totally aloof from all transient things?
Q: Yes, I do--occasionally. But at once a sense of danger sets in, I feel isolated, outside all relationship with others. You see, here lies the difference in our mentalities. With the Hindu, the emotion follows the thought. Give a Hindu an idea and his emotions are roused. With the Westerner it is the opposite: give him an emotion and he will produce an idea. Your ideas are very attractive--intellectually, but emotionally I do not respond.
M: Set your intellect aside. Don't use it in these matters.
Q: Of what use is an advice which I cannot carry out? These are all ideas and you want me to respond feeiingly to ideas, for without feelings there can be no action.
M: Why do you talk of action? Are you acting ever? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens, without being able to influence It in any way.
Q: Why is there such a tremendous resistance in me against accepting that I just can do nothing?
M: But what can you do? You are like a patient under anaesthetics on whom a surgeon performs an operation. When you wake up you find the operation over; can you say you have done something?
Q: But it is me who has chosen to submit to an operation.
M: Certainly not. It is your iilness on one side and the pressure of your physician and family on the other that have made you decide. You have no choice, only the illusion of it.
Q: Yet I feel I am not as helpless as you make me appear. I feel I can do everything I can think of, only I do not know how. It is not the power I lack, but the knowledge.
M: Not knowing the means is admittedly as bad as not having the power! But let us drop the subject for the moment; after all it is not important why we feel helpless, as long as we see clearlv BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASURE 2~q that fcr the time being we are helpless. I am now 74 years old. And yet I feel that I am an infant. I feel clearly that in spite of all the changes I am a child. My Guru told me: that child, which is you even now, is your real self (swarupa). Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still inlits purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am'. Your burden is of false self identifications--abandon them all. My Guru told me--'Trust me. I tell you; you are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes frorn God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done'. I did believe him and soon realized how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking: 'I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond'. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared--myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.
Q: It all looks very simple and easy, but it is just not so. Sometimes the wonderful state of joyful peace dawns on me and I look and wonder: how easily it comes and how intimate it seems, how totally my own. Where was the need to strive so hard for a state so near at hand? This time, surely, it has come to stay. Yet how soon it all dissolves and leaves me wondering--was it a taste of reality or another aberration. If it was reality, why did it go? Maybe some unique experience is needed to fix me for good in the new state and until the crucial experience comes, this game of hide and seek must continue.
M: Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your self realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened--at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as being knowingfeeling. There is only one mistake you are. making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be in 240 1 AM THAT l timate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right. You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
Q: How am I to think myself out when my thoughts come and go as they like. Their endless chatter distracts and exhausts me.
M: Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning, but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all. It is only when you have a vested interest in any particular level, that your attention gets caught in it and you black out on other levels. Even then the work on the blacked out levels goes on, outside the field of consciousness. Do not struggle with your memories and thoughts; try only to include in your fiefd of attention the other, more important questions, like 'Who am l?' 'How did I happen to be born?' 'Whence this universe around me?'. 'What is real and what is momentary?' No memory will persist, if you lose interest in it, it is the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage. You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs. Avoid the disturbance, that is all. To seek there is no need; you would not seek what you already have. You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. To begin with, trust me, trust the Teaoher. It enables you to make the first step--and then your trust is justified by your own experience. In every walk of life initial trust is essential; without it little can be done. Every undertaking IS an act of faith. Even your daily bread you eat on trust! By remembering what ! told you you will achieve everything. I am telling you again: You are the all pervading, all transcending reality. Behave accordingly: think, feel and act in harmony with the whole and the actual experience of what I say will dawn upon you in no time. No effort is needed. Have faith and act on it I AM THAT BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASCIRF 241 Please see that I want nothing from you. It is in your own interest that l speak, because above all you love yourself, you want yourself secure and happy. Don't be ashamed of it, don't deny it. It is natural and good to love oneself. Only you should know what exactly do you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life --perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fulness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on 'I am', 'I know', 'I love' --with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.
Q: Can I think 'I am God'?
M: Don't identify yourself with an idea. If you mean by God the Unknown, then you merely say: 'I do not know what I am'. If you know God as you know your self, you need not say it. Best is the simple feeling 'I am'. Dwell on it patiently. Here patience is wisdom; don't think of failure. There can be no failure in this undertaking.
Q: My thoughts will not let me.
M: Pay no attention. Don't fight them. Just do nothing about thern, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. Just disregard. Look through. Remember to remember: 'whatever happens--happens because I am'. All reminds you that you are. Take full advantage of the fact that to experience you must be. You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. It is disinterestedness that liberates. Don't hold on, that is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up your addictions. There is nothing else to give up. Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results and the freedom of the universe is yours. Be effortless.
Q: Life is effort. There are so many things to do.
M: What needs doing, do it. Don't resist. Your balance must be dynamic, based on doing just the right thing, from moment to moment. Don't be a child unwilling to grow up. StereotYped gestures and postures wi!l not help you. Rely entirely on your c~aritv 234 1 AM THAT
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 lo! 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 you 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, realize 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.
M: Yes, it can.(lt is a matter of actual experience that the self has being independent of mind and body. It is being--awareness--bliss. Awareness of beina is bliss.)
Q: It may be a matter of actual experience to you, but it is not my case. How can I come to the same experience? What practices to follow, what exercises to take up?
M: To know that you are neither body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.
Q: Dangerous!
M: I am not asking you to commit suicide. Nor can you. You can only kill the body, you cannot stop the mental process, nor can you put an end to the person you think you are. Just remain unaffected. This complete aloofness, unconcern with mind and body is the best proof that at the core of your being you are neither mind nor body. What happens to the body and the mind may not be within your power to change, but you can always put an end to your imagining yourself to be body and mind. Whatever happens, remind yourself that only your body and mind are affected, not yourself. The more earnest you are at remembering what needs to be remembered, the sooner will you be aware of yourself as you are, for memory will become experience. Earnestness reveals being. What is imagined and willed becomes actuality--here lies the danger as well as the way out. Tell me, what steps have you taken to separate your real self, that in you which is changeless, from your body and mind?
Q: I am a medical man, I have siudied a lot, I imposed on myself a strict discipline in the way of exercises and periodical fasts and I am a vegetarian.
M: But in the depth of your heart what is it that you want?
Q: I want to fino reality.
M: What price are you willing to pay for reality? Any price?
Q: While in theory I am ready to pay any price, in actual life again and again I am being prompted to behave in ways which come in between me and reality. Desire carries me away.
M: Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfil them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness~ Desire is devotion. By all means be qevoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love~ All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever thev may be, are expressions otyour longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourselt well.
Q: I know that I should not. . .
M: Waitl Who told you that you should not? What is wrong with wanting to be happy?
Q: The self must go,l know.
M: But the self is there. Your desires are there. Your longing to be happy is there. Why? Because you love yourself. By all means love yoursslf--wisely. What is wrong is to love yourself stupidly, so as to make yourself suffer. Love yourself wisely. ~Both indulgence and austerity have the same purpose in view --to make you happy. Indulgence is the stupid way, austerity is the wise way~
Q: What is austerity?
M:(Once you have gone through an experience, not to go through it again is austerity. To eschew the unnecessary is au 212 IAMTHAT sterity. Not to anticipate pleasure or pain Is austerity. Having things under control at all times is austerity~Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge ~grow in knowledge and ex perience. It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing food. sex, power, fame will make you happy is to deceive yourself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.
Q: Since there is nothing basically wrong in desire as an expression of love of self, how should desire be managed?
M: Live your life intelligently, with the interests of your deepest self always in mind. After all, what do you really want? Not perfection; you are already perfect. What you seek is to express in action what you are. For this you have a body and a mind. Take them in hand and make them serve you.
Q: Who is the operator here? Who is to take the body mind in hand?
M: The purified mind is the faithful servant of the self. It takes charge of the instruments, inner and outer, and makes them serve their purpose.
Q: And what is their purpose?
M: The self is universal and its aims are universal. There is nothing personal about the self. Live an orderly life, but don't make it a goal by itself. It should be the starting point for high adventure.
Q: Do you advise me to come to India repeatedly?
M: If you are earnest, you don't need moving about. You are yourself wherever you are and you create your own climate. Locomotion and transportation will not give you salvation. You are not the body and dragging the body from place to place will take you nowhere. Your mind is free to roam the three worlds - make full use of it.
Q: If I am free, why am I in a body?
M:you are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They happen to you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that AWARENESS OF BEING IS BLISS 213 comes within its focus of awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil nor ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much you miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel nor the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws. That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge.~Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love your self absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them Don't pretend to be what you are not, don't refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self knowledge, not its cause. Without self realization, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But~when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self realization can break its Go for it resolutely. • WATCH YOUR MIND 47 Watch your Mind Quesbioner: In one's search for the essential, one soon realizes one's inadequacy and the need for a guide or a teacher. This implies a certain discipline for you are expected to trust your guide and follow implicitly his advice and instruction. Yet the social urgencies and pressures are so great, personal desires and fears so powerful, that the simplicity of mind and will, essential in obedience, are not forthcoming. How to strike z balance between the need for a Guru and the difficulty in obeying him implicitly? Maharaja: What is done under pressure of society and circums tances does not matter much, for it is mostly mechanical, mere reacting to impacts. It is enough to watch oneself dispassion ately to isolate oneself completely from what is going on. What has been done without minding, blindly, may add to one's karma (destiny), otherwise it hardly matters~the Guru demands one thing only; clarity and intensity of purpose, a sense of re sponsibility for oneself~ The very reality of the world must be questioned. Who is the Guru, after all? He who knows the state in which there is neither the world nor the thought of it, he is the Supreme Teacher. To find him means to reach the state in which imagination is no longer taken for reality. Please, understand that the Guru stands for reality, for truth, for what is. He is a realist in the highest sense of the term. He cannot and shall not come to terms with the mind and its delusions. He comes to take you to the real; don't expect him to do anything else. The Guru you have in mind, one who gives you information and instructions, is not the real Guru. The real Guru is he who knows the real, beyond the glamour of appearances. To him ~your questions about obedience and discipline do not make sense, for~in his eyes(the person you take yourself to be does not existyour questions are about a non existing person. What exists for you does not exist for himCWhat you take for granted, he denies absolutely. He wants you to see yourself as he sees you) Then you will not need a Guru to obey and follow, for you will obey and follow your own reality.(Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events~ that while all happens, comes and goes, you alone are, the changeless among the changeful, the self evident among the inferred. Separate the observed from the observer and Aberdeen false identifications.
Q: In order to find the reality, one should discard all that stands in the way. On the other hand, the need to survive within a given society compels one to do and endure many things. Does one need to abandon one's profession and one's social standing in order to find reality?
M: Do your work. When you have a moment free, look within. What isimportant is not to miss the opportunity when it presser,ls itself. If you are earnest you will use your leisure fully. That is enough .
Q: In my search for the essential and discarding the unessential, is there any scope for creative living? For instance, I love painting. Will it help me if I give my leisure hours to painting?
M: Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else. Your difficulty lies in your wanting reality and being afraid of it at the same time. You are afraid of it because you do not know it. The familiar things are known, you feel secure with them. The unknown is uncertain and therefore dangerous. But to know reality is to be in harmony with it. And in harmony there is no place for fear. on infant knows its body, but not the body based distinctions. It is just conscious and happy) After all, that was the purpose for which it was born. The pleasure to be is the simplest form of self love, which later grows into love of the self. Be like an infant with nothing standing between the body and the self. The con stant noise of the psychic life is absent. In deep silence the self 216 I AM THAT contemplates the body. It is like the white paper on which nothing is written yet~Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be. You will be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness. But there should be no feelings and ideas to stand between you and the fields
Q: To be content with mere being seems to be a most selfish way of passing time.
M: A most worthy way of being selfish! By all meats be sefflsh by foregoing everything but the Self. When you love the Self and nothing else, you go beyond the selfish and the unselfish. All distinctions lose their meaning. Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love, go deeper and deeper into it, ~investigate yourself and love the investigation and you will solve not only your own problems but also the problems of humanity~ You will know what to do. Do not ask superficial questions; ( apply yourself to fundamentals, to the very roots of your being:~
Q: Is there a way for me to speed up my self realization?
M: Of course there is.
Q: \I~who will do this speeding up? Will you do it for me?
M: Neither you will do it, nor me. It will just happen.
Q: My very coming here has proved it. Is this speeding up due to holy company? When I left vast time, I hoped to come back. And I did! Now I am desperate that so soon I have to leave for England.
M: You are like a newly born child. It was there before Bud not conscious of its being. At its birth a world arose in it, and with it the consciousness of being. Now you have just to grow in consciousness, that is all. The child is the king of the world - when it grows up, it takes charge of its kingdom. Imagine that in its infancy it fell seriously ill and the physician cured it. Does it mean that the young king owes his kingdom to the physician? Only, perhaps as one of the contributing factors. There were so many others; all contributed. But the main factor, the most crucial, was the fact of being born the son of a king. Similarly, the Guru may help. But the main thing that helps is to have reality wittlin. It will assert itself. Your coming here definitely helped WATCH YOUR MIND 217 you. It is not the only thing that is going to help you. The main thing is your own being. Your very earnestness testifies to it.
Q: Does my pursuing a vocation deny my earnestness?
M: I told you already. As long as you allow yourself an abundance of moments of peace, you can safely practice your most honorable profession. These moments of inner quiet will burn out all obstacles without fail. Don't doubt its efficacy. Try it.
Q: But, I did try!
M: Never faithfully, never steadily. Otherwise you would not be asking such questions. You are asking because you are not sure of yourself. And you are not sure of yourself because you never paid attention to yourself, only to your experiences. Be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with yourself, love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in self knowledge. The main thing is earnestness. Be honest with yourself and nothing will betray you. Virtues and powers are mere tokens for children to play with. They are useful in the world, but do not take you out of it. To go beyond, you need alert immobility, quiet attention.
Q: What then becomes of one's physical being?
M: As long as you are healthy, you live on.
Q: This life of inner immobility, will it not affect one's health?
M: Your body is food transformed. As your food, gross and subtle, so will be your health.
Q: And what happens to the sex instinct? How can it be controlled?
M: Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free. • 48 Awareness is Free
Questioner: I have just arrived from Sri Ramanashram. I have spent seven months there. Maharaja: 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 laboring 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? a: Yes, occasionally and for a very short time. Otherwise I was Jut 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 rain 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 feelings (When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the surface. Do nothing about them, don't react to AWARENESS IS FREE 219 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 particularize 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 anyhowration. 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 I AM THAT center. 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 realize that nothing observable, or experience able is you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself . a To do what you tell me I rust 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 AWARENESS IS FREE 221 '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 cognizance 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 ju;,t waves on the ocean ot 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 cent red in the body and consciousness is cent red 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 realize 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? 222 i AM THAT
M: I am neither conscious nor unconscious, I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions. Distinctions are creates my 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. ! 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 wit die.
M: Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. Beyond space and time I am, encased, encasing, yet the very matrix of ;~ easiness AWARENESS IS FREE 223
Q: May I be permitted to ask how did you arrive at your present condition?
M: My teacher told me to holy 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 realized 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 realization sudden or gradual.
M: Neither. One is what one is timelessly. It is the mind that realizes as and when it get cleared of desires and fears.
Q: Even the desire for realization?
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 I but the states are not the same. The man who seeks realization 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 I AM THAT 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, than 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 realization also preordained? Or are we free there at least?
M: Destiny refers l~nly 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 ot 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 formalized 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 AWARENESS IS FREE 225 freedom from all thoughts will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.
Q: Are you not at all concerned about the state of the world? Look at the horrors in East Pakistan.* 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 longwas 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 worth? 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 payables, 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. • This conversation and a Jew snore in the ~ollowlng pages took place in 1971~ whr~n a war was on in East Pakistan now known as Bangla Desh 226 1 AM THAT 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 cognizance of it?
M: Take cognizance of the whole of it, not only sf 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. . 49 Mind Causes Insecurity
Questioner: People come to you for advice. How do you know what to answer?
Maharaj: As I hear the question, so do I hear the answer.
Q: And how do you know that your answer is right?
M: Once I know the true source of the answers, I need not doubt them. From a pure source only pure water will flow. I am not concerned with people's desires and fears. I am in tune with facts, not with opinions. Man takes his name and shape to be himself, while I take nothing to be myself. Were I to think myself to be a body known by its name, I would not have been able to answer your questions. Were I to take you to be a mere body, there would be no benefit to you from my answers. No true teacher indulges in opinions. He sees things as they are and shows them as they are. If you take people to be what they think themselves to be, you will only hurt them, as they hurt themselves so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in reality, it will do them enormous good. If they ask you what to do, what practices to adopt, which way of life to follow, answer: 'Do nothing, just be. In being all happens naturally.'
Q: It seems to me that in your talks you use the words 'naturally' and 'accidentally' indiscriminately. I feel there is a deep difference in the meaning of the two words. The natural is orderly, subject to law; one can trust nature; the accidental is chaotic, unexpected, unpredictable. One could plead that everything is natural, subject to nature's laws; to maintain that everything is accidental, without any cause, is surely an exaggeration.
M: Would you like it better if I use the word 'spontaneous' instead of 'accidental'?
Q: You may use the word 'spontaneous' or 'natural' as opposed to 'accidental'. In the accidental there is the element of disorder, of chaos. An accident is always a breach of rules, an exception, a surprise.
M: Is not life itself a stream of surprises?
Q: There is harmony in nature. The accidental is a disturbance.
M: You speak as a person, limited in time and space, reduced to the contents of a body and a mind. What you like, you call 'natural' and what you dislike, you call 'accidental'.
Q: I like the natural, and the law abiding, the expected and I fear the law breaking, the disorderly, the unexpected, the meaningless. The accidental is always monstrous. There may be so called 'lucky accidents', but they only prove the rule that in an accident prone universe life would be impossible.
M: I feel there is a misunderstanding. By 'accidental' I mean something to which no known law applies. When I say everything is accidental, encased, I only mean that the causes and the laws according to which they operate are beyond our knowing, or even imagining. If you call what you take to be orderly, harmonious, predictable, to be natural, then what obeys higher laws and is moved by higher powers may Fe called spontaneous. Thus, we shall have two natural orders: the personal and predictable and the impersonal, or super personal, and unpredictable. Call it lower nature and higher nature and drop the word accidental. As you grow in knowledge and insight, the borderline between lower and higher nature keeps on receding, but the two remain until they are seen as one. For, in fact, everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!
Q: Science explains a lot.
M: Science deals with names and shapes, quantities and qualities, patterns and laws; it is all right in its own place. But life is to be lived; there is no time for analysis. The response must be instantaneous hence the importance of the spontaneous, the timeless. It is in the unknown that we live and move. the known is the past.
Q: I can take my stand on what I feel I am. I am an individual, a arisen among persons. Some people are integrated and harmonized, and some are not. Some live effortlessly, respond spontaneously to every situation correctly, doing full justice to the need of the moment, while others fumble, err and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The harmonized people may be called natural, ruled by law, while the disintegrated are chaotic and subject to accidents.
M: The very idea of chaos presupposes the sense of the orderly, the organic, the inter related.chaos and cosmos: are they not two aspects of the same state?
Q: But you seem to say that all is chaos, accidental, unpredictable.
M: Yes, in the sense that not all the laws of being are known and not all events are predictable. The more you are able to understand, the more the universe becomes satisfactory, emotionally and mentally. Reality is good and beautiful; we create the chaos.
Q: If you mean to say that it is the free will of man that causes accidents, I would agree. But we have not yet discussed free will.
M: Your order is what gives you pleasure and disorder is what gives you pain.
Q: You may put it that way, but do not tell me that the two are one. Talk to me in my own language the language of an individual in search of happiness. I do not want to be misled by non dualistic talks.
M: What makes you believe that you are a separate individual?
Q: I behave as an individual. I function on my own. I consider myself primarily, and others only in relation to myself. Ian short, I am busy with myself.
M: Well, go on being busy with yourself. On what business have you come here?
Q: On my old business of making myself safe and happy. I confess I have not been too successful. I am neither safe nor happy. Therefore, you find me here. This place is new to me, but my reason for coming here is old: the search Tom safe happiness, happy safety. So far I did not find it. Can you help me?
M: What was never lost can never be found. Your very search 230 1 AM THAT for safety and joy keeps you away from them. Stop searching, cease losing. The disease is simple and the remedy equally simple. It is your mind only that makes you insecure and unhappy. Anticipation makes you insecure, memory unhappy. Stop misusing your mind and all will be well with you. YGU need not set it right it will set itself right, as soon as you give up all concern with the past and the future and live entirely in the now.
Q: But the now has no dimension. I shall become a nobody, a nothing !
M: Exactly. As nothing Ann nobody you are safe and happy. You can have the experience for the asking. Just try. But let us go back to what is accidental and what is spontaneous, or natural. You said nature is orderly while accident iS a sign of chaos. I denied the difference and said that we call an event accidental when its causes are untraceable. There is no place for chaos in nature. Only in the mind of man there is chaos. The mind does not grasp the whole its focus IS very narrow. It sees fragments only and fails to perceive the picture. Just as a man who hears sounds, but does not understand the language, may accuse the speaker of meaningless jabbering, and be altogether wrong. What to one is a chaotic stream of sounds is a beautiful poem to another. King Janaka once dreamt that he was a beggar. On waking up he asked his Guru Vasishta: Am I a king dreaming of being a beggar, or a beggar dreaming of being a king? The Guru answered: You are neither, you are both. You are, and yet you are not what you think yourself to be. You are because you behave accordingly; you are not because it does not last. Can you be a king or a beggar for ever? All must change. You are what does not change. What are you? Tanaka said: Yes, I am neither king nor beggar, I am the dispassionate witness. The Guru said. This is your last illusion that you are a nanny, that you are different from, and superior to, the common man. Again you identify yourself with your mind, in this case a well behaved and in every way an exemplary mind. As long as you see the least difference, you are a stranger to reality. You are on the level of the mind. When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes. When the 'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes. When even 'I am' goes, reality alone is and in it every 'I am' is preserved and glorified. MINDCAUSES INSECURITY :~31 . Diversity without separateness is the Ultimate that the mind can touch. Beyond that all activity ceases, because in it all goals are reached and all purposes full d.
Q: Once the Supreme State is reached, can it be shared with others?
M: The Supreme State is universal, here and now; everybody already shares in it. It is the state of being knowing and liking. Who does not like to be, or does not know his own existence? But we take no advantage of this joy of being conscious, we do not go into it and purify it of all that is foreign to it. This work of mental self purification, the cleansing of the psyche, is essential. Just as a speck in the eye, by causing inflammation, may wipe out the world, so the mistaken idea: 'I am the body mind' causes the self concern, which obscures the universe. It is useless to fight the sense of being a limited and separate person unless the roots of it are laid bare. Selfishness is rooted in the mistaken ideas of oneself. Clarification of the mind is Yoga. ... 50 Self awareness is the Witness Qu,estioner: You told me that I can be considered under three aspects: the personal (vacuity), the super personal (vacuity) and the impersonal (avyakta). The Avyakta is the universal and real pure 'I'; the Vyakta is its reflection in consciousness as PI am'; the Vyakti is the totality of Physical and vital processes. Within 232 1 AM THAT 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? Maharaja: On the level of the mind yes. Beyond the mental level not aword 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 center, is it mental too?
M: The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a color needs a surface to appear on. The seeing of the color is independent of the color it is the same whatever the color. One needs an eye to see a color. The colors are many, the eye is single. The personal is like the light in the color 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 daisy 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 fact, 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 pyres SELF AWARENESS IS THE WITNESS 233 pence 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 attire 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 analyze 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. 238 I AM THAT say: I do not need oppose, or deny, because it is clear to me that I cannot be the opposite or denial of anything. I am just beyond, in a different dimension altogether. Do not look for me in identification with, or opposition to something: I am where desire,and fear are not. Now, what is your experience? Do you also feel that you stand totally aloof from all transient things?
Q: Yes, I do--occasionally. But at once a sense of danger sets in, I feel isolated, outside all relationship with others. You see, here lies the difference in our mentalities. With the Hindu, the emotion follows the thought. Give a Hindu an idea and his emotions are roused. With the Westerner it is the opposite: give him an emotion and he will produce an idea. Your ideas are very attractive--intellectually, but emotionally I do not respond.
M: Set your intellect aside. Don't use it in these matters.
Q: Of what use is an advice which I cannot carry out? These are all ideas and you want me to respond feeiingly to ideas, for without feelings there can be no action.
M: Why do you talk of action? Are you acting ever? Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens, without being able to influence It in any way.
Q: Why is there such a tremendous resistance in me against accepting that I just can do nothing?
M: But what can you do? You are like a patient under anaesthetics on whom a surgeon performs an operation. When you wake up you find the operation over; can you say you have done something?
Q: But it is me who has chosen to submit to an operation.
M: Certainly not. It is your iilness on one side and the pressure of your physician and family on the other that have made you decide. You have no choice, only the illusion of it.
Q: Yet I feel I am not as helpless as you make me appear. I feel I can do everything I can think of, only I do not know how. It is not the power I lack, but the knowledge.
M: Not knowing the means is admittedly as bad as not having the power! But let us drop the subject for the moment; after all it is not important why we feel helpless, as long as we see clearlv BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASURE 2~q that fcr the time being we are helpless. I am now 74 years old. And yet I feel that I am an infant. I feel clearly that in spite of all the changes I am a child. My Guru told me: that child, which is you even now, is your real self (swarupa). Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still inlits purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am'. Your burden is of false self identifications--abandon them all. My Guru told me--'Trust me. I tell you; you are divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes frorn God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done'. I did believe him and soon realized how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking: 'I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond'. I simply followed his instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with, nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared--myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.
Q: It all looks very simple and easy, but it is just not so. Sometimes the wonderful state of joyful peace dawns on me and I look and wonder: how easily it comes and how intimate it seems, how totally my own. Where was the need to strive so hard for a state so near at hand? This time, surely, it has come to stay. Yet how soon it all dissolves and leaves me wondering--was it a taste of reality or another aberration. If it was reality, why did it go? Maybe some unique experience is needed to fix me for good in the new state and until the crucial experience comes, this game of hide and seek must continue.
M: Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your self realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened--at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as being knowingfeeling. There is only one mistake you are. making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be in 240 1 AM THAT l timate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right. You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
Q: How am I to think myself out when my thoughts come and go as they like. Their endless chatter distracts and exhausts me.
M: Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning, but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all. It is only when you have a vested interest in any particular level, that your attention gets caught in it and you black out on other levels. Even then the work on the blacked out levels goes on, outside the field of consciousness. Do not struggle with your memories and thoughts; try only to include in your fiefd of attention the other, more important questions, like 'Who am l?' 'How did I happen to be born?' 'Whence this universe around me?'. 'What is real and what is momentary?' No memory will persist, if you lose interest in it, it is the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage. You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs. Avoid the disturbance, that is all. To seek there is no need; you would not seek what you already have. You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. To begin with, trust me, trust the Teaoher. It enables you to make the first step--and then your trust is justified by your own experience. In every walk of life initial trust is essential; without it little can be done. Every undertaking IS an act of faith. Even your daily bread you eat on trust! By remembering what ! told you you will achieve everything. I am telling you again: You are the all pervading, all transcending reality. Behave accordingly: think, feel and act in harmony with the whole and the actual experience of what I say will dawn upon you in no time. No effort is needed. Have faith and act on it I AM THAT BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASCIRF 241 Please see that I want nothing from you. It is in your own interest that l speak, because above all you love yourself, you want yourself secure and happy. Don't be ashamed of it, don't deny it. It is natural and good to love oneself. Only you should know what exactly do you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life --perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fulness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on 'I am', 'I know', 'I love' --with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.
Q: Can I think 'I am God'?
M: Don't identify yourself with an idea. If you mean by God the Unknown, then you merely say: 'I do not know what I am'. If you know God as you know your self, you need not say it. Best is the simple feeling 'I am'. Dwell on it patiently. Here patience is wisdom; don't think of failure. There can be no failure in this undertaking.
Q: My thoughts will not let me.
M: Pay no attention. Don't fight them. Just do nothing about thern, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. Just disregard. Look through. Remember to remember: 'whatever happens--happens because I am'. All reminds you that you are. Take full advantage of the fact that to experience you must be. You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. It is disinterestedness that liberates. Don't hold on, that is all. The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you. Give up your addictions. There is nothing else to give up. Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results and the freedom of the universe is yours. Be effortless.
Q: Life is effort. There are so many things to do.
M: What needs doing, do it. Don't resist. Your balance must be dynamic, based on doing just the right thing, from moment to moment. Don't be a child unwilling to grow up. StereotYped gestures and postures wi!l not help you. Rely entirely on your c~aritv 234 1 AM THAT
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 lo! 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 you 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, realize 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.
(My humble salutations to Advaita Vedanta Library for the collection)
Note: This text may have spelling and grammatical mistakes.
(Continued .......)
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