I am That
Talks with
Sri Nisarga Datta Maharaj
Q: What benefit do I derive from listening to you?
M: I am calling you back to yourself. All I ask you is to look at yourself, towards yourself, into yourself.
Q: To what purpose?
M: You live, you feel, you think. By giving attention to your living, feeling and thinking, you free yourself from them and go beyond them. Your personality dissolves and only the witness remains. Then you go beyond the witness. Do not ask how it happens. Just search within yourself.
Q: What makes the difference between the person and the witness?
M: Both are modes of consciousness. In one you desire and fear, in the other you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are not ruffled by events. You let them come and go.
Q: How does one get established in the higher state, the state of pure witnessing?
M: Consciousness does not shine by itself. It shines by a light beyond it. Having seen the dreamlike quality of consciousness, look for the light in which it appears, which gives it being. There is the content of consciousness as well as the awareness of it.
Q: I know and I know that I know.
M: Quite so, provided the second knowledge is unconditional and timeless. Forget the known, but remember that you are the knower. Don't be all the time immersed in your experiences. Remember that you are beyond the experience ever unborn and deathless. In remembering it, the quality of pure knowledge will emerge, the light of unconditional awareness.
Q: At what point does one experience reality?
M: Experience is of change, it comes and goes. Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced. It is not perceivable in the same way as an event is perceivable. If you wait for an event to take place, for the coming of reality, you will wait for ever, for reality neither comes nor goes. It is to be perceived, not expected. It is not to be prepared for and anticipated. But the very longing and search for reality is the movement, operation, action of reality. All you can do is to grasp the central point, that reality is not an event and does not happen and whatever happens, whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only, the transient as transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all you can. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no monger armour is against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences. But as soon as there is some like or dislike, you have drawn a screen.
Q: Would you say that Reality expresses itself in action rather than in knowledge? Or, is it a feeling of sorts?
M: Neither action, nor feeling, nor thought express reality. There is no such thing as an expression of reality. You are Introducing a duality where there is none. Only reality is, there is nothing else. The three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping are not me and I am not in them. When I die, the world will say - 'Oh, Maharaj is dead!' But to me these are words without content; they have no meaning. When the worship is done before the image of the Guru, all takes place as if he wakes and bathes and eats and rests, and goes for a stroll and returns, blesses all and goes to sleep. All is attended to in minutes details and yet there is a sense of unreality about it all. So is the case with me. All happens as it needs, yet nothing happens. I do what seems to be necessary, but at the same time I know that nothing is necessary, that life itself is only a make belief.
Q: Why then live at all? Why all this unnecessary coming and going, waking and sleeping, eating and digesting?
M: Nothing is done by me, everything just happens I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.
Q: Were you always like this from the first moment of enlightenment?
M: The three states rotate as usual there is waking and sleeping and waking again, but they do not happen to me. They just happen. To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock like, unassailable; a solid mass ot pure being consciousness bliss. I am never out ot it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.
Q: Yet, you are conscious!
M: Yes and no. There is peace deep, immense, unshakeable. Events are registered in memory, but are of no importance. I am hardly aware of them.
Q: If I understand you rightly, this state did not come by cultivation.
M: There was no coming. It was so always. There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being.
Q: Was it clouded over and your sadhana dissolved the mist? When your true state became clear to you, did it remain clear, or did it get obscured again? Is your condition permanent or intermittent?
M: Absolutely steady. Whatever I may do, it stays like a rock - motionless. Once you have awakened into reality, you stay in it. A child does not return to the womb! It is a simple state, smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest. It is self evident and yet beyond description.
Q: Is there a way to it?
M: Everything can become a way, provided you are interested. Just puzzling over my words and trying to grasp their full meaning is a sadhana quite sufficient for breaking down the wall. Nothing troubles me. I offer no resistance to trouble therefore it does not stay with me. On your side there is so much trouble. On mine there is no trouble at all. Come to my side. You are trouble prone. I am immune. Anything may happen what is needed is sincere interest. Earnestness does it.
Q: Can I do it?
M: Of course. You are quite capable of crossing over. Only be sincere.
Questioner: From year to year your teaching remains the same. There seems to be no progress in what you tell us. Maharaja: ln a hospital the sick are treated and get well. The treatment is routine, with hardly any change, but there is nothing monotonous about health. My teaching may be routine, but the fruit of it is new from man to man I!
Q: What is realization? Who is a realized man? By what is the nanny recognized?
M: There are no distinctive marks of Ghana. Only ignorance can be recognized, not Ghana. Nor does a nanny claim to be something special. AII those who proclaim their own greatness and uniqueness are not nannies. They are mistaking some unusual development for realization. The nanny shows no tendency to proclaim himself to be a nanny. He considers himself to be perfectly normal, true to his real nature. Proclaiming oneself to be an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipotent deity is a clear sign of ignorance.
Q: Can the nanny convey his experience to the ignorant? Can Ghana be transmitted from one man to another?
M: Yes, it can. The words of a gungnaw have the power of dispelling ignorance and darkness in the mind. It is not the words that matter, but the power behind them.
Q: What is that power?
M: The power of conviction, based on personal realization, on one's own direct experience.
Q: Some realized people say that knowledge must be won, not got. Another can only teach, but the learning is one's own.
M: It comes to the same. Q There are many who have practiced Yoga for years and years without any result. What may be the cause of their failure?
M: Some are addicted to trances, with their consciousness in abeyance. Without full consciousness what progress can there be?
Q: Many are practicing samadhis (states of rapturous absorption). In samadhis consciousness is quite intense, yet they do not result in anything.
M: What results do you expect? And why should Ghana be the result of anything? One thing leads to another, but.gnana is not a thing to be bound by causes and results. It is beyond causality altogether. It is abidance in the self. The Yogi corr~es to know many wonders, but of the self he remains ignorant. The nanny may look and feel quite ornary, but the self he knows well.
Q: There are many who strive for self knowledge earnestly, but with scant results. What may be the cause of it?
M: They have not investigated the sources of knowledge sufficiently, their sensations, feelings and thoughts they do not know well enough. This may be one cause of delay. The other: some desires may still be alive.
Q: Ups and downs in sadhana are inevitable. Yet the earnest seeker plods on in spite of all. What can the nanny do for such a seeker?
M: If the seeker is earnest, the light can be given. The light is for all and always there, but the seekers are few, and among those few, those who are ready are very rare. Ripeness of heart and mind is indispensable.
Q: Did you get your own realization through effort or by the grace of your Guru?
M: His was the teaching and mine was the trust. My confidence in him made me accept his words as true, go deep into them, live them, and that is how I came to realize what I am. The Guru's person and words made me trust him and my trust made them fruitful. IGNORANCE CAN BE RECOGNIZED, NOTGNANA 195
Q: But can a Guru give realization without words, without trust, just like this, without any preparation?
M: Yes, one can, but where it the taker? You see, I was so attuned to my Guru, so completely trusting him. there was so little of resistance in me, that it all happened easily and quickly. But not everybody is so fortunate.\~Laziness and restlessness often stand in the way and until they are seen and removed, the progress is slow. All those who have realized on the spot, by mere touch, look or thought, have been nope for it. But such are very few. The majority needs some time for ripening. Sadhana is accelerated ripening;
Q: What makes one ripe? What is the ripening factor?
M: Earnestness of course, one must be really anxious. After all, the realized man is the most earnest man~\Nhatever he does, he does it completely, without limitations and reservations. Integrity will take you to reality.)
Q: Do you love the world?
M: When you are hurt, you cry. Why? Because you love yourself. Don't bottle up your love by limiting it to the body, keep it open. It will be then the love for all.~When all the false self identifications are thrown away, what remains is all embracing love. Get rid of all ideas about yourself, even of the idea that you are God. No self definition is valid.,
Q: I am tired of promises. I am tired of sadhanas, which take all my time and energy and bring nothing. I want reality here and now. Can I have it?
M: Of course you can, provided you are really fed up with everything, including yoursadhanas. When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected!
Q: If a man engrossed in family life and in the affairs of the world does his sadhana strictly as prescribed by his scriptures, will he get results?
M: Results he will get, but he will be wrapped up in them like in a cocoon.
Q: So many saints say that when you are ripe and ready, you 196 1 AM THAT will realize. Their words may be true, but they are of little use. There must be a way out, independent of ripening which needs time, of sadhana which needs effort.
M: Don't call it a way; it is more a kind of skill. It is not even that. Stay open and quiet, that is all. What you seek is so near you, that there is no place for a way.
Q: There are so many ignorant people in the world and so few jnannies. What may be the cause of it?
M: Don't concern yourself with others, take care of yourself. You know that you are. Don't burden yourself with names, just be. Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.
Q: Why should seeking end before one can realize?
M: The desire for truth is the highest of all desires, yet, it is still a desire. All desires must be given up to the real to be. Remember that you are. This is your working capital. Rotate it and there will be much profit.
Q: Why should there be seeking at all.
M: Life is seeking, one cannot help seeking. When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State.
Q: Why does the Supreme State come and go?
M: It neither comes nor goes. Itis.
Q: Do you speak from your own experience?
M: Of course. It is a timeless state, ever present.
Q: With me it comes and goes, with you it does not. Why this difference?
M: Maybe because I have no desires. Or you do not desire the Supreme strongly enough. You must feel desperate when your mind is out of touch.
Q: All my life I was striving and achieved so little. I was reading, I was listening all in vain.
M: Listening and reading became a habit with you.
Q: I gave it up too. I do not read nowadays.
M: What you gave up is of no importance now. What have you not given up is. Find that out and give up that sadhana is a search for what to give up. Empty yourself completely~
Q: How can a fool desire wisdom? One needs to know the object of desire, to desire it. When the Supreme is not known, how can it be desired?
M: Man naturally ripens and becomes ready for realization.
Q: But what is the ripening factor?
M: SelF remembrance, awareness of 'l am' ripens him powerfully and speedily. Give up all ideas about yourself and simply be.
Q: I am tired of all the ways and means and skills and tricks, of all these mental acrobatics. Is there a way to perceive reality directly and immediately?
M: ~Stop making use of your mind and see what happens. Do this one thing thoroughly. That is all.
Q: When I was younger, I had strange experiences, short but memorable, of being nothing, just nothing, yet fully conscious. But the danger is that one has the desire to recreate from memory the moments that have passed.
M: This is all imagination. In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any. The sight of a flower is as marvelous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens. Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being. You will find that in that light there is love and infinite energy.
Q: If I am that light, why do I not know it?
M:~To know, you need a knowing mind, a mind capable of knowing. But your mind is ever on the run,never still, never fully reflecting~ How can you see the moon in all her glory when the eye is clouded with disease?
Q: Can we say that while the sun is the cause of the shadow,198 1 AM THAT one cannot see the sun in the shadow. One must turn round.
M: Again you have introduced the trinity of the sun, the body and shadow. There is no such division in reality. What I am talking about has nothing to do with dualities and trinities. Don't mantels and verbalize. Just see and be.
Q: Must I see, to be?
M: See what you are. Don't ask others, don't let others tell you about yourself. Look within and see. All the teacher can tell you is only this. There is no need of going from one to another. The same water is in all the wells. You just draw from the nearest. In my case the water is within me and I am the water. I 44 ' I am' is True, all else is Inference
Maharaj: The perceive of the world, is he prior to the world, or does he come into being along with the world?
Questioner: What a strange question! Why do you ask such questions?
M: Unless you know the correct answer, you will not find peace. 0: When I wake up in the morning, the world is already there, waiting for me. Surely the world comes into being first. I do, but much later, at the earliest at my birth. The body mediates between me and the world. Without the body there would be neither me nor the world. ' I EM' IS TRUE, ALL ELSE IS I NFERENCE 199
M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changeless Ness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all the little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.
Q: We call it God.
M: God is only an idea in your mind. The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: 'here and now I a em'. Remove, the 'here and now' the 'I am' remains, unassailable.rThe worry exists in memory, memory comes into consciousness; consciousness exists in awareness and awareness is the reflection of the light on the waters of existence.~
Q: Still I do not see how can the world be in me when the opposite 'I am in the world' is so obvious.
M: Even to say 'I am the world, the world is me', is a sign of ignorance. But when I keep in mind and confirm in life my identity with the world, a power arises in me which destroys the ignorance, burns it up completely.
Q: Is the witness of ignorance separate from ignorance? Is not to say: 'I am ignorant' a part of ignorance?
M: Of course.~ll I can say truly is: 'I am', all else is inference. But the inference has become a habit. Destroy all habits of thinking and seeing.~The sense 'I am' is the manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call self, God. Reality or by any other name. The 'I am' is in the world; but it is the key which can open the door out of the world. The moon dancing on the water is seen in the water, but it is caused by the moon in the sky and not by the water.
Q: Still the main point seems to escape me!l can admit that the world in which I live and move and have my being is of my own creation, a projection of myself, of my imagination, on the unknown world, the world as it is, the world of 'absolute matter', whatever this matter may be. The world of my own creation may be quite unlike the ultimate, the real world, just like the cinema 200 1 AM THAT screen is quite unlike the pictures projected onto it. Nevertheless, this absolute world exists, quite independent of myself.
M: (layout so, the world of Absolute Reality, onto which your mind has projected a world of relative unreality is independent of yourself, for the very simple reason that it is yourself.
Q: Is there no contradiction in terms? How can independence prove identity?
M: Examine the motion of change and you will see.~What can change while you do not change, can be said to be independent of you. But what is changeless must be one with whatever else is changeless. For, duality implies interaction and interaction meats change. In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essences
Q: Like in a lri dimensional picture, the light forms its own screen.
M: Any comparison will do. The main point to grasp is that you have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and that you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.
Q: How does one break the spell?
M: Assert your independence in thought and action. After all, all hangs on your faith in yourself, on the conviction that what you see and hear, think and feel is real. Why not question your faith? No doubt, this world is painted by you on the screen of consciousness and is entirely your own private world. Only your sense 'I am', though in the world, is not of the world. By no effort of logic or imagination can you change the 'I am' into 'I am not'. In the very denial of your being you assert it. Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the Imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear. Just as the colors in this carpet are brought out by light but 'I AM' IS TRUE, ALL ELSE IS INFERENCE 201 light is not the color, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world. (That which creates and sustains the world, you may call it God or providence, but ultimately you are the proof that God exists, not the other way round. For, before any question about God can be put, you must be there to put it.)
Q: God is an experience in time, but the experience is timeless.
M: Even the experience is secondary. Primary is the infinite expanse of consciousness, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be~When you look at anything, it is the ultimate you see, but you imagine that you see a cloud or a tree. Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelt, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.) Even the sense of 'I am' is composed of the pure light and the sense of being. The 'I' is there even without the 'am'. So is the pure light there whether you say 'I' or not. Become aware of that pure light and you will never lose it. The being Ness in being, the awareness in consciousness, the interest in every experience that is not describable, yet perfectly accessible, for there is nothing else. a You talk of reality directly as the all pervading, ever present, eternal, all knowing, all energizing first cause. There are other teachers, who refuse to discuss reality at all. They say reality is beyond the mind while all discussions are within the realm of the mind, which is the home of the unreal. Their approach is negative; they pinpoint the unreal and thus go beyond it into the real.
M: The difference lies in the words only. After all, when l~talk of the real, I describe it as not unreal, space less, time less, cause less, beginning less and end less. It comes to the same. As long as it leads to enlightenment, what does the wording matter? Does it matter whether you pull the cart or push it, as 202 1 AM THAT long as it is kept rolling? You may feel attracted to reality at one time and repelled from the false at another; these are only moods which alternate; both are needed for perfect freedom. You may go one way or another but each time it will be the right way at the moment; just go wholeheartedly, don't waste time on doubting or hesitating.(Many kinds of food are needed to make the child grow, but the act of eating is the same. Theoretically all approaches are good. In practice, and at a given moment, you proceed by one road only. Sooner or later you are bound to discover that if you really want to find, you must dig at one place only within~ Neither your body nor mind can give you what you seek the being and knowing your self and the great peace that comes with it.
Q: Surely there is something valid and valuable in every approach.
M: In each case the value lies in bringing you to the need of seeking within. Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular. To find water you do not dig small pits all over the place, but drill deep in one place only. Similarly, to find your self you have to explore yourself~When you realize that you are the light of the world, you will also realize that you are the love of it; that to know is to love and to love is to know.) Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first.~Your love of the world is the reflection of your love of yourself, for your world is of your own creation. Light and love are impersonal, but they are reflected in your mind as knowing and wishing oneself well. We are always friendly towards ourselves. but not always wise. A Yogi is a man whose goodwill is allied to wisdom.) • 45 What Comes and Goes has no Being
Questioner: I have come to be with you, rather than to listen. Little can be said in words, much more can be conveyed in silence. Maharaja: First words, then silence. One must be ripe for sil ence.
Q: Can I live in silence?
M:~Unselfish work leads to silence,for when you work selflessly, you don't need to ask for help. Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance. You just do what needs be done leaving success and failure to the unknown. For everything is caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavor is but one. Yet such is the magic of man's mind and heart that the most improbable happens when human will and love pull together~
Q: ~What is wrong with asking for help when the work is worthy?
M: ~Where is the need of asking? It merely shows weakness and anxiety. Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the unknown. Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go through the necessary movements. You are merely one of the links in the long chain of causation. Fundamentally, all happens in the mind only. When you work for something wholeheartedly and steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen.~ln reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths there is I AM THAT perfect peace.(AIR your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions,;J
Q: A person is naturally limited.
M: where is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the persori~ You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you believe yoLIrself to be~Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourselMn terms of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don't be lazy to thinks
Q: Activity is the essence of reality. There is no virtue in not working. Along with thinking something must be done.
M: To work in the world is hard, to refrain Tom all unnecessary work is even harder.
Q: For the person I am all this seems impossible.
M: What do you know about yourself? You can only be what you are in reality; you can only appear what you are not. You have never moved away from perfection. All idea of self improvement is conventional and verbal. As the sun knows not darkness, so does the self know not the non self. It is the mind, which by knowing the other, Bentomes the other. Yet the mind is nothing else but the serif. It is the self that becomes the other, the not self, and yet remains the self. All else is an assumption. Just as a cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it, so does WHAT COMES AND GOES HAS NO BEING 205 assumption obscure reality without destroying it. The very idea of destruction of reality is ridiculous; the destroyer is always snore real than the destroyed. Reality is the ultimate destroyer All separation, every kind ot estrangement and alienation is false. All is one this is the ultimate solution of every conflict.
Q: How is it that in spite of so much instruction and assistance we make no progress?
M: us long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both,~
Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small and separate person, one amongst many.
M: Your being a person is due to the. illusion of space anti time you imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your self identification with the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession they have their span in time and make you imagine yourself, because of memory, as having duration. In reality time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. How old are you?
Q: Forty eight!
M: What makes you say forty eight? What makes you say: I am here? Verbal habits born from assumptions. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of 'else' is a disaster and a calamity.
Q: What is the cause of personification, of self limitation in time and space?
M: ~That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no such thing as a separate persons Even taking the empirical point of view, it is ox\pious that everything is the cause ot every 206 1 AM THAT thing, that everything is as it is, because the entire universe is as it is.
Q: Yet personality must have a cause.
M: How does personality, come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.
Q: Does not 'I am' remain?
M: The word 'remain' does not apply. 'I am' is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be. As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All Lou need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms. Self li mutation is the very essence of personality.
Q: How can I become universal?
M: But you are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Only cease imagining yourself to be the particular. What comes and goes has no being. It owes its very appearance to reality. You know that there is a world, but does the world know you? All knowledge flows from you, as all being and all joy. Realize that you are the eternal source and accept all as your own. Such acceptance is true love.
Q: All you say sounds very beautiful. But how has one to make it into a way of living?
M: Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you ~nowhere. Just cease imagining.
Q: It is not a matter of achievement, but of understanding.
M: Don't try to understand! Enough if you do not misunderstand.. Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. What is beginning less cannot have a cause. It is not that you knew what you are and then you have forgotten. Once you know, you cannot forget. Ignorance has no beginning, but can WHAT COMES AND GOES HAS NO BEING 207 have an end. Enquire: who is ignorant and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body no world. First enquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will come later.
Q: What you say sounds convincing, but of what use is it to the private person, who knows itself to be in the world and of the world?
M: Millions eat bread, but few know all about wheat. And only those who know can improve the bread. Similarly, only those who know the self, who have seen beyond the world, can improve the world.Their value to private persons is immense, for they are their only hope of salvation. What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world you must step out of it.
Q: But can one step out of the world?
M: Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realize, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it. All scriptures say that before the world was, the Creator was. Who knows the Creator? He alone who was before the Creator, your own real being, the source of all the worlds with their creators.
Q: All you say is held together by your assumption that the world is your own projection. You admit that you mean your personal, subjective world, the world given you through your senses and your mind. In that sense each one of us lives in a world of his own projection. These private worlds hardly touch each other and they arise from and merge into the 'I am' at their center. But surely behind these private worlds there must be a common objective world, of which the private worlds are mere shadows. Do you deny the existence of such objective world, common to all?~
M: Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor208 1 AM THAT matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to whom to happen, a conscious separate centre. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose your self in it. When you deny reality to anything, you come to a residue which cannot be denied . All talk of gnana is a sign of ignorance. It is the mind that imagines that it does not know and then comes to know. Reality knows nothing of these contortions. Even the idea of God as the Creato~ is false. Do I owe my being to any other being? Because I am, all is.
Q: How can it be? A child is born into the world, not the world into the child. The world is old and the child is new.
M: The child is born into your world. Now, were you born into your world, or did your world appear to you? To be born means to create a world round yourself as the centre. But do you ever cr~.ate yourself? Or did anyone create you? Everyone creates a world for himself and lives in it, imprisoned by one's ignorance. All we have to do is to deny reality to our prison.
Q: Just as the waking state exists in seed form during sleep, so does the world the child creates on being born exist before its birth. With whom does the seed lie?
M: With him who is the witness Ot oirih and death, but is neither born nor dies. He alone is the seed of creation as well as its residue. Don't ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation. . ~ 46 Awareness of Being is Bliss
Questioner: By profession I am a physician. I began with surgery, continued with psychiatry and also wrote some books on mental health and healing by faith. I came to you to learn the laws of spiritual health.
Maharaj: When you are trying to cure a patient, what exactly are you trying to cure? What is cure? When can you say that a man is cured?
Q: I seek to cure the body as well as improve the link between the body and the mind. I also seek to set right the mind.
M: Did you investigate the connection between the mind and the body? At what point are they connected?
Q: Between the body and the indwelling consciousness lies the mind.
M: Is not the body made of food? And can there be a mind without food?
Q: The body is built and maintained by food. Without food the mind usually goes weak. But the mind is not mere food. There is a transforming factor which creates a mind in the body. What is that transforming factor?
M: ~Just like the wood produces fire which is not wood, so does thebody produces the mind which is not the body ~But to whom does the mind appear? Who is the perceiver of the thoughts and feelings which you call the mind? There is wood, there is fire and there is the enjoyer of the fire. Who enjoys the mind? Is the enjoyer also a result of food, or is it independent?
Q: The perceiver is independent.
M: How do you know? Speak from your own experience. You are not the body nor the mind. You say so. How do you know? 210 1 AM THAT I AWARENESS OF BEING IS BLISS 211
Q: I really do not know. I guess so.
M: Truth is permanent. The real is changeless. What changes is not real, what is real does not change. Now, what is it in you that does not change? As long as there is food, there is body and mind. When the food is stopped, the body dies and the mind dissolves. But does the observer perish?
Q: I guess it does not. But I have no proof.
M: You yourself are the proof. You have not, nor can you have any other proof. You are yourself, you know yourself, you love yourself. Whatever the mind does, it does for the love of its own self. The very nature of the self is love. It is loved, loving and lovable. It is the self that makes the body and the mind so interesting, so very dear. The very attention given to them comes from the self.
(My humble salutations to Advaita Vedanta Library for the collection)
Note: This text may have spelling and grammatical mistakes.
(Continued .......)
