I am That
Talks with
Sri Nisarga Datta Maharaj
Q: I admit that the world in which I live is not the real world. But there is a real world, of which I see a distorted picture. The distortion may be due to some blemish in my body or mind. But when you say there is no real world, only a dream world in my SELF AWARENESS IS THE WITNESS 235 mind, I just cannot take it. I wish I could believe that all the horrors of existence are due to my having a body. Suicide would be the way out.
M: As long as you pay attention to ideas, your own or of others, you will be in trouble. But if you disregard all teachings, all books, anything put into words and dive deeply within yourself and find yourself, this alone will solve all your problems and leave you in full mastery of every situation, because you will not be dominated by your ideas about the situation. Take an example. You are in the company of an attractive woman. You get ideas about her and this creates a sexual situation. A problem is created and you start looking for books on continence, or enjoyment. Were you a baby, both of you could be naked and together without any problem arising. Just stop thinking you are bodies and the problems of love and sex will lose their meaning. With all sense of limitation gone, fear, pain and the search for Be Indiflerent to Pain and Pleasure Pleasure all cease. Only awareness remains.
Questioner: I am a Frenchman by birth and domicile and since about ten years I have been practicing Yoga. Maharaja: After ten years of work are you anywhere nearer your goal?
Q: A little nearer, maybe. It is hard work, you know. 236 1 AM THAT
M: The Self is near and the way to it is easy. All you need doing is doing nothing.
Q: Yet I found my sadhana very difficult.
M: Your sadhana is to be. The doing happens. Just be watchful. Where is the difficulty in remembering that you are? You are all the time.
Q: The sense of being is there all the time no doubt. But the field of attention is often overrun by all sorts of mental events - emotions, images, ideas. The pure sense of being is usually crowded out.
M: What is your procedure for clearing the mind of the unnecessary? What are your means, your tools for the purification of the mind?
Q: Basically, man is afraid. He is afraid of himself most. I feel I am like a man who is carrying a bomb that is going to explode. He cannot defuse it, he cannot throw it away. He is terribly frightened and is searching frantically for a solution, which he cannot find. To me liberation is getting rid of this bomb. I do not know much about the bomb. I only know that it comes from early childhood. I feel like the frightened child protesting passionately against not being loved. The child is craving for love and because he does not get it, he is afraid and angry. Sometimes I feel like killing somebody, or myself. This desire is so strong that I am constantly afraid. And I do not know how to get free from fear. You see there is a difference between a Hindu mind and a European mind. The Hindu mind is comparatively simple. The European is a much more complex being. The Hindu is basically sattvic. He does not understand the European's restlessness, his tireless pursuit of what he thinks needs be done; his greater general knowledge.
M: His reasoning capacity is so great, that he will reason himself out of all reason! His self assertiveness is due to his reliance on logic.
Q: But thinking, reasoning is the mind's normal state. The mind just cannot stop working.
M: It may be the habitual state but it need not be the normal BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASURE 237 state. A normal state cannot be painful, while wrong habit often leads to chronic pain.
Q: If it is not the natural, or normal state of the mind, then how to . stop it? There must be a way to quieten the mind. How often I tell myself: enough, please stop, enough of this endless chatter of sentences repeated round and round! But my mind would not stop. I feel that one can stop it for a while, but not for long. Even the so called 'spiritual' people use tricks to keep their mind quiet. They repeat formulas, they sing, pray, breathe forcibly or gently, shake, rotate, concentrate, meditate, chase trances, Cultivate virtues, working all the time, in order to cease working, cease chasing, cease moving. Were it not so tragic, it would be ridiculous . M. The mind exists in two states: as water and as honey. l~he water vibrates at the least disturbance, while the honey, how ever disturbed, returns quickly to immobility.
Q: By its very nature the mind is restless. It can perhaps be made quiet, but it is not quiet by itself.
M: You may have chronic fever and shiver all the time. It is de sires and fears that make the mind restless. Free from all nega ya tive emotions it is quiet. 3
Q: You cannot protect the child from negative emotions. As soon as it is born it learns pain and fear. Hunger is a cruel Mas ter and teaches dependence and hate. The child loves the mother because she feeds it and hates her because she is late with food. Our unconscious mind is full of conflicts, which over flow into the conscious. We live on a volcano; we are always in danger. I agree that the company of people whose mind is peaceful has a very soothing effect, but as soon as I am away from them, the old trouble starts. This is why I come periodically to India to seek the company of my Guru.
M: You think you are coming and going, passing through various statesand moods. I see things as they are, momentary events, presenting themselves to me in rapid succession, deriving their being from me, yet definitely neither me nor mine. Among phenomena I am not one, nor subject to any. I am independant so simply and totally, that your mind, accustomed to opposition and denial, cannot grasp it. I mean literally what I 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?
M: As long as you pay attention to ideas, your own or of others, you will be in trouble. But if you disregard all teachings, all books, anything put into words and dive deeply within yourself and find yourself, this alone will solve all your problems and leave you in full mastery of every situation, because you will not be dominated by your ideas about the situation. Take an example. You are in the company of an attractive woman. You get ideas about her and this creates a sexual situation. A problem is created and you start looking for books on continence, or enjoyment. Were you a baby, both of you could be naked and together without any problem arising. Just stop thinking you are bodies and the problems of love and sex will lose their meaning. With all sense of limitation gone, fear, pain and the search for Be Indiflerent to Pain and Pleasure Pleasure all cease. Only awareness remains.
Questioner: I am a Frenchman by birth and domicile and since about ten years I have been practicing Yoga. Maharaja: After ten years of work are you anywhere nearer your goal?
Q: A little nearer, maybe. It is hard work, you know. 236 1 AM THAT
M: The Self is near and the way to it is easy. All you need doing is doing nothing.
Q: Yet I found my sadhana very difficult.
M: Your sadhana is to be. The doing happens. Just be watchful. Where is the difficulty in remembering that you are? You are all the time.
Q: The sense of being is there all the time no doubt. But the field of attention is often overrun by all sorts of mental events - emotions, images, ideas. The pure sense of being is usually crowded out.
M: What is your procedure for clearing the mind of the unnecessary? What are your means, your tools for the purification of the mind?
Q: Basically, man is afraid. He is afraid of himself most. I feel I am like a man who is carrying a bomb that is going to explode. He cannot defuse it, he cannot throw it away. He is terribly frightened and is searching frantically for a solution, which he cannot find. To me liberation is getting rid of this bomb. I do not know much about the bomb. I only know that it comes from early childhood. I feel like the frightened child protesting passionately against not being loved. The child is craving for love and because he does not get it, he is afraid and angry. Sometimes I feel like killing somebody, or myself. This desire is so strong that I am constantly afraid. And I do not know how to get free from fear. You see there is a difference between a Hindu mind and a European mind. The Hindu mind is comparatively simple. The European is a much more complex being. The Hindu is basically sattvic. He does not understand the European's restlessness, his tireless pursuit of what he thinks needs be done; his greater general knowledge.
M: His reasoning capacity is so great, that he will reason himself out of all reason! His self assertiveness is due to his reliance on logic.
Q: But thinking, reasoning is the mind's normal state. The mind just cannot stop working.
M: It may be the habitual state but it need not be the normal BE INDIFFERENT TO PAIN AND PLEASURE 237 state. A normal state cannot be painful, while wrong habit often leads to chronic pain.
Q: If it is not the natural, or normal state of the mind, then how to . stop it? There must be a way to quieten the mind. How often I tell myself: enough, please stop, enough of this endless chatter of sentences repeated round and round! But my mind would not stop. I feel that one can stop it for a while, but not for long. Even the so called 'spiritual' people use tricks to keep their mind quiet. They repeat formulas, they sing, pray, breathe forcibly or gently, shake, rotate, concentrate, meditate, chase trances, Cultivate virtues, working all the time, in order to cease working, cease chasing, cease moving. Were it not so tragic, it would be ridiculous . M. The mind exists in two states: as water and as honey. l~he water vibrates at the least disturbance, while the honey, how ever disturbed, returns quickly to immobility.
Q: By its very nature the mind is restless. It can perhaps be made quiet, but it is not quiet by itself.
M: You may have chronic fever and shiver all the time. It is de sires and fears that make the mind restless. Free from all nega ya tive emotions it is quiet. 3
Q: You cannot protect the child from negative emotions. As soon as it is born it learns pain and fear. Hunger is a cruel Mas ter and teaches dependence and hate. The child loves the mother because she feeds it and hates her because she is late with food. Our unconscious mind is full of conflicts, which over flow into the conscious. We live on a volcano; we are always in danger. I agree that the company of people whose mind is peaceful has a very soothing effect, but as soon as I am away from them, the old trouble starts. This is why I come periodically to India to seek the company of my Guru.
M: You think you are coming and going, passing through various statesand moods. I see things as they are, momentary events, presenting themselves to me in rapid succession, deriving their being from me, yet definitely neither me nor mine. Among phenomena I am not one, nor subject to any. I am independant so simply and totally, that your mind, accustomed to opposition and denial, cannot grasp it. I mean literally what I 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?
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 feelingly 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 illness 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 clearly that for 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 in its 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 from 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 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 field 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 Teacher. 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 I 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. Please see that I want nothing from you. It is in your own interest that I 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 them, 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 will not help you. Rely entirely on your clarity 242 1 AM THAT of thought, purity of motive and integrity of action. You cannot possibly go wrong . Go beyond and leave all behind.
Q: But can anything be left for good?
M: You want something like a round the clock ecstasy. Ecstasies come and go, necessarily, for the human brain cannot stand the tension for a long time. A prolonged ecstasy will burn out your brain, unless it is extremely pure and subtle. In nature nothing is at stand still, everything pulsates! appears and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking birth and death everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life. If you seek the Immutable, go beyond experience. When I say: remember 'I am' all the time, I mean: 'come back to it repeatedly'. No particular thought can be mind's natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence. Now, what you have learnt here becomes the seed. You may forget it apparently. But it will live and in due season sprout and grow and bring forth flowers and fruits. All will happen by it self. You need not do anything, only don't prevent it. ... Being Happy, Making Happy is the Rhythm of Life
Questioner: I came from Europe a few months ago on one of my periodical visits to my Guru near Calcutta. Now I am on my way back home. I was invited by a friend to meet you and I am glad I came.
Maharaj: What did you learn from your Guru and what practice did you follow?
Q: He is a venerable old man of about eighty. Philosophically he is a Vedantin and the practice he teaches has much to do with rousing the unconscious energies of the mind and bringing the hidden obstacles and blockages into the conscious. My personal sadhana was related to my peculiar problem of early infancy and childhood. My mother could not give me the feeling of being secure and loved, so important to the child's normal development. She was a woman not fit to be a mother; ridden with anxieties and neuroses, unsure of herself, she felt me to be a responsibility and a burden beyond her capacity to bear. She never watned me to be born. She did not want me to grow and to develop, she wanted me back in her womb, unborn, nonexistent. Any movement of life in me she resisted, any attempt to go beyond the narrow circle of her habitual existence she fought fiercely. As a child I was both sensitive and affectionate. I craved for love above everything else and love, the simple, instinctive love of a mother for her child was denied me. The child's search for its mother became the leading motive of my life and I never grew out of it. A happy child, a happy childhood became an obsession with me. Pregnancy, birth, infancy interested me passionately. I became an obstetrician of some re 244 1 AM THAT nown and contributed to the development of the method of painless childbirth. A happy child of a happy mother that was my ideal all my life. But my mother was always there unhappy herself, unwilling and incapable to see me happy. It manifested itself in strange ways. Whenever I was unwell, she felt better; when I was in good shape, she was down again, cursing herself and me too. As if she never forgave me my crime of having been born, she made me feel guilty of being alive. 'You live because you hate me. If you love me die', was her constant, though silent message. And so I spent my life, being offered death instead of love. Imprisoned, as I was, in my mother, the perennial infant, I could not develop a meaningful relation with a woman; the image of the mother would stand between, unforgiving, unforgiven. I sought solace in my work and found much; but I could not move from the pit of infancy. Finally, I turned to spiritual search and I am on this line steadily for many years. But, in a way it is the same old search for mother's love, call it God or Atma or Supreme Reality. Basically I want to love and be loved; unfortunately the so called religious people are against life and all for the mind. When faced with life's needs and urges, they begin by classifying, abstracting and conceptualizing and then make the classification more important than life itself. They ask to concentrate on and impersonate a concept. Instead of the spontaneous integration through love they recommend a deliberate and laborious concentration on a formula. Whether it is God or Atma, the me or the other, it comes to the same! Something to think about, not somebody to love. It is not theories and systems that I need; there are many equally attractive or plausible. I need a stirring of the heart, a renewal of life, and not a new way of thinking. There are no new ways of thinking, but feelings can be ever fresh. When I love somebody, I meditate on him spontaneously and powerfully, with warmth and vigour, which my mind cannot command. Words are good for shaping feelings; words without feeling are like clothes with no body inside cold and limp. This mother of mine she drained me of all feelings my sources have run dry. Can I find here the richness and abundance of emotions, which I needed in such ample measure as a child?
M: Where is your childhood now? And what is your future? BEING HAPPY. MAKING HAPPY IS THE RYTHM OF LIFE 245
Q: I was born, I have grown, I shall die.
M: You mean your body, of course. And your mind. I am not talking of your physiology and psychology. They are a part of nature and are governed by nature's laws. I am talking of your search for love. Had it a beginning? Will it have an end?
Q: I really cannot say. It is there from the earliest to the last moment of my life. This yearning for love how constant and how hopeless!
M: In your search for love what exactly are you searching for?
Q: Simply this: to love and to be loved.
M: You mean a woman?
Q: Not necessarily. A friend, a teacher, a guide as long as the feeling is bright and clear. Of course, a woman is the usual answer. But it need not be the only one.
M: Of the two what would you prefer, to love or to be loved?
Q: I would rather have both! But I can see that to love is greater, nobler, deeper.To be loved is sweet, but it does not make one grow.
M: Can you love on your own, or must you be made to love?
Q: One must meet somebody lovable, of course. My mother was not only not loving, she was also not lovable.
M: What makes a person lovable? Is it not the being loved? First you love and then you look for reasons.
Q: It can be the other way round. You love what makes you happy.
M: But what makes you happy?
Q: There is no rule about it. The entire subject is highly individual and unpredictable.
M: Right. Whichever way you put it, unless you love there is no happiness. But, does love make you always happy? Is not the association of love with happiness a rather early, infantile stage? When the beloved suffers, don't you suffer too? And do you cease to love, because you suffer? Must love and happiness come and go together? Is love merely the expectation of pleasure?
Q: Of course not. There can be much suffering in love.
M: Then what is love? Is it not a state of being rather than a state of mind? Must you know that you love in order to love? Did you. not love your mother unknowingly? Your craving for her love, for an opportunity to love her, is it not the movement of Iove? Is not love as much a part of you, as consciousness of being? You sought the love of your mother, because you loved her.
Q: But she would not let me
M: She could not stop you.
Q: Then, why was I unhappy all my life?
M: Because you did not go down to the very roots of your being. It is your complete ignorance of yourself, that covered up your love and happiness and made you seek for what you had never lost. Love is will, the will to share your happiness with all. Being happy making happy this is the rhythm of love. Desires Fulfilled, Breed More Desires
Questioner: I must confess I came today in a rebellious mood. I got a raw deal at the airlines office. When faced with such situations everything seems doubtful, everything seems useless.
Maharaj: This is a very useful mood. Doubting all, refusing all, unwilling to !earn through another. It is the fruit of your long sadhana. After all one does not study for ever.
Q: Enough of it. It took me nowhere.
M: Don't say 'nowhere'. It took you where you are now.
Q: It is again the child and its tantrums. I have not moved an inch from where I was.
M: You began as a child and you will end as a child. Whatever you have acquired in the meantime you must lose and start at the beginning.
Q: But the child kicks. When it is unhappy or denied anything it kicks.
M: Let it kick. Just look at the kicking. And if you are too afraid of the society to kick convincingly look at that too. I know it is a painful business. But there is no remedy except one the search for remedies must cease. If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalization is the first step to liberation. Step away and look. The physical events will go on happening, but by themselves they have no importance. It is the mind alone that matters. Whatever happens, you cannot kick and scream in an airline office or in a Bank. Society does not allow it. If you do not like their ways, or are not prepared to endure them, don't fly or carry money. Walk, and if you cannot walk, don't travel. If you deal with society you must accept its ways, for its ways are your ways. Your needs and demands have created them. Your desires are so complex and contradictory no wonder the society you create is also complex and contradictory.
Q: I do see and admit that the outer chaos is merely a reflection of my own inner disharmony. But what is the remedy?
M: Don't seek remedies.
Q: Sometimes one is in a 'state of grace' and life is happy and harmonious. But such a state does not last! The mood changes and all goes wrong.
M: If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. It is your restlessness that causes chaos.
Q: For full three hours that I spent in the airline office I was practising patience and forbearance. It did not speed uP matters. 248 1 AM THAT
M: At least it did not slow them down, as your kicking would have surely done! You want immediate results! We do not dispense magic here. Everybody does the same mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends. You want peace and harmony in the word, but refuse to have them in yourself. Follow my advice implicitly and you will not be disappointed. I cannot solve your problem by mere words. You have to act on what I told you and persevere. It is not the right advice that liberates, but the action based on it. Just like a doctor, after giving the patient an injection, tells hi
M: 'Now, keep quiet. Do nothing more, just keep quiet,' I am telling you: you have got your 'injection', now keep quiet, just keep quiet. You have nothing else to do. My Guru did the same. He would tell me something and then said: 'Now keep quiet. Don't go on ruminating all the time. Stop. Be silent'.
Q: I can keep quiet for an hour in the morning. But the day is long and many things happen that throw me out of balance. It is easy to say 'be silent', but to be silent when all is screaming in me and round me please tell me how it is done.
M: All that needs doing can be done in peace and silence. There is no need to get upset.
Q: It is all theory which does not fit the facts. I am returning to Europe with nothing to do there. My life is completely empty.
M: If you just try to keep quiet, all will come the work, the strength for work, the right motive. Must you know everything beforehand? Don't be anxious about your future be quiet now and all will fall in place. The unexpected is bound to happen, while the anticipated may never come. Don't tell me you cannot control your nature. You need not control it. Throw it overboard. Have no nature to fight, or to submit to. No experience will hurt you, provided you don't make it into a habit. Of the entire universe you are the subtle cause. All is because you are. Grasp this point firmly and deeply and dwell on it repeatedly. To realize this as absolutely true, is liberation.
Q: If I am the seed of my universe, then a rotten seed I am! By the fruit the seed is known.
M: What is wrong with your world that you swear at it?
Q: It is full of pain. DESIRES FULFILLED, BREED MORE DESIRES 249
M: Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change. Pleasure and pain are mere disturbances of the senses; treat them equally and there will be only bliss. And the world is, what you make it; by all means make it happy. Only contentment can make you happy desires fulfilled breed more desires. Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state - a precondition to the state of fulness. Don't distrust its apparent sterility and emptiness. Believe me, it is the satisfaction of desires that breeds misery. Freedom from desires is bliss.
Q: There are things we need.
M: What you need will come to you, if you do not ask for what you do not need.Yet only few people reach this state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation.
Q: I have been barren for the last two years, desolate and empty and often was I praying for death to come.
M: Well, with your coming here events have started rolling. Let things happen as they happen they will sort themselves out nicely in the end. You need not strain towards the future the future will come to you on its own. For some time longer you will remain sleep walking, as you do now, bereft of meaning and assurance; but this period will end and you will find your work both fruitful and easy. There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable for it means the soul had cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places. This is detachment when the old is over and the new has not yet come. If you are afraid, the state may be distressing; but there is really nothing to be afraid of. Remember the instruction: whatever you come across go beyond.
Q: The Buddhas rule: to remember what needs to be remembered. But I find it so difficult to remember the right thing at the right moment. With me forgetting seems to be the rule!
M: It is not easy to remember when every situation brings up a storm of desires and fears. Craving born of memory is also the destroyer of memory.
Q: How am I to fight desire? There is nothing stronger.
M: The waters of life are thundering over the rocks of objects - desirable or hateful. Remove the rocks by insight and detachment and the same waters will flow deep and silent and swift, in greater volume and with greater power. Don't be theoretical about it, give time to thought and consideration; if you desire to be free, neglect not the nearest step to freedom. It is like climbing a mountain: not a step can be missed. One step less and the summit is not reached. Body and Mind are Symptoms of Ignorance
Questioner: We were discussing one day the person the witness the absolute (vyakti vyakta avyakta). As far as I remember, you said that the absolute alone is real and the witness is absolute only at a given point of space and time. The person is the organism, gross and subtle, illumined by the presence of the witness. I do not seem to grasp the matter clearly; could we discuss it again? You also use the terms mahadakash, chidakash and paramakash. How are they related to person, witness, and the absolute?
Maharaj: Mahadakash is nature, the ocean of existences, the physical space with all that can be contacted through the senses. Chidakash is the expanse of awareness, the mental space of time, perception and cognition. Paramakash is the timeless and spaceless reality, mindless, undifferenciated, the infinite potentiality, the source and origin, the substance and the essence, both matter and consciousness, yet beyond both. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and the end of all manifestation, the root of time and space, the prime cause in every chain of causation.
Q: What is the difference between vyakta and avyakta?
M: There is no difference. It is like light and daylight. The universe is full of light which you do not see; but the same light you see as daylight. And what the daylight reveals is the vyakti, The person is always the object, the witness is the subject and 'heir relation of mutual dependence is the reflection of their absolute identity. You imagine that they are distinct and separate states. They are not. They are the same consciousness at rest and in movement, each state conscious of the other. In chit man knows God and God knows man. In chit the man shapes the world and the world shapes man. Chit is the link, the bridge between extremes, the balancing and uniting factor in every experience. The totality of the perceived is what you call matter. The totality of all perceivers is what you call the universal mind. The identity of the two, manifesting itself as perceptibility and perceiving, harmony and intelligence, loveliness and loving, reasserts itself eternally.
Q: The three gunas, sattva rajas tamas, are they only in matter, or also in the mind?
M: In both, of course, because the two are not separate. It is only the absolute that is beyond gunas. In fact, these are but points of view, ways of looking. They exist only in the mind. Beyond the mind all distinctions cease.
Q: Is the universe a product of the senses?
M: Just as you recreate your world on waking up, so is the universe unrolled. The mind with its five organs of perception, five organs of action, and five vehicles of consciousness appears as memory, thought, reason and selfhood.
Q: The sciences have made much progress. We know the 252 1 AM THAT body and the mind much better than our ancestors. Your traditional way, describing and analyzing mind and matter, is no longer valid.
M: But where are your scientists with their sciences? Are they not again images in your own mind?
Q: Here lies the basic difference! To me they are not my own projections. They were before I was born and shall be there when I am dead.
M: Of course. Once you accept time and space as real, you will consider yourself minute and short lived. But are they real? Do they depend on you, or you on them? As body, you are in space. As mind, you are in time. But are you mere body with a mind in it? Have you ever investigated?
Q: I had neither the motive nor the method.
M: I am suggesting both. But the actual work of insight and detachment(viveka vairagya) is yours.
Q: The only motive I can perceive is my own causeless and timeless happiness. And what is the method?
M: Happiness is incidental. The true and effective motive is love. You see people suffer and you seek the best way of helping them. The answer is obvious first put yourself beyond the need of help. Be sure your attitude is of pure goodwill, free of expectation of any kind. Those who seek mere happiness may end up in sublime indifference, while love will never rest. As to method, there is only one you must come to know yourself both what you appear to be and what you are. Clarity and charity go together each needs and strengthens the other.
Q: Compassion implies the existence of an objective world, full of avoidable sorrow.
M: The world is not objective and the sorrow of it is not avoidable. Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.
Q: If the reasons are imaginary, why should the suffering be inevitable?
M: It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires BODY AND MIND ARE SYMPTOMS and.fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy truth liberates.
Q: The truth is that I am a mind imprisoned in a body and this is a very unhappy truth.
M: You are neither the body nor in the body there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly investigate.
Q: But I was born as a body, in a body and shall die with the body, as a body.
M: This is your misconception. Enquire, investigate, doubt yourself and others. To find truth, you must not cling to your convictions; if you are sure of the immediate, you will never reach the ultimate. Your idea that you were born and that you will die is absurd: both logic and experience contradict it.
Q: All right, I shall not insist that I am the body. You have a point here. But here and now, as I talk to you, I am in my body obviously. The body may not be me, but it is mine.
M: The entire universe contributes incessantly to your existence. Hence the entire universe is your body. In that sense I agree.
Q: My body influences me deeply. In more than one way my body is my destiny. My character, my moods, the nature of my reactions, my desires and fears inborn or acquired they are all based on the body. A little alcohol, some drug or other and all changes. Until the drug wears off I become another man.
M: All this happens because you think yourself to be the body. Realize your real self and even drugs will have no power over you.
Q: You smoke?
M: My body kept a few habits which may as well continue till it dies. There is no harm in them.
Q: You eat meat?
M: I was born among meat eating people and my children are eating meat. I eat very little and make no fuss.
Q: Meat eating implies killing. 254 1 AM THAT
M: Obviously. I make no claims of consistency. You think absolute consistency is possible; prove it by example. Don't preach what you do not practise. Coming back to the idea of having been born. You are stuck wlth what your parents told you: all about conception, pregnancy and birth, infant, child, youngster, teenager, and so on. Now, divest yourself ot the idea that you are the body with the help of the contrary idea that you are not the body. It is also an idea, no doubt; treat it like something to be abandoned when its work is done. The idea that I am not the body gives reality to the body, when in fact, there is no such thing as body, it is but a state of mind. You can have as many bodies and as diverse as you llke; just remember steadily what you want and reject the incompatibles.
Q: I am like a box within box, within boxi the outer box acting as the body and the one next to it as the indwelling soul. Abstract the outer box and the next becomes the body and the one next to it the soul. It is an infinite series, an endless opening of boxes, is the last one the ultimate soul?
M: If you have a body, you must have a soul; here your simile of a nest of boxes applies. But here and now, through all your bodies and souls shines awareness, the pure light of chit. Hold on to it unswervingly. Without awareness, the body would not last a second. There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body. Discover that current and stay with it. Of course, all these are manners of speaking. Words are as much a barrier. as a bridge. Find the spark of life that weaves the tissues of your body and be with it. It is the only reality the body has.
Q: What happens to that spark of life after death?
M: It is beyond time. Birth and deaih are but points in time. Life weaves eternally its many webs. The weaving is in time, but life itself IS timeless. \/Yhatever name and shape you give to its expressions, it is like the ocean never changing. ever changing.
Q: All you say sounds beautifully convincing. yet my teeling of being JUSt a person in a world strange and alien, often inimical and dangerous, does not cease. Bein~ a person, limited in BODY AND MIND ARE SYMPTOMS OF IGNORANCE 255 space an~ time, how can I possibly realize myself as the opposite; a de personalized, universalized awareness of nothing in particular?
M: You assert yourself to be what you are not and deny yourself to be what you are. You omit the element of pure cognition, of awareness free from all personal distortions. Unless you admit the reality of chit, you will never know yourself.
Q: What am I to do? I do not see myself as you see me. Maybe you are right and I am wrong, but how can I cease to be what I feel I am?
M: A prince who believes himself to be a beggar can be convinced conclusively in one way only: he must behave as a prince and see what happens. Behave as if what I say is true and judge by what actually happens. All I ask is the little faith needed for making the first step. With experience will come confidence and you will not need me any more. I know what you are and I am telling you. Trust me for a while.
Q: To be here and now, I need my body and its senses. To understand, I need a mind.
M: The body and the mind are only symptoms of ignorance, of misapprehension. Behave as if vou were pure awareness, bodiless and mindless, spaceless and timeless, beyond 'where' and 'when' and 'how'. Dwell on it, think of it, learn to accept its reality. Don't oppose it and deny it all the time. Keep an open mind at least. Yoga is bending the outer to the in~er. Make your mind and body express the real which is all and beyond all. By doing you succeed, not by arguing.
Q: Kindly allow me to come back to my first question. How does the error of being a person originate?
M: The absolute precedes time. Awareness comes first. A bundle of memories and mental habits attracts attention, awareness gets focalized and a person suddenly appears. Remove the light of awareness, go to sleep or swoon away and the person disappears. The person (vyakti) flickers, awareness (vyakta) contains all space and time, the absolute (avyakta) Is. give up All and You Gain All
(My humble salutations to Advaita Vedanta Library for the collection)
Note: This text may have spelling and grammatical mistakes.
(Continued .......)
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