Nisargadatta The Philosophy part 2

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Nisargadatta ThePhilosophy

Part 2 Chapters 50 - 97

50. Consciousness

In the West the name for consciousness is the mind, in India the name for consciousness is Jnana, knowledge.
All consciousness is one.
There is no difference in the consciousness, it is all one, but we call it by different names.
Consciousness comes at what is called birth, and goes at what is called death. It is always the same consciousness whether in the child or the adult. There is only one consciousness.
You are not the consciousness but have to become one with the consciousness. As you stabilize in the consciousness, dispassion for the body and for the expressions through the body occurs spontaneously. It is a natural renunciation, not a deliberate one. Become one with that consciousness, then you transcend it.
Everything takes place in consciousness.
Consciousness is all-pervading and has no ignorance and no knowledge, but ignorance and knowledge take birth in it.
Realize yourself as the ocean of consciousness in which all happens. A little close observation and you will see that no event is outside your consciousness.
Consciousness is the mind of the Absolute.
Consciousness is the material of creation.
Creation is the very nature of consciousness. Consciousness causes appearances. Reality is beyond consciousness.
That speck of consciousness has taken the form of universal consciousness. Its image is the entire universe, just like the pinprick of consciousness in deep sleep develops into a dream world.
Consciousness gives rise to the world, which is a unified field, a unicity. All differences exist only in your consciousness as appearances. The source is the same consciousness. Consciousness, or the beingness itself, is formless, it is the love. It wants to exist all the time. That is love. That love wants to be. Because of that you experience the whole world. The world is in that consciousness.
That consciousness which spills into the room spontaneously occupies the room and the cosmos totally. In the process of stabilizing it expands into the cosmos. When it expands fully then it stabilizes in the Brahma aperture, the Brahma-randhra.
The entire cosmos in its vibrant, stirring movement is represented by the consciousness, and the whole universe is the body of the consciousness. It dwells in the core of all beings as the knowledge “I Am”, the love ‘to be’. By continually witnessing the consciousness, or the sense of being, one’s mind, which assesses and differentiates persons observed as males and females, gradually removes itself from the focus of attention, leaving the consciousness in its innate glory. Such a state can only be attained if one totally accepts with full conviction and faith the knowledge “I Am” as oneself, and firmly believes “I am that by which I know I am”. Thus a true devotee, by abiding in the knowledge “I Am” transcends the experience of death and attains immortality. But as long as the mind remains unconquered, the experience of death is inevitable.
The world is but a succession of experiences and you are what makes them conscious, and yet remain beyond all experience. Similarly, without awareness there would be no consciousness, nor life, which transforms matter into a vehicle of consciousness.
Consciousness is normally associated with an individual. But it is not really the individual that has consciousness, but it is the consciousness that assumes innumerable forms.
In a heap of grain consciousness is latent, and in the presence of favourable conditions, it will manifest according to the form and quality of the species.
The expression of consciousness through different bodies is different. Sound as such is the same, but its expression through different instruments is different. Out of the same consciousness, with the formation of a Krishna body a Krishna is born; a donkey also is formed accordingly. Consciousness is the same.
The infant Lord Krishna is the consciousness which is manifesting itself in millions of forms. That which assumes all these forms in the world is itself really formless, spaceless and timeless.
There is no end to what this consciousness can do. This consciousness that one has is of a manifold nature.....it can adopt any form it likes.....whereas your true nature is full in itself, unchanging.
The millions of forms are the manifestation of consciousness. It is the millions of forms that get created and destroyed, but universal consciousness itself is unborn and undying. You are this unlimited universal consciousness. Only that in which consciousness manifests itself is limited, and is created and destroyed. Creation and destruction is a continuous process. The total potential of consciousness remains. It is unlimited.
Although this consciousness functions through millions of forms, it is one and the same consciousness.
The objective universe (mahadakash) is in constant movement, projecting and dissolving innumerable forms. Whenever a form is infused with life (prana), consciousness (chetana) appears by reflection of awareness in matter.
The combination of the body and the vital breath generates this consciousness. You are not the consciousness.
In the body, in combination with the vital breath, the consciousness appears. It is the consciousness that feels pain or pleasure, not the body or the vital breath.
Just like in a cinema all is light, so does consciousness become the vast world. Look closely and you will see that all names and forms are but transitory waves on the ocean of consciousness, that only consciousness can be said to be, not its transformations.
Consciousness is like light.
If you are alert, be aware of yourself, and you will see light in the deepest recesses of your core. You are the light.
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.
This consciousness, because of which everything else is, is itself merely the light of That which is, a reflection of That which is.
This consciousness is nothing but energy. When the body essence grows weaker, the consciousness grows weaker, and ultimately will leave.
Consciousness as such is the subtle counterpart of matter. Just as inertia (tamas) and energy (rajas) are attributes of matter, so does harmony (sattva) manifest itself as consciousness. You may consider it , in a way, as a form of very subtle energy. Wherever matter organizes itself into a stable organism, consciousness appears spontaneously. With the destruction of the organism consciousness disappears.
In the absence of this basic concept “I Am” there is no thought, there is no consciousness.
In order to manifest itself the consciousness needs a frame, a particular construct in which it can appear. That form can be anything, but consciousness lasts only as long as that particular form remains. Until that consciousness appears there cannot be any knowledge of any kind. Knowledge can only be there when this base, the knowledge “I Am” is there.
This consciousness is all-pervading when the touch of “ I Amness” is not present. Since this consciousness had no support to say “I am this or that”, it caught hold of the body and said “I am a male or a female”.
All idea of “me” and “mine”, even of “I Am” is in consciousness. The idea of unconsciousness exists in consciousness only.
Consciousness gives the knowledge that “I Am”. All sentient creatures have the same knowledge, ‘I am’. This basic consciousness is the same in all forms. However consciousness needs a particular basic construction in which it can appear, a physical form. Until consciousness appears there cannot be any knowledge. Knowledge depends on consciousness.
You as consciousness cannot be disturbed by any disturbances outside. It is not a question of I am that consciousness, ‘I’ itself is the consciousness, but without saying the word ‘I’.
There is something you want to protect. You feel: ‘It should be, or it should not be’. At the bottom of this is that you feel that you are. When you feel that you are, all the trouble starts. If the feeling that you are is not there, no trouble exists. The world is not troubling you, it is the consciousness which appears on you which is troubling you. You are not in a position to sustain that consciousness and you cannot bear it. When the consciousness was not there, what were you? You are conscious now, spontaneously, not because you want to be. It is only because the consciousness appears on you that you are giving or not giving names, or doing or not doing something. When the consciousness is there, so is the vital force, thoughts are flowing and a lot of words are coming. That is your mind. Do not be concerned with the consciousness. Do not identify with it, by saying: ‘I am this’, or ‘I am that’.
We have this conviction that I am, I exist, I am alive. That conviction is because of the consciousness, and consciousness is not aware of itself unless the body is there. Consciousness is the taste of this physical form. If the form is not there, the taste is not there. The body is the essence of food, and the consciousness is the essence of the physical form. If this is understood, there can be no individuality. Individuality is a process of manifestation.
Presently I do not have any individuality.....what is available is only the consciousness, for the expression of which this material instrument is available. This consciousness is not a very desirable thing, it is an imperfect state.
When this consciousness goes into oblivion, who is to say what that state is? Because your “I Amness” is not there, you do not know yourself.
A small part of consciousness merges with the total consciousness. When it is merged which part of consciousness will want to know which part was separate? When one is merged who is it that will want to know?
This consciousness will not rest until it gets the answer to the question: ‘What or who I am?’ This consciousness cannot bear its own existence, cannot bear its own consciousness.
That speck of consciousness within you that I am, that ‘I-am-ness’, that is Lord Krishna. That is Krishna consciousness. In the absence of that Krishna consciousness there cannot be the world.
You should never forget your true nature. Take up the silent chant “I am consciousness.” This chant should go on without any effort. One who remembers that he is the knowledge, that he is the consciousness, becomes in the end, the Parabrahman.
I am not consciousness, nor its contents. Whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there is the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. Cease taking yourself to be within the field of consciousness.
You do not know whether you are in the consciousness or out of it, you simply witness it.
Consciousness comes into being and goes out of being. Sometimes we are conscious and sometimes not. When we are not conscious, it appears to us as a darkness or a blank. But a jnani is aware of himself as neither conscious nor unconscious, but purely aware, a witness to the three states of mind and their contents.
Consciousness is not in the body. Your consciousness has some attraction, some love, for your body. You know also that you are not the consciousness. You witness your consciousness.
All that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness, and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the Witness. I am beyond it as Being.
Beingness or consciousness is the supreme God. But you as the knower of this are separate from the consciousness and the body. Movement, thought, or experience can only take place on that consciousness, and you are prior to this consciousness.
Consciousness is not my true abode; I am not in it, it is not mine, there is no myself in it. I am beyond. It is not easy to explain how one can be neither conscious, nor unconscious, but just beyond.
Consciousness is always of obstacles. When there are no obstacles, one goes beyond it.
Transcending consciousness is when the consciousness knows and understands the consciousness.
Consciousness is the reflection of the Awareness that is the Absolute.
If you are interested in the world, then it means you are not interested in the consciousness. If you are interested in the consciousness, you will come to know it. You must give your full attention to the consciousness only. By the process of meditation all the secrets will be revealed to you by the consciousness. Then you will know what you are. Just consciousness without any activity. Awareness means pure consciousness, and there is no “I” there.
Consciousness is not private property, it is universal.
Space is created and thereby the consciousness which is really non-personal, has become a person, limited to the body and mind. Accept consciousness as non-personal.
Consciousness is used by all. Consciousness is like water taken from a public well, you have taken a portion of that water, or that consciousness, for your personal use. That consciousness which you have taken for yourself is the omniscient, the omnipotent, the omnipresent.
Whatever is, is the consciousness.
Consciousness is without any colour, but where there is a personality, it takes the colour of that particular personality. Consciousness is the activity of your beingness. When the beingness goes, that colourful personality merges into that colourless one, consciousness.
A jnani is aware of the origin and value of consciousness, this beingness, which has spontaneously dawned on him. This same consciousness plays a multitude of roles, some happy, some unhappy, but whatever the roles, the jnani is merely the seer of them. The roles have no effect on the jnani. Consciousness comes into being, and that consciousness becomes the ether, as well as the food itself, and both perish into nothingness, so how can anything be changed?
Being pervades and transcends consciousness. Objective consciousness is a part of pure consciousness, not beyond it.
Beingness has the quality to become whatever you think of. Whatever concept you feed to the consciousness, the consciousness will provide you with that. Whatever you hold on to intensely, you are bound to be that, that is the quality of your consciousness. Therefore never think you are the body. Consciousness is not the body. As a result of the body the beingness is felt, but beingness is all-pervasive. Consciousness alone feels the expanse of consciousness, but I, the Absolute, am not that.
Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness. That is all.
Consciousness comes upon one by itself, spontaneously, and goes away in the same manner. Consciousness is a time-bound state.
You have no authority over this consciousness, it has come by itself and it will go by itself. You can not do anything with it.
Consciousness stirs without any cause, spontaneously, it happens. There is no reason. That consciousness is universal....there is no individuality. But when the consciousness stirs in a particular form, which has also arisen spontaneously, and starts functioning in that form, that form assumes it is an individual, and what is unlimited limits itself to a particular form, and the trouble starts.
Consciousness has identified with a form. Later it understands that it is not that form and goes further. In a few cases it may reach the space, and very often there it stops. In a very few cases, it reaches its real source, beyond all conditioning. Consciousness must seek its source. Not as an individual, the knowledge “I Am” must go back to its source.
Go back to your state before this consciousness came upon you. The original state is before the consciousness came upon you.
That which you do not know, that is the right state. Everything that comes after this consciousness is attained is useless. Consciousness is useless.
Because of the mistaken identity we think of personalized consciousness, but actually it is vast and limitless. The source of consciousness is prior to time and space, prior to manifestation.
Realize that all happens in consciousness, and you are the root, the source, the foundation of consciousness.
You cannot speak of a beginning of consciousness. The very ideas of beginning and time are within consciousness. To talk meaningfully of the beginning of anything, you must step out of it, and the moment you step out, you realize that there is no such thing and never was. There is only reality, in which no ‘thing’ has any being on its own. Like waves are inseparable from the ocean, so is all existence rooted in being.
Consciousness itself is an impurity, because it is the result of procreation, and cannot exist without a body. Consciousness is made of material and is therefore temporary.
People do not really understand that the body, breath, and consciousness are time-bound. At the end of the day the consciousness will disappear.
Being in consciousness is time-bound. Consciousness is a temporary condition which has come upon the total, timeless, spaceless, changeless state. It is a happening which has come and which will disappear.
Entering the consciousness drags you down into the suffering. Consciousness brings you trouble. Understand the nature of the consciousness and feel you have nothing to do with it. Consciousness is a guest with you, it was not originally there and will not be there in the future. It is temporary. In the temporary knowledge about the consciousness you want to understand everything in that consciousness itself. Understand that consciousness is conditioning. Consciousness is concepts, ideas, hopes, and all things. Awareness is already beyond consciousness.
You do not want to leave consciousness.
I know this consciousness is not going to remain with me. Why are you taking responsibility for this consciousness? You did not ask for it. Can you control the consciousness? Can you keep it with you always? No, it can go at any time, and you have no authority that you can say this is my consciousness and I will hold on to it for such and such a time.
Consciousness will remain only as long as the body is there. While we are alive, consciousness is everything, and we must abide in it, but keep in mind that consciousness is going to disappear.
Consciousness is the product of the five elements and their interactions. Consciousness is present as long as the five elements are present. When the great dissolution of the universe occurs, there is dissolution of the five elements, and consciousness also finishes. But the knower of consciousness, the Absolute state, is unaffected. In that state there is no fear of anything. Even when there is total destruction, the Absolute is merely watching, being in a state of witnessing.
You are the Absolute, the perfect state. Consciousness was not there earlier, and it is going to disappear, and when it disappears you will still be there and witness that consciousness. You are not the consciousness, nor are you in the consciousness, which is full of wants and needs. Your true nature is That which was before the body and the consciousness came into being.
The main consciousness in the body leaves when death occurs.
This consciousness in the body remains only so long as the body lasts, but it is not destroyed when the body is destroyed. Individual consciousness becomes one with the universal consciousness. When the body dies this individual consciousness will merge with the total consciousness, but even so, that total consciousness knows that it is, and so long as one knows that it is, it is in a state of duality.
How can that be stopped which is spontaneous and which has come into being without any reason? The body may go, but the knowing which is consciousness itself, does not go, and will appear again in another form.
Consciousness can only become more subtle and refined, and that is what happens after death. As the various vehicles of man die off, the modes of consciousness induced by them also fade away. Senses are mere modes of perception. As the grosser modes disappear, finer states of consciousness emerge. But there can be no transition from consciousness to awareness, for awareness is not a form of consciousness.
What remains when consciousness, or the sense of Being goes, is the Original, which is unconditioned, without attributes, and without identity. It is Parabrahman, the Absolute.
The expressions of consciousness are limitless. If you enter into the expressions you will be lost. Surrender to and be one with your consciousness and your consciousness alone will show you the process of how it can be dissolved.
This consciousness subsides into no consciousness.
The consciousness arises spontaneously. Once I am conscious of myself I know I exist, and I love this beingness. I do not want this beingness to depart from me, and it is this that makes me strive all the day until sleep overcomes me, in order to keep this love of beingness satisfied. The Guru tells me that this consciousness, which I love so much, is only an illusion. This consciousness is the basic cause of all unhappiness. My true state is before this consciousness arose, and beyond all concepts.
Whatever comes and goes is merely projections of the mind or consciousness.
It is all the play of consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be separated from the world and the universe, it is the same. This is my maya, it has come out of me, and I know that I am not the maya. I am the witness of this play.
Compare consciousness and its content to a cloud. You are inside the cloud, while I look at it. You are lost in it, while I see the cloud and many other clouds and the blue sky too and the sun, the moon, the stars. Reality is one for both of us, but for you it is a prison, and for me it is a home.
Consciousness and whatever appears in consciousness is nothing but a gigantic fraud. It is a spontaneous happening, there is no perpetrator of this fraud. There is nothing that can be done about it, therefore all that can happen is for the understanding to take place.
All that is to be done, if anything, is to sit and let consciousness unfold itself, and unfold knowledge about itself.
You must have a thorough knowledge of this consciousness, and having known everything about the consciousness you come to the conclusion that it is all unreal, and then it should drop off.
The moment the consciousness of ‘I’ appears on you, you have experience of the world, suffering as well as happiness. Suffering and happiness have nothing to do with you, they merely happen in the consciousness which you observe coming and going. You are that which observes the coming and going of consciousness. You are not that which comes and goes, but that which is permanently there.
Consciousness, through ignorance, has taken upon itself the limitation that it is the body. That ignorance has to be discarded.
All consciousness is limited and therefore painful. At the root of consciousness lies desire, the urge to experience. Consciousness is a burden. Body means burden. Sensations, desires, thoughts.....these are all burdens. All consciousness is in conflict. As long as there is consciousness, there must be pleasure and pain. It is in the nature of the ‘I Am’, of consciousness, to identify itself with the opposites.
If you come to the conclusion that whatever is happening is in the consciousness, then you can tell the consciousness: “It is you who is suffering, not I”. If consciousness wants to continue to suffer, let it remain in the body. If consciousness wants to leave the body, let it. Either way you are not concerned. It is amusing to see someone who thinks of himself as an individual, who thinks of himself as a doer or achiever. Whatever is happening, and the experiencing of the happening, takes place in this consciousness when the “I Am” arises.
This consciousness in which concepts arise is itself a concept.
There are two aspects: one is conceptual, dynamic consciousness which is full of concepts, and the other is transcendent consciousness in which even the concept “I Am” is not there. The one that is full of concepts and is qualitative is the conceptual qualitative Brahman and is the outcome of the functioning body. To the jnani that consciousness is dead to him and gone. He has transcended that. Therefore whatever is, is that other consciousness, that one which is without concepts.
In the body there is consciousness, and both are material. Consciousness is the product of the body substance. When transcended, consciousness is of no use to the ultimate principle. Consciousness is the product of the food material. Whatever form it takes....man, monkey, or worm....does not matter.
When the foliage, the grass, and the vegetation is eaten, the essence is eaten and another consciousness appears through that. Consciousness is the essence of the food that has been digested, and along with the food, that consciousness will also disappear. The consciousness that has come out of the five elements, through the body, is the state of beingness, the knowledge that ‘I Am’. That state of beingness will perish.
The whole consciousness is already there.
No great man having taken birth has wrought an iota of change in the consciousness. What is, is. It will never change. The experience is there and somebody comes later to experience it. Unknowingly this knowingness has appeared in you, and you have to go through it, willingly or unwillingly. No one can change what he has to face as experience so long as he is identifying with the body and mind.
Look at consciousness as something that happens to you and not in you, as something external, alien, superimposed. Then, suddenly you are free of consciousness, really alone, with nothing to intrude. And that is your true state. You cannot step out of consciousness for the very idea of stepping out is in consciousness. But if you learn to look at your consciousness as a sort of fever, personal and private, in which you are enclosed like a chick in its shell, out of this very attitude will come the crisis which will break the shell.
You can never isolate yourself from the consciousness unless consciousness is pleased with you and gets rid of you. Consciousness opens the gate for you to transcend consciousness.
Consciousness cannot stand still. Consciousness is the same as movement. The movement takes place through the three gunas which are inherent in this knowledge “I Am”. All movement takes place through these gunas and this consciousness keeps on vibrating.
All experiences are due to memories and are merely movements in consciousness and therefore they cannot last. All experiences will be a means of suffering if one has not realized what they are.
Whatever happens is a mere movement in that consciousness. Once this is understood, nothing remains to be done, there is nothing you can or need to do.
What you think you have understood is only a movement in your consciousness, and you are separate from that consciousness. As far as the Self is concerned there is no question of understanding or not understanding.
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness, that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.
Consciousness is itself God. Consciousness is the only thing which will divulge to one the secret of all manifestation. Everything else is a concept. Until consciousness divulges its own secret to you, whatever knowledge you can have can only be based on concepts and is untrue. This consciousness not only brings to you the knowledge of your own existence, but also knowledge of the world. And when this knowledge disappears with the disappearance of the body, there is no knowledge of oneself or the world.
‘I-am-ness’ is consciously receding from the Absolute. Consciousness is slowly extinguishing itself, knowingly it is disappearing. But nothing affects you, the Absolute.
Consciousness (chitananda) is spirit (purusha), consciousness is matter (prakriti). Imperfect spirit is matter, perfect matter is spirit. In the beginning as in the end, all is one.

51. Universal Consciousness

Consciousness is universal. Universal consciousness does not come from anywhere, because it is universal.
There is no reason or law of cause and effect for the functioning of this universal consciousness. Why something happens at a particular time cannot be explained in this dualistic state. We can only watch the functioning and cannot ask for any reason for any functioning which takes place.
This consciousness is of a universal nature, just like space. This consciousness within the body is a minute experience, but its nature, its quality, is essentially the same, exactly like space.
Universal consciousness does not have a body. The universal consciousness becomes manifest when a body comes into the picture. The essence of the five elements constitute the sustenance of the universal consciousness.
Universal consciousness works through this body at the moment, but is not visible.
Everything is this consciousness, but one is not aware of the consciousness unless there is a body. Consciousness is present everywhere, but knowledge of that consciousness is dependent on the form, does not come about unless there is a form, and that form cannot maintain itself unless there is food. The seed of the universe is dimensionless but, because of the body, the consciousness appears and identifies with the body, but actually everything is manifest, all-pervasive consciousness.
There is an intimate connection between the universal consciousness and the consciousness appearing in the body. It is a continuum from the individual consciousness to the manifest consciousness. For example, you have the vital breath: outside it is called universal air and when you breathe, it is your prana.
Once the conviction: ‘I am not the body’ becomes so well grounded that you can no longer feel, think and act for and on behalf of the body, you will easily discover that you are the universal being, knowing, acting, that in you and through you the entire universe is real, conscious and active. The heart of the problem is either you are body-consciousness and a slave of circumstances, or you are the universal consciousness itself and in full control of every event.

52. Child Consciousness

Krishna is consciousness in a form. In the Bhagavad Gita consciousness in a form has written about itself. The same consciousness is in you. It is the consciousness that was there when you were a child, and the same as is present now also. Time passes but the consciousness remains what it is. It is called bal-krishna, the child consciousness. On the first day of birth the ‘I-consciousness’, the identification ‘I am’ is not there, only bal-krishna, child ignorance is there.
When an infant is born he is just an innocuous form of flesh and bones and all innocence. He has no mentation. Gradually this lump of flesh develops the capacity for knowledge and action. Gradually this knowingness “I Am” is felt by it, and this is followed by the mind. This “I-Amness feeling before the formation of mind is the ignorant-child principle, called the balkrishna state. Bal means food essence, child body, and krishna means non-knowing, that is ignorance. But this balkrishna principle has great potential, it has the potential to receive, respond, and react. It is the chemical that can develop photographic memories, can retain and reproduce whatever was read or heard only once. The balkrishna state, the child principle, is the root cause of all your acquisitions, both spiritual and worldly. This is not the same as your so-called knowledge gained externally through the senses, due to your erroneous concept of knowledge as being that of collecting information and ideas from the outside.
The child consciousness has to know the consciousness. It has to know itself. If you live for a thousand years, whatever identity you will have from time to time, nothing will remain the same. You will not have any permanent identity for yourself. Everything is contained within the knowledge that you are a child, and all that will finally go. So your whole identity will disappear, even that child identity, eventually. This childhood, and this child-consciousness, is it true? Recognize that it is false. One who understands this becomes nirguna. Nirguna means beyond consciousness. Childhood is a cheat. The knowledge ‘I am’ is also a cheat. When the beingness appears, that love for existence is the result of the primary illusion, that maya. Once you come to know that you exist, you feel like enduring eternally. You always want to be, to exist, to survive. And so the struggle begins. All because of that maya.
What is the function of childhood? Its function is for you to know that you exist. That is all that it has done. Prior to that, you had no experience of the ‘I’-consciousness.
So long as you have ‘I’-consciousness you will be trying to acquire things. Your ‘I’-consciousness itself is time-bound and will eventually dissolve. As long as you do not understand ‘I’-consciousness or the child consciousness you will get involved in the world and its activities. Real liberation is when you understand this ‘I’-consciousness or child consciousness.
The child principle, which is consciousness, is the product of a ‘chemical process’. Consciousness is ‘chemical’, but you, at the highest level, are not that chemical in which all the world drama happens. If you are a hundred-year-old who holds on to this memory that he is a hundred years old, it is the chemical. There is a picture of my guru on the wall. Who is holding on to the image of my guru? It is the chemical of the photograph. This chemical in the body holds on to an identity and carries out activities through the body. This is ‘mechanical’.
This birth principle, which is the child principle, grows spontaneously, develops mind and intellect and in due course may become a Mahatma, a great sage even, but the root of that sage is the sprouting of the child principle only. You are collecting a lot of knowledge in the name of spirituality, but that is only entertainment.
In old age whatever the person learned or gained is gone, only that child-consciousness, that child-ignorance remains, and that also will go.
You eat food to sustain your childhood principle, the beingness. You attempt to protect the basic child-beingness from death. When it disappears you will be termed ‘dead’.
Whatever I see is just child’s play, the whole thing. The existence of the world and the knowledge of the world is child’s play. The child may be eighty years old etc., but this is the play of that child’s illusion. What is the game that is being played? The infant has been born, and the age belongs to that infant not to myself. Everything is like a play, like the play between a mother and child, just entertaining, and there is no real meaning to it. The child just lives in the present, for that moment, it has no anxiety and no responsibility.
You are not the child-principle, balkrishna. You abide in the Absolute.

53. Beingness

This beingness has that touch of love for the Absolute and is a representation of the Absolute.
Sattva guna is beingness, just to be.
This beingness is because of the sattva guna, which behaves in the world according to the other guna, rajas and tamas. You are not any of these. The attributes refer to everything manifest, and the expression of the sattva guna is this beingness.
Beingness means loving that feeling of self.
The love of beingness is present in all living creatures. Beingness is loved, that self is loved. The origin of this love is in atomic consciousness, sattva advaita.
So many things are required to satisfy the love of the feeling of self, the beingness. You want things for that comfort, comfort of the body, that love to be, that beingness, and in order to satisfy that craving you must have a wife, you must have a house, you must have clothes, and other comforts. This beingness only creates karma.
This love of being is not of an individual being, it is the nature of the entire universal consciousness.
The essence of being is humming “I Am”. Ahamkara is the humming of beingness.
Beingness expresses through the mind with the words “I Am”.
You have the constant irritation in you that “you are”, but you do not know exactly what you are. That is the cause of all the trouble. You are roaming from place to place in search of nobody.
The beingness, the “I Am”, is merely an instrument, it is not you. It is an instrument of knowledge, and that great instrument of knowledge is called God, which is the quality of the food essence. Out of that alone you will be able to see everything else.
The primary quality of the beingness is the sense of “I Amness”. Later there arises a multiplicity of qualities. But the Observer.....the Absolute.....is totally free from any qualities, and is called nirguna.
This beingness goes into individuality because of the form of the food package, the body. But really it is dynamic, manifest beingness only.....no individuality.
When the taste of beingness, which you feel today, merges into the universal consciousness, it does not have consciousness of limited individuality.
This beingness has come to you without your knowledge, but you are using it according to your own volition. It is purest truth and justice to sentence that individuality to death. That individuality must go.
Someone brings a carpet. It is not mine but I use it. Similarly, the beingness, in the realm of beingness, is being used or experienced, but I am not it.
Experiences take rise in the beingness and in that knowledge again they merge. Experiences flow out of your beingness. There is no gain and loss out of the experiences. They do not affect you. Everyone wants experiences, but they will not fill you. Call what has happened to you a vision, a vision within consciousness.
‘I Am’ is ever afresh. You need not remember in order to be. Before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences, and you will no longer be misled by names and forms.
When the vital breath and body combination are present, this beingness is there.
The knowledge ‘I am’, consciousness, the feeling or sense of Being, is the quintessence of the body. When the body essence goes, the feeling and sense of Being also goes, because the sense of Being cannot remain without the body.
At the time of conception your beingness is in a latent condition, and because of its presence the formation of the body is taking place in the foetus. You are not that.
Beingness is the product of the food essence which has come out of the five elemental flow. At the time of conception this beingness principle, a chemical, unknowingly takes a photograph of whatever the situation is. At that stage it has no intelligence. Later the beingness principle becomes mature enough to attain its purpose: to know itself as “I Am”. That gets manifest in due course in the child.
This beingness was not fully manifest in the womb. In the womb the beingness does not know itself.
It takes nine months to create this instrument, this beingness, out of the five elements. With that instrument of beingness all this is experienced and seen.
Find out what this beingness is due to. Once you understand that beingness is the product of the food essence, you know that you cannot be that beingness.
All the pride of any being is based entirely on this food essence quality, the beingness.
Regarding Christ, Krishna, or any other prophet, understand that when they became embodied, the raw material and equipment which went into the process were the five elements only, earth, water, fire, air, and ether. The beingness which emerged out of those embodied forms was an outcome of the interactions of these five elements. It expresses itself through the three gunas, rajas, tamas, sattva, and lasted only so long as the five-elemental food essence was available. And when the beingness disappeared, these saviours did not know their existence, nor their performance, in their embodied state.
In the discussion concerning beingness and the source of beingness, that which was before was nearly dead, almost invisible. It had a fluid form, as a result of emission. Out of its wetness and fluid energy sprang the beingness. This fluid was nothing but something like spit. Out of the same fluid energy, a body form assumed a shape and it turned out to be a dwelling-place for the beingness; that is the state of “love to be”. Whatever is created has the wetness of self-love, the “love to be”, as its basis. The very wetness is capable of manifesting itself into the entire movable and immovable world. In the body dwells the fluid energy and in the fluid energy dwells a latent body. This fluid energy is ethereal, subtle and most potent.
Realize that beingness is not independent.....it depends on something. When you investigate you will come to the conclusion that you, the Absolute, do not depend on that beingness.
Be aware of your being.....here and now. That is all. There is nothing more to it. If you are aware of your thinking, feeling, doing, you are not aware of your being. Prior to this experiential state I was perfect in every respect. With the arrival of this beingness this imperfect state has started.
Beingness or knowingness itself is misery. Before the appearance of the beingness you had no problems. Problems start only after the appearance of the beingness. It is in the very quintessence of the knowledge ‘I am’ for miseries to be experienced by it. Miseries are bound to follow as a natural corollary of ‘I-am-ness’.
This beingness of mine.....the experiential state.....is mean, low and despicable. Your beingness is unreal, unworthy, lowly and a cheat. This beingness which prompts you to think “I am like this and I am like that” is illusory and fraudulent.
The moment the sense of beingness arose there was a sense of duality.
Understand the root cause of your being here. Out of the womb of conception, out of the seed, you are born.
In the seed of the beingness everything is enfolded, everything is contained in that consciousness, the whole world, the body, is present there. ‘I am’ itself is the world, it contains the entire world.
The seed of world experience is the beingness.
This beingness, this seed, this chemical, contains the whole universe of yours. This beingness has its own latent qualities to manifest itself into in this manifestation, just as in an infinitesimal seed the whole seed is already present in a latent state, and in due course it grows and proliferates. Through mechanical properties beingness has its own mechanical way as to how it will perform in the world.
What is this principle of Siva? In Marathi, shiv means ‘a touch’. Thoroughly observe and investigate the touch of beingness. How did this principle, the touch of beingness, happen to be? The entire cosmic expression is the proliferation of the touch of beingness. This principle comprises the five elements, three gunas, and prakriti-purusha.
Without you even the 5 elements will not have any life. Your beingness sustains the entire universe. This beingness is of no value, it brings nothing but unhappiness, and it is time-bound, but simultaneously, so far as the manifest world is concerned, the tiniest being alive is the support of the entire universe.
The beingness is a speck of ignorance. In the space of that speck of beingness innumerable universes dwell.
All the itching and nausea in life is because of that tiny speck in the Brahma-randhra, because of that beingness all these troubles arise in the consciousness. Once you know that you are not that, everything is over.
There are two things, the world and one’s presence. There is the feeling of presence, that is, the consciousness, the beingness. That is Brah-ma or “I am present”. Brahma-randhra means the tiniest of apertures, and in that aperture is the silent, primordial sound, which gives you the impression that you are, but you really are not. This sound in that aperture gives you the feeling that you are, but be sure that you are not.
Your beingness is like a tape recorder or a film in which all this has already been recorded and is being projected in the waking state, sleep, meditation, or whatever. Realize that all the universes are already present in this consciousness. When you abide in the beingness you will realize that it is all the play of consciousness. When you realize that it is already recorded in that consciousness of yours, you will discard it. That consciousness is disposable.
The beingness has appeared, and in the beingness all this play is going on. This is unreal. it is all Brahma’s play. Because of the beingness the play has started.
Beingness is a temporary phase, and is unreal. The one who understands that it is unreal is the Eternal.
Whatever is supposedly happening is an illusion. Nothing is really happening because the basic concept, beingness, is itself an illusion.
The beingness is a superimposition, a cloak of illusion over the Absolute. Beingness is the very first and primary concept “I Am”, and is itself the conceptual illusion.
This beingness of the self is of short duration, it is experienced for a short time only. But the one that experiences the beingness exists for ever.
Do not believe beingness to be the truth, or reality. Do not base spiritual activities on the feeling that beingness is the truth. Make no deference towards beingness. Beingness is a temporary phase, since beingness is going to disappear. Beingness is unreal.
That which makes us believe that we are is the cause. And at the end of it we are back in our original state. This touch of beingness is a temporary phaze.
This beingness which is our most prized possession and which we want to retain at all costs, preferably for all time to come, is dependent upon the body and will only last as long as the time limit for each individual existence.
This beingness which is manifest has brought with it its own expiration date, hence it is time-bound. A jnani understands the roots of beingness, and that it is pure ignorance only. He does not involve himself in the play of this beingness. He is the observer and knower of that beingness, its sprouting, nourishing and disappearance, and knows he is not that principle.
The Observer is not the instrument. Through the instrument, that is the beingness, which is the expression of the Observer only, he witnesses the manifest world. The Observer does not disappear when the instrument of beingness and the field of observation are gone.
The beingness does not die, it just disappears.
Beingness when extinguished, is dissolved into Brahman, from where it came.
Beingness and its manifestation, including the activities, are time-bound. That which is prior to beingness is eternal.
Prior to the appearance of beingness, you did not know that you were.
In the absence of beingness you do not know that you exist. In that state both the world and the joy of Brahman are valueless to you. Until you know that you exist nothing is of any value to you.
There is no cause for the beingness.
You are absolutely free to be what you consent to be. You are what you appear to be because of ignorance or indifference. You allow yourself to be what you are not. You are free to revolt and change. It is futile to search for cause of being what you are not. There are no causes, but your ignorance of your real being, which is perfect and beyond all causation.
When you discover and know the source of this beingness or I-consciousness....that is liberation. Then you become free.
Beingness has not come from anywhere and it does not go anywhere.
When you escape this body-mind state you are the manifest beingness, but in that manifest state you transcend beingness also. In realizing that you are the manifest you escape beingness.
You must come to a firm decision. Once the decision is taken, there is no moving away from it. You must forget the thought that you are a body and be only the knowledge “I Am”, which has no form, no name. When you stabilize in that beingness it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you, and when the secrets are given to you, you transcend the beingness, and you, the Absolute, will know that you are also not the consciousness. Having gained all this knowledge, having understood what is what, a kind of quietude prevails, a tranquillity. Beingness is transcended, but beingness is available.
Having understood this state of beingness and all its play, the jnani has transcended it and abides in the state prior to conception. He ever dwells in that perfect state, whether beingness appears or disappears. One who has understood all the five elements and its play is not worried about the essence of these five elements, the beingness.....this state is transcended. That one remembers humanity, but knows that he has nothing to do with humanity.
Be one with that beingness, and when you are one with it, that very principle will disclose to you all the mysteries of this beingness, and in that process you will transcend it. But be humble and devoted.
At my Guru’s directive I became one with the beingness. Beingness means having the vision that one is the entire dynamic universe. When one transcends individuality, one is the manifest beingness only. In this process the Unmanifest reveals itself.
This beingness has come from that no-being state.
This beingness is the child of that no-beingness, Absolute state. When beingness understands the beingness, it attains no-being. then it does not bother about what happens to this beingness. First get rid of the world, then get rid of beingness.
The last step is from beingness to no-beingness.

54. Being-Nonbeing

What comes and goes has no being.
In your real being you are the whole.
Birth and death are one. Life pulsates between being and not being. Each needs the other for completeness. You are born to die and you die to be reborn.
The subtle body, the antahkarana the inner organ, is created with the emergence of the ‘I Am’ idea. The two are one. It is momentary, real when present, unreal when over. It is the reality of immediate experience, here and now. Being and not-being alternate and their reality is momentary. The Immutable Reality lies beyond space and time. Realize the momentariness of being and not-being, and be free from both.
There should be a knower of this ‘nothingness’, and this knower is ‘nothingness’ also. In that ‘non-beingness’ state there is no subject and no object, it is called nirvishaya. In the beingness state, both subject and object are there, thus it is called savishaya.
The borderline of beingness and non-beingness is intellect-incomprehensible, because the intellect subsides at that precise location.
Pure being cannot be described.
I live in the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness. This void is also fullness. Do not pity me. It is like a man saying: ‘I have done my work, there is nothing left to do’.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not existence which is limited. All limitation is imaginary, only the unlimited is real.

55. Becoming

Out of love of corporate existence one is born, and once born, one gets involved in destiny. Destiny is inseparable from becoming. The desire to be the particular makes you into a person, with all its personal past and future. How utterly dependent is the personality of man, and how indifferent its world, and yet we love it and protect it for its very insignificance.
With being arising in consciousness, the ideas of what you are arise in your mind as well as what you should be. This brings forth desire and action and the process of becoming begins. Becoming has, apparently, no beginning and no end, for it restarts every moment. With the cessation of imagination and desire, becoming ceases, and the being this or that merges into pure being, which is not describable, only experiencable.

56. Just Be

There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivables, nor the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind.....just be.
No one can tell you what you shall become because there is no becoming. You merely discover what you are. All moulding oneself to a pattern is a grievous waste of time. Think neither of the past nor of the future, just be.
Try to be. Only to be. Allot enough time daily for sitting quietly and trying, just trying, to go beyond the personality, with its addictions and obsessions. Do not ask how, it cannot be explained. The all-important word is ‘try’. You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness. You must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success.
Just be. Do not try to be quiet, do not make being quiet into a task to be performed. Just be aware that you are, and remain aware. Do not say :’yes, I am, what next?’ There is no next in ‘I Am’. It is a timeless state.
To be, you must be nobody. To think yourself to be something, or somebody, is death and hell.

57. I-Am and I-Amness

You cannot ask a valid question about yourself, because you do not know whom you are asking about. In the question ‘Who am I?’ the ‘I’ is not known, and the question can be worded as: ‘I do not know what I mean by “I” ’.
In my original true state I have no form and no thoughts. I did not know I was. But suddenly another state appeared in which I had a form and thought, “I Am”.
This touch of “I Amness” is in each being.
Know how the touch of ‘I am’ has appeared.
The knowledge ‘I am’ is common. However the expression of knowledge through the body and the mind is individualistic, and at that level everything is different.
In the Absolute the “I Amness” is whole but the expression is in many. I manifest myself in many. Human beings are one type of form, and each type of form will act according to its nature, according to the combination of the three gunas. Therefore how can there be an individual?
“I Amness” is not limited to the body, it is universal. It is the source of manifestation.
This knowledge “I Am” is the same, whether it is an insect, worm, human being, or an avatar. The basic consciousness is the same in all these.
The sense of “I Am” is always there. Only when it identifies with the body it is called the ego. The knowledge “I Am” is not individualistic, it is universal.
Due to an illusion we think that I am a separate self and have a separate personality. I am all. I know it for certain and you do not.
The only thing you have that can be used to know the meaning of life is the knowledge ‘I am’. ‘I-am-ness’ is based on time, and is the product of the five elements, and should not be identified with.
When the mind stays in the “I Am” without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized, but can be experienced. All you need to do is to try and try again, because after all the sense of “I Am” is always with you, but you have attached all kinds of things to it.....body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions, etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.
You love only this sense of “I”, you do everything because of this. You are not working for anybody, nor for the nation, but only for this sense of “I” which you love so much.
“I Amness” is love only. You have assumed this shape, this flower of “I Amness”, out of love only. The very core of atoms is permeated by that knowledge “I Am”. All the atoms of the universe have come inside us in the form of the knowledge “I Am”.
That knowledge “I Am” is born out of love, but the illusion has taken such a hold of it that love for the “I Amness” has gone into the background.
In food this “I Amness” is in a dormant condition. It only appears when it has a body.
In food, innately and dormantly, the sense of “I Amness” is already present. Once the food is consumed and assimilated in the body, the “I Amness” manifests itself.
Understand that “I Am” is a product of the sattva guna, food essence product. ‘I-am-ness’ appears because the food-body is there, and is dependent on the body. After the food-body disappears ‘I-am-ness’ will disappear.
The feeling that you are, and the feeling “I Am”, are the products of this gross earth. “I Amness” disappears when the body drops off, because essentially it is only a product of the food essence. Out of the earth comes the vegetation and the essence of “I Amness”.
The five element essences, plus the three gunas means a person. With that, this knowingness comes, the memory “I Am”. This personality is sustained by the provisions supplied by the five elements. So long as the provisions are supplied in proper order the body and “I Amness” will be there. Once the supply is stopped the touch of “I Amness” is gone.
From the Absolute no-knowing state, spontaneously, this consciousness “I Am” has appeared.....there is no reason, no cause. Spontaneously it has come with the waking state, deep sleep, the five elemental play, three Gunas, and Prakriti and Purusha. These together are the means of demonstrating the “I Amness”. Then “I Am” embraces the body as its self and therefore identifies as a male or a female. This “I Amness” has its own love to be. It wants to remain, to perpetuate itself, but it is not eternal.
“I Amness” has no authority of its own. It is a puppet in the play of the five elements. It is an outcome of the five elements.
In the womb that knowingness is ignorant of its existence, the “I Am” is not present but the “I Am” principle is started there. All things happen unknowingly, but even to understand that is very difficult, it is beyond our comprehension.
The knowledge “I Am” is absent during the time the foetus is in the womb. That “I Amness” came after the body was born. Until you met your mother and was indoctrinated you did not know anything, you did not remember yourself. After being indoctrinated you became conscious that you are a body, a son, etc..
In infancy until some two or three years that “I Amness” touch is present in a dormant condition, it has not fully developed, it cannot express itself.
‘I Amness’ is like a dream world, it appears and disappears.
‘I-Amness’ is a seed. In the human seed ‘I-Amness’ is the seed of manifestation in which actions happen. When the seed is formed, recorded in the seed are all the images of the parents. These images are already recorded somewhere and are being played now. They will not stop even if we shout and ask them to. In each person the ideas are sprouting and when they spontaneously come out, he behaves accordingly.
‘I-Amness’ contains this manifested universe, like a seed. This manifest world is created by that ‘I-Amness’. This “I Amness” contains the entire cosmos. It is a very Godly principle. Just as in a small seed the entire tree is contained, the ‘I Amness’ contains the whole creation.
‘I Amness’ is forgotten in deep sleep, and it appears in the waking and dream states. It is the Hiranyagarbha, the golden womb, which is called the greatest principle in the Vedas.
In the morning you wake up and get the conviction of ‘I am’. You get up, move around, and involve yourself in all the activities because you want to sustain that ‘I Amness’. Later that ‘I Amness’ forgets itself in deep sleep.
In pure being consciousness arises, in consciousness the world appears and disappears. All there is is me, all there is is mine. Before all beginnings, after all endings.....I Am. All has its being in me, in the “I Am” that shines in every living being. Even not-being is unthinkable without me. Whatever happens, I must be there to witness it.
This “I Amness”, the life principle, the manifest principle, is like a flywheel rotating all beings.
When the consciousness “I Am” disappears there is no movement.
Rays of light cannot be seen, they reflect only when they encounter another object. Similarly, “I Amness” is the interruption because of these five elements and three gunas. If something was not there these rays of light would be spread all over and become invisible as a source of light.
First you have the “I Am” sense, called aham-bhava. Later this sense identifies with the form of the body, when it is called aham-akar, the “I am” form. This is ego. It is the natural outcome of the three gunas. The body is the product of the food essence and is the medium through which all these three gunas function. Ego is the very nature of these gunas. A man thinks that he is the doer, even though he does no action. In reality all activities are due to the gunas. Only a jnani realizes this and transcends the ego. Ego is just a sense of “I Am” prior to words. The waking state, the sleep state, and the knowingness “I Am” constitute an ego.
It is the quality of that great knowledge “I Am” that creates.
When the “I Am” explodes into being the whole universe is conjured up, but the consciousness, the “I Amness” gives rise to inadequacy, imperfection, and therefore the beginning of sorrow, misery, etc., and the settling into the body-mind sense. From perfect to imperfect, from no-being to being.
The ‘I Am’ had a beginning, it will have an end.
The knowingness, ‘I am’ will not last. In due course this message “I Am” will disappear.
‘I-am-ness’ is a view that appears in the child body. It persists. Continuous changes take place due to Maya, but ‘I-am-ness’ continues for as long as the food-body is viable.
“I Amness” will only be present as long as the fuel lasts.
The food-body is dropped by the vital breath, then ‘I-am-ness’ ends. ‘I-am-ness’ is not permanent. Consciousness is not permanent.
‘I am’ is not real. ‘I am’ comes out of something else.
‘I-am-ness’ is nothing.
The knowledge “I Am” is nothing. That knowledge is like a guest, it comes and goes.
“I Am” and birth are not you, it is material. It is something you have adopted. I, the Absolute, have nothing to do with that.
The knowledge “I Am” is not the Absolute state.
As the consciousness you are everything; whatever is, is you. All this knowledge has dawned on you, but you are not that knowledge. The knowledge “I Am” and all its manifestations are understood. In understanding, I am not That. Once you have understood what you are not, you should no longer be concerned with what you are not.
I claim nothing as my own. When the ‘I’ is not, where is the ‘mine’?
I may receive a letter containing all the information about myself, but that message is not me. I am the observer of the message.
You have tasted many things.....all came to naught. Only the sense ’I Am’ persisted, unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond.
There is only one principle: the principle is that ‘you are’. Hold it firmly to yourself. If you give no significance to the fact that you are, then you are carried away by all the manifestation which is the expression of your beingness.
Your most important asset is the knowledge that “I Am” prior to emanation of mind. Hold on to this knowledge and meditate. Nothing is superior to this, not even devotion to a Guru, guru-bhakti, or devotion to God, Ishvara-bhakti.
That “I Amness” is like the sweetness of the sugar cane, abide in the sweetness of your beingness, only then will you reach and abide in eternal peace.
Hold on to the knowledge ‘I am’ without any body sense, beyond name and form or design. Name and form and design are employed only for the sake of worldly activities. The knowledge ‘I am’ has no name and no form, it is pure knowledge ‘I am’.
The indwelling principle ‘I am’, the knowledge ‘I am’, you have to be that. Just be that. The knowledge ‘I am’, without words, is the Ishvara.
The “I Am” without words arises in the morning. Knowing the Self, abiding in the Self-knowledge, remain firm. You should not move away from it.
Focus only on knowing that you are. How do you know you are? This is the very quintessence of my teaching.
You firmly believe you are the body and live accordingly, while entertaining fond wishes that you will achieve something good in the world, and later still better. This wrong identification dissolves when you totally subside in the consciousness and lose your individuality. Dissolution of individuality is not possible without devotion to the Master.....guru-bhakti.....which is the consciousness, guru-charan-amrita. Abidance in the consciousness stabilizes one in the present, the here and now, and removes all past and future problems. Consciousness is the sense of knowingness “I Am” without words, which appears unknowingly and unsolicited. It is the manifest universal life force and therefore cannot be individualistic. It extends inside and outside like the brilliance of a diamond. Hold onto this knowingness “I Am” and the fount of knowledge will well up within you, revealing the mystery of the universe. In the process of this revelation, your individualistic personality confined to the body shall expand into the manifested universe, and it will be realized that you permeate and embrace the entire cosmos as your body only. This is shuddhavijnana.
Concepts begin with the primary concept ‘I Am’. Having wandered through all the concepts and rejected them, you have to get rid of this last or the first concept.
I am God, I am Christ, etc., is still based on the concept ‘I am’. Unless that concept is negated all that you build on will be an illusion. When ‘I-am-ness’ itself disappears you will be free of the concept. So long as the concept ’I am’ is there, the conceptual element cannot disappear.
The “I Amness” is absent only in the state of samadhi, when the self merges into the Self. Otherwise it will be there. In the realized state the “I Am” is there, but the jnani does not give much importance to it, because he is not guided by a concept.
Out of ignorance the knowledge ‘I am’ comes into being, and into ignorance, where it does not know itself, it will dissolve again.
You must eradicate the concept “I Am”. In deep sleep the concept “I Am” has vanished.
The present ‘I Am’ is as false as the ‘I was’ and ‘I shall be’. It is merely an idea in the mind, an impression left by memory, and the separate identity it creates is false. This habit of referring to a false centre must be done away with; the notion; ‘I see’, ‘I feel’, ‘I think’, ‘I do’, must disappear from the field of consciousness. What remains when the false is no more, is real.
You must deal with the ‘I’-sense if you want to be free of it. Watch it in operation and at peace, how it starts and when it ceases, what it wants and how it gets it, until you see clearly and understand fully. You suffer because you have alienated yourself from reality and now you seek an escape from this alienation. You cannot escape from your own obsessions. You can only cease nursing them. It is because the ‘I Am’ is false that it wants to continue. Reality need not continue.....knowing itself indestructible, it is indifferent to the destruction of forms and expressions. To strengthen, and stabilize the ‘I Am’ we do all sorts of things.....all in vain, for the ‘I Am’ is being rebuilt from moment to moment. It is unceasing work and the only radical solution is to dissolve the separative sense of ‘I am such-and-such person’ once and for good. Being remains, but not self-being.
The ultimate knowledge is that death comes to the quality of “I Amness”, but the Absolute prevails. Once you understand this ultimate knowledge, then do what you like. Carry out your worldly life with full enthusiasm, but understand that your true identity is beyond this quality of “I Amness”.
There is no ‘I Am’ without the mind. In the abeyance of the mind even the sense ‘I Am’ dissolves.
‘I am’ and ‘the world is’ are related and conditional. They are due to the tendency of the mind to project names and shapes.
‘I Am’ is not a thought in the mind. Before the mind.....I am. The mind happens to me, I do not happen to the mind.
‘I-Amness’ is a little pinprick which has no dimension, yet creates a huge manifestation.
The message “I Am” does not have any form, design, or colour. So long as “I Am” is present this experience of manifestation is. Once this message of “I Am” appears, in insect, animal, or human being, immediately the manifestation occurs with that beingness. Inside and outside is full of manifestation. Once that “I Amness” disappears there is no experience.
When you abide in your own self, all your questions will be dissolved by the knowledge ‘I am’. The knowledge ‘I am’ is not in the manifest world.
When you have knowledge you see that the consciousness “I” is all-pervasive, as long as the consciousness is there. But the witness of the consciousness has no “I Am” and that is your true eternal nature.
As long as the concept ‘I am’ is still there, you have not gone beyond or prior to it, not gone beyond the total manifestation.
This “I Amness” is the product of the 5 elements, and the “I Amness” again creates the 5 elements. It is a vicious circle. Understand it and get out of it. You cannot destroy that, you have to go beyond it. You are prior to the “I Amness”.
‘I-am-ness’ or consciousness is the godly principle.
The importance and significance of the enquiry is that no one can give you an answer to this enquiry except yourself. Each one, as “I”, has to find out what this “I” is. The merest description that can be given to this consciousness is that it is as fine, as subtle, as space. In maturity your consciousness is God. That original state, prior to the arising of consciousness, cannot be described, one can only be That.
Manifest knowledge, having occupied and permeated the cosmos, dwells in you as the knowledge “I Am”. What is it in you that understands this knowledge “I Am” without a name or word? Subside in that innermost centre and witness the knowledge “I Am” and just be. This is the bliss of being, the svarupananda. To abide in the bliss of being no external factor or aids are required at all.
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
You are and 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? If you say ‘I am the dispassionate witness’, this is your last illusion, that you are a jnani, 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. 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 fulfilled.
By focusing the mind on “I Am”, on the sense of being, “I am so-and-so” dissolves. “I am a witness only” remains and that too submerges in “ I am all”. Then the all becomes the One and the One.....yourself.
Understand that this “I” is not different at different levels. As the Absolute it is the “I” which in manifesting needs a form. The same Absolute “I” becomes the manifested “I”, and in the manifested “I” it is the consciousness which is the source of everything. In the manifested state it is the Absolute with consciousness.

58. I am this

You know on contact that you exist.....‘I Am’. The ‘I am this’, ‘I am that’ are imaginary.

59. Thought and Words

Remember that language is an instrument of the mind. It is made by the mind, for the mind.
Things just happen to be as they are, but we want to build them into a pattern, laid down by the structure of our language. So strong is this habit, that we tend to deny reality to what cannot be verbalized. We just refuse to see that words are mere symbols, related by convention and habit to repeated experiences.
Whatever you may say will be both true and false. Words do not reach beyond the mind.
Thoughts are the result of previous conditioning that the mind has had.
Only the changeable can be thought of and talked about. The unchangeable can only be realized in silence. Once realized, it will deeply affect the changeable, itself remaining unaffected.
I watch all that happens, including my talking to you. It is not me who talks, the words appear in my mind, and then I hear them said. You insist that you think, you speak, while to me there is thinking, there is speaking.
You think you are the one who has the thoughts. In fact thoughts arise in consciousness.
Thought arises from the vital breath, and expresses itself in the word. Without words there cannot be any communication in the world. The world proceeds because of the word and the name.
Where does speech originate? There is vibration going on internally, wanting to come out in thoughts and words. The vibration is part of the knowledge ’I am’ within, which includes the physical form, and has been created out of the five elements. The whole process is entirely mechanistic and pure ignorance. Whatever manifests is sheer ignorance. Even the spiritual is the result of the five elements.
The words come out of the consciousness spontaneously, as part of the total functioning
All thoughts which arise are merely movements in consciousness. You are before any thoughts can arise. Once consciousness arises, everything arises. Merely witness them. Witnessing takes place of the total functioning of the universal consciousness.
The language of the vital breath, prana, is four languages. The mind flows out into words. There are four stages of speech. Para (source consciousness), Pashyanti (the emanation of thoughts), Madhyama (formulation of thoughts-words), Vaikhari (language explodes out). The first two stages: Para and Pashyanti are too subtle and are ordinarily imperceptible. Para corresponds to your original state when you do not even know that you exist. Then comes the feeling that you are about to become conscious. That is still para, but it is followed by Pashyanti, which is this consciousness, when you say yes, I am alive, and awake, and I exist. On the level of the third and fourth, two minds, two kinds of speech, every ignorant individual works: Madhyama is the mind and Vaikhari is the words coming out. The ignorant individual has his own image made out of that madhyama, which is mind. He will talk about concepts with which he has identified himself: birth, rebirth, and other ideas. Until you recognize all the kinds of speech that flow through the vital breath, prana, you are bound to take as absolutely certain whatever the mind, madhyama, tells you. The concepts that the mind gives you will be final for you. You are a slave to your thoughts, which are the emanations of the mind.
Mind is the language of the vital breath. That mind-language will talk only about the impressions it has collected. The knowledge “I Am” is not a thought but observes the thoughts. Out of prana, the pranava, the beginning of sound, in the sound is the love to be. The innermost, subtlest principle is that gnawing principle “I Am, I Am”, without words, by which you know that you are. It has no form or image, it is only beingness, the love to be. Para shakti is the beingness or love to be. The next stage of the para shakti is para shunti, the formation but not yet perceptible. The next stage is mind formation and the language is formed in the mind, next is the explosion of words.
Words do not contain the truth.
All thinking is in duality.
The mind is made of words and images, and so is every reflection in the mind. It covers up reality with verbalization and then complains.
All are mere words, of what use are they to you? You are entangled in the web of verbal definitions and formulations. Go beyond your concepts and ideas. In silence the truth is found.
There is no lasting satisfaction from the reading of books. You have collected a profound vocabulary, but the Self-knowledge has not dawned.
What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind.
Thoughts will always flow because of the vital breath. Don’t pay attention to the thoughts, pay attention to the consciousness. You are before the mind is. Yet, whatever thoughts are useful to you, make use of them.
There is no such thing as mind apart from thoughts which come and go, obeying their own laws, not yours. They dominate you only because you are interested in them.
Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it. I am not talking of suppression. Just refuse attention. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it. It is all quite simple. Turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create, and you are at once in your natural state.
Pay no attention to your thoughts. Do not 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. Do not 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.
When you do not hang onto thoughts, you are no more a person.
The light of consciousness passes through the film of memory and throws pictures on your brain. Because of the deficient and disordered state of your brain, what you perceive is distorted and coloured by feelings of like and dislike. Make your thinking orderly and free from emotional overtones, and you will see people and things as they are, with clarity and charity.
Before consciousness appears in the waking state, that is the Absolute. As soon as consciousness appears the thoughts come. You do not have to bear with the thoughts, nor discard them. Simply know them.
The words come from the consciousness. Consciousness needs the strength of the body. The strength of the body is gradually weakening. Therefore, with ageing, words do not come out as freely as you would like.
As soon as that “I Am” catches hold of the body, you have to behave through whatever thoughts are appearing in this manifestation, disposition, or mind.
Thought arises from the breath and the thought expresses itself in words. Without words there could not be any communication in the world. The world goes on because of the word and the name. People cannot be identified without a name. Even God has to be given a name.
Non-distinction speaks in silence. Words carry distinctions. The unmanifested (nirguna) has no name, all names refer to the manifested (saguna). It is useless to struggle with words to express what is beyond words. Unfortunately language is a mental tool and works only in opposites.
Prior to the emanation of any words, consciousness, beingness, sense of being, “I Amness”, all are the same in you.

60. Ideas and Concepts

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation (nirvikalpa samadhi) nothing is perceived. The root idea is: “I Am”, it shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feeling and ideas, which in their totality constitute God and His world. The “I Am” remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens. You have split yourself into God and witness. Both are one.
To be in the jnani state you recede and abide in a state prior to the emanation of words in you, the para-shakti or para-vani state. Such a state is revealed at the borderline of deep sleep and the waking state, which is the very beginning of the emergence of the consciousness. Para-vani is not the language of the Absolute, as it is still the outcome of the beingness. ‘Para’ means ‘other’ indicating separateness from the Absolute state, but the closest to it. After passing through various stages of development, it finally expresses vocally a concept, which on our acceptance possesses us. In the process we identify totally with the concept and lose our true identity.
Through the concepts of others you have built up so many things around you that you are lost. “You” is decorated and embellished by the concepts of others. Walls are built around you by the hearsays and concepts of others.
As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas. To know yourself as you are, give up all ideas.
It is very difficult to reject concepts. We accept them and make them our own.
To expound and propagate concepts is simple. But to drop all concepts is difficult and rare.
Nothing in the conceptual world is true.
The concept says: ‘I am the body’, and is also conscious that it is time-bound, and says: ‘I will die’. That which knows the concept is quite apart from the concept. The body dies, but this means that only the thought ‘I am’, the concept ‘I am’, has disappeared. Nothing has happened to the knower. One who knows that the concept will disappear, does not have the experience of either the birth, the happiness or unhappiness, or the death.
Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren’t any.
If you keep absolutely quiet, then concepts will be strangled to death.
You are so used to the support of concepts that when your concepts leave you, although it is your true state, you get frightened and try to cling to them again. That is the meeting point of that immanent principle and the Eternal, the borderland. Why is the intellect puzzled then? That beingness which you are experiencing is melting away. When that concept of “I Am” goes, intellect also goes. So the intellect gets that frightening experience of “I am going”. Just watch that moment. One who feels “I am dying” is not your true state. Your true state is beyond the primary concept of “I Am”.
Man binds himself with all sorts of concepts, for example man takes upon himself the concepts of sin and merit. The consciousness takes an infinite manifestation of forms according to the concepts of the individual.
It is only because of thoughts that you do not reach the Self that you desire to reach. You achieve realization or understanding according to whatever meaning you attach to your concepts or imaginations.
Just by saying that everything is a concept does not free you. You will merely go from a gross concept to a subtler one.
Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.
One who understands spirituality through various concepts will be caught up in a vicious circle. If you are caught up in concepts, you will be caught up in the circle of concepts.....rebirth, reincarnation, these are all concepts. If you are caught up in these concepts you are bound to have them. Out of concepts the forms are created. Originally you make a plan, you have a concept, the concept is born out of you, and you give it a concrete shape, but it remains a concept.
Just throw out whatever you have heard or read. Speak only what is from your own experience. Have no faith in anything unless you have experienced it yourself.
All are engrossed in concepts. They enjoy them. With all these ramblings you will be entertained, but you will not obtain knowledge. This is all spiritual entertainment.
Any Guru who gives you spiritual knowledge can base that knowledge only on his own concept, which he considers as Truth. The concept may be excellent, yet it is only a concept, and whatever you try to understand through it is not going to be permanent.
What is meant by ‘study’? It means you are only trying to remember concepts. You must become concept free. Cut out concepts, including the concept “I Am”.
It is only your mind that prevents self-knowledge. There are ideas and some of them are wrong. Abandon the wrong ideas, for they obstruct your vision of yourself. Assertions are usually wrong, and denials right. Assertion is bondage, to question and deny is necessary.
Everything is spontaneous, but only one in a million will accept this, most want to gain something. The very concept “I” gain this is the root of illusion.
The “I Amness” is the prime concept. Whatever concept you have about yourself cannot be true.
Each person has entangled himself in certain concepts of his own and is keen on perpetuating them.
Consciousness is itself a concept. As long as consciousness remains all other concepts will continue to arise.

61. Upadhi-Attributes

Nothing that has attributes can last. All behaviour in this world is due to attributes, and tendencies and qualities.
The tendencies or attributes are Maya. They are doing everything. If the witness is not there, the manifestation or Maya is not present. When ‘I am’ arises everything appears, when ‘I am’ subsides everything disappears.
The hearer, the knower, is not concerned with the upadhi. [The upadhi is an adjunct or limiting attribute which has been superimposed on the self]. The upadhi is the body, mind and consciousness.
The Self is beyond all attributes. Attributes appear and disappear in my light but they cannot describe me. The universe is all names and forms, based on qualities and their differences, while I am beyond.
The homogeneous understands the play of the attributes, the projection of the mind, but the play, the projection of the mind, cannot understand the homogeneous. The moment it tries to understand It, it becomes one with It.

62. Knowledge

Knowledge has no beginning and therefore no end.
Knowledge experiences itself as a person. Eventually it subsides and becomes one in, and mixes with, the Whole.
There are various kinds of knowledge in this world, but the only true knowledge is knowledge of the Self. To know yourself is the real knowledge, but you cannot look at yourself, you can only abide in your Self.
Very few people want to know themselves. And rarer is one who actually knows.
The Self wants to know itself.
You are always inquiring about everything outside, but you do not try to find out what you are.
You are bent on knowledge, I am not. I do not have that sense of insecurity that makes you crave to know. I am curious, like a child is curious, but there is no anxiety to make me seek refuge in knowledge. Therefore I am not concerned whether I shall be re-born, or how long will the world last. These are questions born of fear.
Many acquire knowledge, but whatever is acquired is not true knowledge.
Learning words is not enough. You may know the theory, but without the actual experience of yourself as the impersonal and unqualified centre of being, love and bliss, mere verbal knowledge is sterile.
Investigate, question wisely, go through the proofs you have of what you believe you know. You will find you know nothing for sure.....you trust on hearsay. To know the truth, you must pass through your own experience.
True knowledge of the self is not a knowledge. It is not something that you find by searching, by looking everywhere. It is not to be found in space or time. Knowledge is but a memory, a pattern of thought, a mental habit. All these are motivated by pleasure and pain. It is because you are goaded by pleasure and pain that you are in search of knowledge. Being oneself is completely beyond all motivation. You cannot be yourself for some reason. You are yourself and no reason is needed. Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what is it that you have never lost. That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything. That immovable state which is not affected by the birth and death of a body, or a mind..
Scientists and their sciences are images in your own mind.
To earn a livelihood some specialized knowledge is needed. General knowledge develops the mind, no doubt, but if you are going to spend your life in amassing knowledge, you build a wall round yourself. To go beyond the mind, a well-furnished mind is not needed. Distrust your mind, and go beyond. Beyond the mind is the direct experience of being, knowing, and loving.
Because of your identity with a body you are in the grip of the discursive intellect. Whatever knowledge you now collect is from this identity. But that is not true knowledge. Whatever knowledge we formulate, we formulate it only as body-mind, and add it to our existing store of information. The amassing of knowledge will not help you, because it is in a dream. The dream will repeat itself.
As a child you began gathering knowledge and when you become very old you forgot everything. So all that knowledge of objects was of no use. What you gathered as your identity or your form, you are in the process of losing.
Those who know only scriptures know nothing. To know is to be.
Until I met my Guru I knew so many things. Now I know nothing, for all knowledge is in dream only and not valid.
You are very clever. All the knowledge which you have collected elsewhere and brought here, before the Guru, is rendered useless and redundant. You may be the very ocean of knowledge, but when your three gunas and beingness disappear, all your knowledge also disappears. So long as beingness is there, all the worldly activities will go on. But you should realize that you are neither the activities in the beingness, nor the beingness. You, as the Absolute, are none of these.
Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. Pandits and Yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere knowledge when the self is not known? That knowledge will be certainly misused.
Whatever you have read is of no use in the spiritual world. Only be your own being.
Whatever knowledge is obtained is what one word gives to another word. It is based on words.
You ask many questions, you look for the answers in books and words, not in intuitive experience. This is not knowledge. Knowledge springs from the consciousness without effort, of its own accord.
Only when consciousness is conscious of itself can there be knowledge of anything. Consciousness is prior to any knowledge.
The only true knowledge is my own, without hearing it from anyone. That is the only true knowledge which I accept.
Most knowledge is what you have read and heard from others, and you will have to draw on the authority of others until you have confidence in your own Self.
You might run around the world but nobody is going to give you the knowledge. Recede into your own Self. Surrender to your own beingness and that alone will give you all the knowledge necessary for you.....no one else will.
Whenever something is known, it is the real that is known.
Both ignorance and knowledge will remain for all time. There cannot be knowledge without ignorance, and there cannot be ignorance without the correlated knowledge. Both are the opposites in manifestation, one cannot remain without the other. For the jnani, there is no concept of either ignorance or knowledge. The total absence of all knowledge or ignorance is that state prior to the arising of consciousness.
In your original state there is no awareness of awareness, therefore no question of knowledge. The knowledge comes only with the appearance of the body and consciousness. This knowledge is really ignorance, and whatever knowledge is based on that is also ignorance.
Normally, in the name of spirituality, knowledge is expounded. Knowledge is in the realm of the five elements and is talked about as real or unreal as long as the knowledge “I Am” is there, and is a product of the knowledge “I Am”.
Some people are in search of knowledge which is acceptable to their mind and intellect, but the sphere of the mind and intellect is of no use to receive this knowledge. All your experiences and visions depend on your knowledge “I Am” and this itself is going to dissolve. People want concrete knowledge, but as their knowingness itself is going to dissolve, is it possible to hold on to something?
The knowledge that you are has mistakenly identified itself with the body and so you are thinking of yourself as the body. But you are the knowledge. Strengthen your conviction that you are the knowledge and not the body by meditation: ‘I am’.
I can only know something different from me. How can something know itself when there is nothing with which to compare? The Self is alone, without identity, without attributes. We can only talk about the Self at the phenomenal stage.
You can not know perfection, you can know only imperfection. For knowledge to be, there must be separation and disharmony. You can know what you are not, but you can not know you real being. You can only be what you are. The entire approach is through understanding, which is the seeing of the false as false. But to understand, you must observe from outside.
The knower is the unmanifested, the known is the manifested. The known is always on the move, it changes, it has no shape of its own, no dwelling place. The knower is the immutable support of all knowledge. Each needs the other, but reality lies beyond.
There can be no knowledge of the unmanifested. The potential is unknowable. Only the actual can be known.
What you are cannot be understood as an objective thing. You cannot find your real nature out as an objective thing. The moment it becomes objective, it is impermanent, not true. You are that which says: ’I do not know anything’. That which you know, is not real, it is impermanent.
If one is merely a witness of everything that takes place, why need knowledge of any kind?
The knowledge that the Guru is expounding will dissolve your identity as a personality, and will transform you into manifest knowledge. The manifest knowledge, the consciousness, is free and unconditioned. It is not possible to either catch hold of or give up that knowledge, because you are that knowledge, subtler than space. This knowledge that you are the manifest must be opened through meditation; you do not get it by listening to words.
People consider themselves ignorant and want knowledge. They come to a jnani and listen and they get knowledge, and ultimately they give the knowledge up again as being unnecessary.
When you want knowledge you want something in the manifestation. You are amassing knowledge for an individual. You are amassing knowledge that is not going to help you, because it is in a dream.
Ultimately one must go beyond knowledge. Knowledge can and must come by constant meditation. By meditating, the knowledge “I Am” gradually settles down and merges with universal knowledge, and thereby becomes totally free, like the sky, or space. Those who come to the Guru with the idea of getting knowledge, come as individuals aspiring to get something. That is the real difficulty. The seeker must disappear. When you know your real nature the knowledge “I Am” remains, but that knowledge is unlimited. It is not possible for you to acquire knowledge, because you are knowledge. You are what you are seeking. Your true being exists prior to the arising of any concept.
Because you are, there is the light, the light of knowledge, and when you are gone the light of knowledge will be extinguished.
Whatever has happened has happened when you were not knowing. The knowledge has come out of ignorance, or complete absence of knowledge, and no different course can be given to what is going on from infinity.
Knowledge has no peace, no pleasure whatsoever. Without knowledge I am really very happy. Every human being believes it is his duty to gain knowledge, but this knowledge is of no use at all in the gaining of the ultimate goal.
When you stabilize in the knowledge of your beingness, all other knowledge becomes available to you.
You are the one who knows “I Am”.
What the Guru expounds does not relate to worldly knowledge. You do not want to give up either worldly knowledge or so-called spiritual knowledge, and yet through these worldly concepts you want to understand the riddle of your existence, and that is precisely why you are not able to understand.
The true knowledge can only come when all possible concepts have been given up, and can only come from within.
The no-knowingness state is a total, complete, perfect state. In the knowingness state everything is imperfect and is never complete. In your nothingness you are perfect, you are total, and in your knowingness you are imperfect.
You cannot know the knower, for you are the knower. The fact of knowing proves the knower. You need no other proof. The knower of the known is not knowable.
The one who is listening, which you do not know, is you, and the one which you know as you, you are not.
Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind. Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown, and reject it in its turn. Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge, only being, in which being itself is knowledge. To know by being is direct knowledge. It is based on the identity of the seer and the seen. Indirect knowledge is based on sensation and memory, on proximity of the perceiver and his percept, confined with the contrast between the two.
That principle, which is always present, has no name and form, and Knowledge is merely a name given to it. It is the source of all perception. It has no need of peace and quietude because it itself is peace and quietude. In this principle of basic quietude, without duality, no change occurs at any time. This basic principle is beyond any state.
“I Am” is a quality, an attribute indicating beingness, but the Self is not a quality. For that Ultimate Self no worldly knowledge is necessary. Words are not called for. But for the sustenance of this beingness, these words and worldly knowledge are necessary.
When you are convinced you are the Knower of the consciousness, there is still a mental identification with the body which makes you feel that something good is going to happen to you. Now you have a certain amount of knowledge and it makes you feel very happy. This knowledge has driven away ignorance. In the washing away of the ignorance the knowledge will also disappear, only you remain.
Although you have imbibed knowledge, still you want to do something to further yourself. You may presume you have a certain knowledge but with that you want to develop your egoistic sense only.
Any knowledge of any kind that you think you have can only be in the consciousness, and whatever happens in consciousness is purely imaginary.
Can there be true knowledge of things? Relatively.....yes. Absolutely.....there are no things. To know that nothing is is true knowledge.
From the self’s point of view the world is the known and the Supreme is the Unknown. The known is infinite, but the Unknown is an infinitude of infinities. Just as a ray of light is never seen unless intercepted by the specs of dust, so does the Supreme make everything known, itself remaining unknown.
Once you are inwardly integrated, outer knowledge comes to you spontaneously. At every moment of your life you know what you need to know. In the ocean of the universal mind all knowledge is contained, it is yours on demand.
You take remembering to be knowledge. True knowledge is ever fresh, new, unexpected. It wells up from within. When you know what you are, you also are what you know. Between knowing and being there is no gap.
Whatever knowledge you collect is bound to disappear.
Knowledge and ignorance both disappear into vijnana. Jnana is knowledge, ajnana is ignorance, both disappear into vijnana.
Can you understand that knowledge itself is ignorance? If knowledge were real it would have been there eternally.....it would not have had a beginning and an end.
All knowledge is a form of ignorance. All knowledge is in memory; it is only recognition, while reality is beyond the duality of the knower and the known.
How is it known that everyone is completely ignorant? Consider, where did it all start? It is part of the knowledge “I Am”, and this knowledge and the particular form, the whole bundle, has been created out of the 5 elements, and the 5 elements have no knowledge, so the whole thing is pure ignorance.
All these ideas of yours are binding you. Understand that there is no knowledge, that it is all ignorance. There is no knowledge whatsoever.
When you understand yourself, both knowledge and ignorance disappear. You only require knowledge so long as the ignorance is there.
A knowledgeable person can tell anything to an ignorant person to remove his ignorance. For that purpose he takes the aid of the so-called worldly knowledge, concepts, and both the worldly conceptual knowledge and the ignorance go simultaneously. A jnani will give you any concepts to remove your ignorance. This “I Amness” is the knowledge and you are embracing that. To remove the “I Amness” the jnani gives you all these concepts in order that you may understand that you are not this “I Amness”, which is an outcome of the food essence product. Once you realize that, whatever concepts he has given you, together with this “I Amness”, are to be thrown out. What remains is the Absolute. The Absolute can never say I am like this or that, It is without knowledge.
The Absolute does not know Itself. Without the aid of the food essence, body consciousness does not know itself. Nobody knows himself without the food essence body.
You can never have knowledge about your Self because Parabrahman cannot be witnessed. You know what you are not.....what you are you cannot know.
The Ultimate knowledge does not have any knowledge.
All this knowledge, all this knowingness, is offered to the Brahman. Whatever is acquired is surrendered in oblations to the Brahman.
63. Understanding
Never think ‘I have understood everything correctly’. That is a mistake.
We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood.
When a clear understanding takes place of the nature and function of consciousness, that understanding no longer needs consciousness, because that understanding becomes the knower of consciousness.
There is no goal, nor a way to reach it. You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself. All you need is to understand, and understanding is the flowering of the mind.
Understanding is that the body is the essence of food and consciousness is the nature of the essence of food, and that you have no authority or control over your own existence, being able to do nothing by your own efforts.
So long as one is identified with the essence of the five elements it is impossible to understand, because that which is trying to understand is a pseudo-entity.
You are hanging on to an entity that is trying to understand. You are carrying on a lot of activities because of certain concepts you entertain, to satisfy the concepts that have arisen spontaneously in you. All this will go on so long as this conscious presence is available, and all this merely to satisfy the concept “I Am”, and you, the Absolute, are not the primary concept “I Am”.
The biggest drawback to understanding is the concept that I am an entity, and secondly, that any concept I have is the truth.
The feeling of having understood is likely to lead one into a sense of illusion, because the individual thinks he has found something to impart to others, but there is no individual.
Understanding can be of no use to you, because it is at the level of consciousness, and consciousness is illusory.
Do not try to understand. Enough if you do not misunderstand.
Understand your own mind and its hold on you will snap. The mind misunderstands, misunderstanding is its very nature. Right understanding is the only remedy. by all means use your mind to know your mind. It is perfectly legitimate, and also the best preparation for going beyond the mind.
The correct understanding will be when you realize that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid. In Jnana-yoga all that is understood is made unreal.
Understanding is a stage. You must go beyond this understanding stage, to a stage beyond, you must come to a state of “I have not understood anything”. Come to the conclusion that the various stages from childhood up to old age.....whatever you have understood and got stabilized as your identity.....has proved false. Similarly, whatever you have tried to understand during your spiritual, search will prove false. Therefore nothing is to be understood.
The ultimate point of view is that there is nothing to understand, so when we try to understand, we are only indulging in acrobatics of the mind.
You have not understood until you have solved the riddle of the one who thinks he has understood.

64. The Witness

The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the moveable, the silent witness of all that happens.
As long as there is consciousness, its witness is also there. The two appear and disappear together.
The difference between the person and the witness is that both are modes of consciousness. In the 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.
Dive deep within and find what is real in you. If someone tells you that you are the witness, the silent witness, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being. Find the way to your own being by giving up all questions except one: ‘Who am I?’ The only fact you are sure of is that you are. The “I Am” is certain. The “I am this” is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
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.
Witnessing is of the mind. The witness goes with the witnessed.
All the activities are in the field of consciousness, the mind, and vital force. The knower of the mind is just a witness. It does not interfere in anything.
The witness only registers events.
All that happens, happens in and to the mind, not to the source of the ‘I Am’. Once you realize that all happens by itself, call it destiny or the will of God or mere accident, you remain as witness only, understanding and enjoying, but not perturbed.
When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer, and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining oneself to be something: “I am this, I am that”, continues, but only as part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.
The fourth state (turiya) is a state of pure witnessing, detached awareness, passionless and wordless. It is like space, unaffected by whatever it contains. Bodily and mental troubles do not reach it, they are outside ‘there’, while the witness is always ‘here’.
The witness of behaviour is beyond attributes. When the witness subsides everything disappears. The witness is ‘I am’. When ‘I am’ arises the whole of manifestation takes place, because those two are not separate but one. The entire manifest world occurs because of the witness.
Witnessing simply takes place, there is nothing that the witness has to do, witnessing happens purely by itself. Witnessing takes place, there is nothing to be done.
You cannot be witnessed by you. Only what is other than you can be witnessed by you.
There is no you as an entity looking at something, no you actually doing the witnessing. Look at something but understand that there is no you looking at it. Witnessing takes place by itself. Don’t involve yourself in the witnessing, you don’t have to make a statement: ‘Ah I am seeing the something’
Nobody can say: ‘I am the witness’. The ‘I Am’ is always witnessed. The state of detached awareness is the witness-consciousness, the ‘mirror-mind’. It rises and sets with its object and thus it is not quite the real. Whatever its object, it remains the same, hence it is also real. It partakes of both the real and the unreal, and is therefore a bridge between the two.
Whatever is being witnessed is constantly changing. The changing state is witnessed, but the witness does not change. When the witnessing stops, there is the eternal state.
At death the idea ‘I am this body’ dies, the witness does not. The one witness reflects itself in the countless bodies as ‘I Am’. As long as the bodies, however subtle, last, the ‘I Am’ appears as many. Beyond the body there is only the One.
The witness merely registers the presence or absence of experience. It is not an experience by itself, but it becomes an experience when the thought: ‘I am the witness’ arises.
There is a principle which witnesses consciousness, and that principle is beyond the world. The witness of the knowledge ‘I am’ is prior to the knowledge ‘I am’. You are not the consciousness, you are not the knowledge, you are the witness of the consciousness that appears on you, sat-guru is your true nature.
Only observe, be the Witness. Nothing else is to be done.
What you must witness is not your thoughts but the consciousness “I Am”. Everything is an expression of the “I Am”, but you are not that; you are prior to the “I Am”.
The witness is not awake. It is a dream. That dream is yourself. Whatever you see is not the dream, that is the “I” that you are. That consciousness that sees everything, sees through the dream itself.
Witnessing happens to the principle prior to consciousness, to the Absolute, but the Absolute witnesses with the aid of consciousness.
Without mind there cannot be any witnessing. Witnessing can happen only when the objects of mind exist, which is predicated upon the presence of the consciousness. Primarily witnessing happens to the consciousness, in the realm of the mind. All the activities occur to the mind and intellect, and witnessing of that happens to the Self.
Witnessing the five-elemental manifest world and cosmos happens to the Absolute, that is to the Unborn eternal principle called the Parabrahman. But the Absolute.....the Witness.....is not the beingness, the medium of witnessing, nor the manifest universe witnessed.
Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness. There should be no feelings and ideas to stand between you and the field.
Let anything come and go. You are only a witness.
The attitude of pure witnessing is of watching the events without taking part in them.
Do not make special efforts to witness, just be in a relaxed condition. If you make special efforts to witness you are studying your mind movements at mind level. You would then be practising witnessing, not being the witness. Witnessing just takes place.
The witness is the knower of the mind.
For the purpose of witnessing, that fluid, the spit, the fluid energy.....the beingness.....must be there first. The incarnations and births emanate out of the spit.
Prior to witnessing you are.
The knowledge of beingness has appeared, and it is going to disappear. The one that observes the appearance and disappearance of beingness sees it without eyesight, and that witness does not relate to this world of “I Amness” or beingness.
Without beingness, there is no thinking. Beingness is a basic precondition for thinking or not-thinking. If you have pain in the body, your beingness only witnesses it. Everything that comes here has to go, and the beingness which has come, must go. In the absence of beingness, how can there be witnessing at all? The real witness is the eternal Self only.
In the witness 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.
The witness is the reflection of the real in the intellect (buddhi). The real is beyond. The witness is the door through which you can pass beyond.
The witness depends on the condition of the mind. Where clarity and detachment predominate, the witness-consciousness comes into being. Without the witness consciousness becomes unconsciousness, just living. The witness is latent in every state of consciousness, just like light in every colour. There can be no knowledge without the knower, and no knower without his witness. Not only you know, but you know that you know.
For witnessing there must be something else to witness. You are still in duality.
Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.
The witness that is enmeshed in what he perceives is the person; the witness who stands aloof, unmoved and untouched, is the watch-tower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested. There can be no universe without the witness, there can be no witness without the universe.
There are two witnessing stages; beingness witnesses all this manifestation. Witnessing of this beingness, consciousness, happens to the Absolute.
The witness is both real and unreal. The witness is the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. To say: I am only the witness is both false and true; false because of the ‘I Am’, true because of the witness. It is better to say: ‘there is witnessing’. The moment you say ‘I Am’, the entire universe comes into being along with its creator.
Whatever you witness will not remain with you. It is imperfect. The one who recognizes the imperfect is perfect.

65. Truth

The truth is total Brahman only, nothing else but Brahman.
Only the Parabrahman is the truth, nothing else is, and you are That eternally.
Truth is timeless and beyond description.
The truth can understand untruth, but the untruth cannot understand truth. The truth cannot be seen or perceived, but the truth can observe the untruth.
Ideas are not the truth. Truth is the state beyond concepts.
Your true state is ever there, and in its pure state is undisturbed. You are present only, there is not the slightest movement from you.
Truth cannot be described, but it can be experienced. But it is not mere experience.
Truth is simple and open to all. Do not complicate it. Truth is loving and loveable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands. Being false, it is empty, always in search of confirmation and reassurance. It is afraid of, and avoids, enquiry. It identifies itself with any support, however weak and momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses, and asks for more. Therefore put no faith in the conscious. Nothing you can see, feel, or think is so.
Whatever exists is unreal. Whatever you say you are is false. Whatever you say you are not is true. The state in which beingness is absent is the truth. It is eternal. ‘I-am-ness’ is time-bound and is not eternal.
Do not try to know the truth, for knowledge by the mind is not true knowledge. But you can know what is not true.....which is enough to liberate you from the false. The idea that you know what is true is dangerous, for it keeps you imprisoned in the mind. It is when you do not know, that you are free to investigate. There can be no salvation without investigation, because non-investigation is the main cause of bondage.
There is nobody who can have the knowledge of the Truth, the Eternal. It is one’s eternal true state, but it is not a knowledgeable state.....you cannot know it. So-called knowledge is boundless and plenty in the state of attributes, “I Am”.
Whatever anyone can tell you is not the truth, because it has come out of this “I Am”. Words negate. The truth is beyond expression.
Your very desire to formulate truth denies it, because it cannot be contained in words. Truth can be expressed only by the denial of the false.....in action. For this you must see the false as false (viveka) and reject it (vairagya). Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing. It lays open the road to perfection.
Truth is when the idea ‘this is true’, ‘that is true’ does not arise. Truth does not assert itself, it is in the seeing of the false as false and rejecting it. It is useless to search for truth, when the mind is blind to the false. It must be purged of the false completely before truth can dawn on it.
What is false? What has no being is false. What contradicts itself has no being. Or it has only momentary being, which comes to the same. For what has a beginning and an end has no middle. It is hollow. It has only the name and shape given to it by the mind, but it has neither substance nor essence.
The universe has no being. What has being is that which does not depend for its existence, which does not arise with the universe arising, nor set with the universe setting, which does not need any proof, but imparts reality to all it touches. It is the nature of the false that it appears real for a moment. One could say that the true becomes the father of the false. But the false is limited in time and space and is produced by circumstances.
When you know that you are neither body nor mind, you will not be swayed by them. You will follow truth, wherever it takes you, and do what needs be done, whatever the price to pay.
Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. The real is inconceivable and cannot be harnessed to a purpose. It must be wanted for its own sake. What else is there worth wanting? Granted, the real cannot be wanted, as a thing is wanted. But you can see the unreal as unreal and discard it. It is the discarding the false that opens the way to the true.
Self-interest and self-concern are the focal points of the false. Your daily life vibrates between desire and fear. Watch it intently and you will see how the mind assumes innumerable names and shapes. Trace every action to its selfish motive and look at the motive intently until it dissolves.
Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You need not merit truth. It is your own. You are eligible because you are.
Thousands of people come to a guru. They utilize the knowledge as it suits them only. This is not the Truth, it is the Truth as seen through their own concepts, according to their own point of view. This knowledge, filtered through their own point of view, is not knowledge, it is only a point of view.
“I Am the Truth”. Truth has no form. If Truth had a form you would go and get it.
In order to grasp your true nature the centre of perception must change.
Search and study are but the stirrings of a man who is tired of sleeping. They are not the causes of awakening, but its early signs. Do not ask idle questions to which you already know the answers. You get a true answer by asking a true question, non-verbally, by daring to live according to your lights. A man willing to die for truth will get it.
Action is the test of truth. If you do not test yourself all the time, you will not be able to distinguish between reality and fancy. Observation and close reasoning help to some extent, but reality is paradoxical. How do you know you have realized unless you watch your thoughts and feelings, words and actions, and wonder at the changes occurring in you without your knowing why and how? It is exactly because they are so surprising that you know that they are real. The foreseen and expected is rarely true.
If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental, or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives no higher status, no power over others. All you get is truth and the freedom from the false.
Where is the dwelling place of truth where you could go in search of it? And how will you know that you have found it? What touchstone do you bring with you to test it? You imagine that truth is a thing which carries the name ‘truth’, and that it is advantageous to have it, provided it is genuine. You are shopping for truth but you do not trust the merchants. You are afraid of forgeries and imitations. You are asking for truth, but in fact you merely seek comfort, which you want to last forever. Now, nothing, no state of mind, can last forever. In time and space there is always a limit, because time and space themselves are limited. And in the timeless the words ‘for ever’ have no meaning. The same with the proof of truth. In the realm of non-duality everything is complete, its own proof, meaning and purpose. Where all is one, no supports are needed. You imagine that permanence is the proof of truth, that what lasts longer is somehow more true. Time becomes the measure of truth. And since time is in the mind, the mind becomes the arbiter and searches within itself the proof of truth.....a task altogether impossible and hopeless!
You imagine that truth needs pointing at and telling you: ‘Look here is truth’. It is not so. truth is not the result of an effort, the end of a road. It is here and now, in the very longing and search for it. It is nearer than the mind and the body, nearer than the sense ‘I Am’. You do not see it because you look too far away from yourself, outside you innermost being. You have objectified truth and insist on your standard proofs and tests which apply only to things and thoughts. You are the truth itself, only you mistake the false for the true. The discovery of the truth is in the discernment of the false. You can know what is not. What is.....you can only be.
In the search for the truth, the last progress will be for you to transcend the ‘I-Amness’ and to get stabilized in the Ultimate.
The evidence of the Eternal is this transiency, the evidence of the Truth is the untruth.
The Truth, the eternal, cannot be witnessed. It ever prevails.
Whatever can be understood or perceived can never be the eternal Truth. The Unknown is the Truth.

66. Reality

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to whom to happen, a conscious separate centre. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. When you deny reality to anything, you come to a residue which cannot be denied.
Investigate yourself to see if you are real or unreal.
Personality is merely a reflection of the real. The reflection should be true to the original, automatically. The person need not have any designs of its own, the life of which it is an expression will guide it. Realize that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself. Agree to be guided from within, then life becomes a journey into the unknown.
When you start investigating your own Self you come to the conclusion that birth is not a fact, it is unreal. If birth is not a fact, this beingness also cannot be a fact, because beingness has appeared. Beingness also means this manifest world, so the manifest world is not real.
You are unreal.....you know that you are unreal.....that is also unreal. This sense of presence is an untruth, it is like a dream.
Everything is subjective, but the real is objective. The real does not depend on memories and expectations, desires and fears, likes and dislikes. All is seen as it is. The real is solid, steady, changeless, beginningless and endless, ever new, ever fresh. Desirelessness and fearlessness will take you there.
The objective cannot be your own. It would be a grievous mistake to identify yourself with something external. Reality is beyond the subjective and objective, beyond all levels, beyond every distinction. Most definitely it is not the origin, source, or root, of the subjective and objective. These come from ignorance of reality, not from reality itself, which is indescribable, beyond being and not-being.
Everything is unreal. This is all the play due to your consciousness, and your consciousness is due to the food essence body.
Everything which gets consumed, exhausted, is unreal.
Anything that implies a continuity, a sequence, a passing from stage to stage cannot be the real. There is no progress in reality, it is final, perfect, unrelated.
That which is changing continuously is the unreal. Change can be brought about only in the unreal. No change can be made in the real, the truth.
Experience is of change, it comes and goes. Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced. Reality 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 never comes or 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, and 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 longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and appearances. But as soon as there is some like or dislike, you have drawn a screen.
The real sees the real in the unreal. It is the mind that creates the unreal, and it is the mind that sees the false as false.
The unreal may look real, but it is transient. The real is not afraid of time.
A thing of which the beginning is the end, can have no middle. Reality cannot be momentary. It is timeless, but timelessness is not duration.
Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. Look at it without desire or fear and it does lose substance.
To the real, the unreal is not. It appears to be real only because you believe in it. Doubt it and it ceases. When you are in love with somebody, you give it reality.....you imagine your love to be all-powerful and everlasting. When it comes to an end, you say: ‘I thought it was real, but it was not’. Transiency is the best proof of unreality. What is limited in time, and space, and applicable to one person only, is not real. The real is for all and forever.
Neither action, nor feeling, nor thought express reality. There is no such thing as an expression of reality. A duality is introduced where there is none. Only reality is, there is nothing else. 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.
There is no such thing as the experience of the real. The real is beyond experience. All experience is in the mind. You know the real by being the real.
Reality is not approachable through knowledge.
Your mind does move. You are moving into the future all the time whether you like it or not. In the now you are both the movable and the immovable. So far you took yourself to be the movable and overlooked the immovable. Turn your mind inside out. Overlook the movable and you will find yourself to be the ever-present, changeless reality, inexpressible, but solid like a rock.
Reality can neither be proved nor disproved. Within the mind you cannot prove reality, beyond the mind you need not. In the real , the question ‘what is real?’ does not arise. The manifested and unmanifested are not different. I am all. As myself all is real. Apart from me, nothing is real. When you discern and let go all that is unreal, what remains is real.
Relax and watch the ‘I Am’. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet. Keep silent. It will emerge. It will take you in.
You need not chase the ‘I Am’ to kill it. You cannot. All you need is a sincere longing for reality, atma-bhakti, the love of the Supreme, or moksha-sankalpa, the determination to be free from the false. Without love, and will inspired by love, nothing can be done. Merely talking about Reality without doing anything about it, is self-defeating. There must be love in the relation between the person who says ‘I Am’ and the observer of the ‘I Am’. As long as the observer, the inner self, the ‘higher’ self, considers himself apart from the observed, the ‘lower’ self, despises it and condemns it, the situation is hopeless. It is only when the observer (vyakta) accepts the person (vyakti) as a projection or manifestation of himself, and so to say, takes the self into the Self, the duality of ‘I’ and ‘this’ goes, and in the identity of the outer and the inner the Supreme Reality manifests itself. This union of the seer and the seen happens when the seer becomes conscious of himself as the seer; he is not merely interested in the seen, which he is anyhow, but also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, aware of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings Reality into focus.
There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what? You can only be the real, which you are, anyhow.
Your very being is the real.
Unmanifested (nirguna), manifested (saguna), individuality (vyakta), personality (vyakti), all these are mere words, points of view, mental attitudes. There is no reality in them. The real is experienced in silence.
Your difficulty stems from the idea that reality is a state of consciousness, one among many. You tend to say: “This is real. That is not real. And this is partly real, partly unreal”, as if reality were an attribute or quality to have in varying measures.
Do not drag reality down to the level of experience. How can reality depend on experience, when it is the very ground (adhar) of experience. Reality is the very fact of experience, not in its nature. Experience is after all, a state of mind, while being is definitely not a state of mind.
To go beyond consciousness is the supreme state. But as long as you are a seeker it is better to cling to the idea that you are pure consciousness, free from all content. The desire for realization is in consciousness, of course. All desire is born from memory and is within the realm of consciousness. What is beyond is clear of all striving. The very desire to go beyond consciousness is still in consciousness. Even pure awareness is a form of consciousness. What is beyond is not emptiness, because emptiness refers again only to consciousness. Fullness and emptiness are relative terms. The Real is really beyond.....beyond not in relation to consciousness, but beyond all relations of whatever kind. The difficulty comes with the word ‘state’. The Real is not a state of something else.....it is not a state of mind or consciousness or psyche (antahkarana), nor is it something that has a beginning and an end, being and not being. All opposites are contained in it.....but it is not in the play of opposites. You must not take it to be the end of a transition. It is itself. It is after the consciousness as such is no more. Then words ‘I am man’ or ‘I am God’ have no meaning. Only in silence and in darkness can it be heard and seen.
Why live at all? Why all this unnecessary coming and going, waking and sleeping, eating and digesting? 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. 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, rocklike, unassailable.....a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.
Reality is. It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery. But it is, while all else merely happens.
The real is simple, open, clear and kind, beautiful and joyous. It is completely free of contradictions. It is ever new, ever fresh, endlessly creative. Being and non-being, life and death, all distinctions merge in it.
There is peace.....deep, immense, unshakeable. Events are registered in memory, but are of no importance. I am hardly aware of them. 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. It is absolutely steady. Whatever I may do, it stays like a rock.....motionless. Once you have awakened into reality, you stay in it. It is a simple state, smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest. It is self-evident and yet beyond description.
Everything can become a way to reality, provided you are interested. Just puzzling over the Guru’s 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. You are trouble-prone, I am immune. Come to my side. Anything may happen. What is needed is sincere interest. Earnestness does it. You are quite capable of crossing over. Only be sincere.
Those who are acutely conscious of their standing grade people into hierarchies, ranging from the lowest to the highest achievers. To me all are equal. Differences in appearance and expression are there, but they do not matter. Just as the shape of a gold ornament does not affect the gold, so does man’s essence remain unaffected. Where this sense of equality is lacking it means that reality had not been touched.
The mistakes of students consists in their imagining the inner to be something to get hold of, and forgetting that all perceivables are transient and therefore unreal. Only that which makes perception possible, call it Life or Brahman, or what you like, is real.
As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.
He who knows the mind as non-realized and realized, who knows ignorance and knowledge as states of mind, he is the real. The known is but a shape, and knowledge is but a name. The knower is but a state of mind. The real is beyond.
To know that consciousness and its content are but reflections, changeful and transient, is the focusing of the real. The refusal to see the snake in the rope is the necessary condition for seeing the rope. One must also know that a rope exists and looks like a snake. Similarly, one must know that the real exists and is of the nature of witness-consciousness. Of course it is beyond the witness, but to enter it one must first realize the state of pure witnessing. The awareness of conditions brings one to the unconditioned. To know the conditioned as conditioned is all that can be said about the unconditioned. We can only talk of the unreal, the illusory, the transient, the conditioned. To go beyond, we must pass through total negation of everything as having independent existence. All things depend. All things depend on consciousness, and consciousness depends on the witness. The witness is the reflection of the real in all its purity.
I am in a state of detached but affectionate awareness (turiya). When this awareness turns upon itself, you may call it the Supreme State (turiyatita). But the fundamental reality is beyond awareness, beyond the three states of becoming, being, and not-being.
You imagine reality to stand apart from names and forms, while to me names and forms are the ever changing expressions of reality and not apart from it. You separate existence from being, and being from reality, while to me it is all one.
Reality is common to all. Only the false is personal.
As long as you deal in terms: real - unreal, awareness is the only reality that can be. But the Supreme is beyond all distinctions, and to him the term ‘real’ does not apply, for it is all real, and therefore need not be labelled as such. The Supreme is the very source of reality, it imparts reality to whatever it touches.
Reality is beyond description. You can know it only by being it. Know yourself as that being which is the ocean of all existence.
What the real is cannot be told, because words negate it. Whatever is said is not the truth because it has come out of ‘I am’. Reality cannot be described. Everything that can be said, is to be negated: ‘not this’, ‘not this’.
For reality you need a well-ordered and quiet life, peace of mind, and immense earnestness.
From the awareness of the unreal to the awareness of your real nature there is a chasm which you will easily cross, once you have mastered the art of pure awareness.
The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. it is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition, but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions. There is also destiny to consider. The unconscious is in the grip of destiny; it is destiny in fact. One may have to wait. But however heavy may be the hand of destiny, it can be lifted by patience and self-control. Integrity and purity remove the obstacles and the vision of reality appears in the mind.
Reality is all-pervading, all-conquering, intense beyond words. No ordinary brain can stand it without being shattered; hence the absolute need for sadhana. Purity of body and clarity of mind, non-violence and selflessness in life are essential for survival as an intelligent and spiritual entity.
Everything happens all the time, but you must be ready for it. Readiness is ripeness. You do not see the real because your mind is not ready for it. Unready means afraid. You are afraid of what you are. Your destination is the whole. But you are afraid that you will lose your identity. This is childishness, clinging to the toys, to your desires and fears, opinions and ideas. Give it all up and be ready for the real to assert itself.
Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own.
When everything goes you are the Real. Reality is one.

67. Atman

Atman is not a thing with a shape or form.
No action can be attributed to atman, one who is the witness only.
Atman is ‘I am’ without words. Before the emanation of any words, “I” already exist. Later I say mentally “I Am”. The word-free and thought-free state is the atman.
This Atman-principle is immortal and indestructible. The Atman-principle is nothing other than the knowledge “I Am”, the touch of “I Amness”.
Atman is the observer. The mind and the prana are only activators.
This consciousness which makes perception possible is the Atman. That which is aware of the consciousness is the Brahman. The Paramatman is that knowledge that indwells the body, “I Am”, and that cannot be described.
The Atman is only beingness, or the consciousness, which is the world. “I Am” means my whole world. Just being and the world.
The Atman has no body, therefore it cannot change. Atman is not the individual. Atman feels the sense of being only through a body with sense organs in proper working order operating, otherwise the Atman does not feel itself.
This body form is the product of the five elements, and the five elements are created out of the Atman. How does one recognize the Atman? It is by understanding the knowledge “I Am”.....the Atman-jnana. Just as space is all-pervading, so the knowledge “I Am” is all-pervading, limitless, and infinite. Such a supreme principle cannot be treated as though it is a body! All the sufferings are due to such a mistaken identity. By giving the highest honour due to the Atman, you will not undergo either suffering or death.
There is no question of the Atman needing to enter the body since it is already everywhere, like the sky.
This great principle.....the Atman.....remains unaffected by whatever actions you do from your body-identity.
The atman is self-sufficient. But when it clings to the body, ‘treatments’ such as mental and physical recreation or occupation are necessary; without these the atman cannot be tolerated by a person. For spiritual evolution, which is a requisite in the disengagement of the atman from body-identity, the best discipline recommended is namasmarana .....recitation of a holy name of God. But here God means the indwelling principle within you.....the atman. By reciting his name this inner-God will awaken and respond and shower grace on the one who chants by leading him into quietude. This merging of beingness within itself is the fount of bliss.

68. Brahman

Brahman means the emanation of the world, simultaneously confirming that “I Am”. In this Brahman everything is illusion. The principle that understands, realizes, and witnesses, is the Parabrahman. Witnessing happens to the Parabrahman.
Whatever is seen and felt in totality, space-like, is universal manifestation.....the Brahman. But forms emanated, and these are felt as separate and isolated from each other. For the jnani everything is the Brahman, its expression only. The pure dynamic Brahman unknowingly wears various bodies, like garments, and then functions through them. This results in perception of the world taking place through the senses of the bodies.
You will never get evidence of Brahman’s existence anywhere except within you.
Brahman is created out of your beingness. All this Brahman is illusion.. Out of ignorance, this beingness develops everything, the entire manifestation.
When a body dies, this basic principle the pure Brahman, does not leave and proceed anywhere as an individual entity, simply because it ever pervades everything and everywhere. At the moment of death of the body, its expression through that body subsides then and there only.
You are the manifest Brahman.
‘I am’ is Brahman. You have to elevate yourself to the state of Brahman. You have to develop ‘I am’.
When you are absolutely one with Brahman, you do not use the mind. There is no sound, and you cannot talk. You keep quiet. To talk you have to use the instrument of the mind, and so you need to detach a little from Brahman, then talk can come out.
Once stabilized in the Brahman, there is no longer any use for knowledge of the Brahman, that is, knowledge of the Self. Therefore I, the Brahman, do nothing, and need nothing. This is videhisthiti, the body-free state. There is no high nor low, no real nor unreal, no inside nor outside, and no dimension of any kind in that state.
You are the Brahman who loses identification with the body, no longer a human being. You are not ever the Brahman, but the Parabrahman, the witness of that Brahman.
All this Brahman is illusion, ignorance. Brahman is created out of your beingness. Your beingness is ignorance only, from the Absolute standpoint.

69. Parabrahman

The Parabrahman is the highest Self. It is subtler than space.
One who is Parabrahman does not know whether he is or is not. Non-beingness or beingness have absolutely no effect on him. That is nirguna.
Saguna and nirguna are one in Parabrahman. There is only the Supreme. In movement it is saguna. Motionless it is nirguna. But it is only the mind that moves or does not move. The real is beyond, you are beyond.
To realize that natural perfect state prior to conception, that eternal state, to abide in that is the highest. The name attached to it is the Parabrahman state.....the Absolute. That state always prevails, eight days before conception, millions of years back, and after the departure of the beingness, it still prevails.
The Paramatman does not participate in the activities of the world, but without that principle no activities could take place at all. Just as without akash (space) no activities are possible.
In the state of Parabrahman there are no desires, no likes or dislikes. That is Niskama Parabrahman. Niskama Parabrahman is desireless, and in that state this manifestation has appeared and is doing what it pleases.
Nobody becomes a Parabrahman, nobody can become a Parabrahman. It is. Before the knowledge “I Am” appeared on you, that is Parabrahman.
In the Parabrahman state the quality of knowingness is not present, nor does the Parabrahman state have any embellishments like the manifest consciousness. The Parabrahman state does not know it is, neither does it have this manifestation. In spite of the dissolution of universes and cosmos that Absolute is untouched. It exists.
When beingness forgets itself, that state is Parabrahman.
The Parabrahman does not experience this “I Amness” at all.
In the Parabrahman there is no awareness of existence, there is awareness of awareness only. As soon as awareness of existence comes, there is a duality and manifestation comes.
“I Amness” is the subtlest principle, subtler than even space. When it is extinguished because of death of the body and stopping of the vital breath, the event is termed nirvana. This is a state in which there is no sample left of “I Amness”.....a sampleless condition absolutely. The state does not know it is, and is beyond happiness and suffering, and beyond words. It is called the Parabrahman, a non-experiential state.
Consciousness happens in the universal consciousness or mind, called the ether of consciousness. All the objects of consciousness form the universe. Beyond both, supporting both, is the supreme state, a state of utter stillness and silence. Whoever goes there, disappears. It is unreachable by words or mind. It is called God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, which are names given by the mind. It is the nameless, contentless, effortless and spontaneous state, beyond being and not being. Just as the universe is the body of the mind, so consciousness is the body of the supreme.
Why can the Parabrahman afford to have this luxury or suffering of this manifest world? Because to the Parabrahman, this does not exist.
The Parabrahman can talk with the aid of consciousness.
With the transcendence of the knowledge “I Am”, the Absolute prevails. The state is called Parabrahman, while the knowledge “I Am” is termed Brahman. This knowledge “I Am” or the beingness is illusion only. Therefore when Brahman is transcended only the Parabrahman is, in which there is not even a trace of the knowledge “I Am”.
Parabrahman has no beginning and no end. It is eternal, whereas this consciousness is time-bound.....it has a beginning and an end. Parabrahman comes to know that It is, and the consciousness is how Parabrahman knows that It is. Parabrahman is your eternal state, you cannot remember it because you have not forgotten it. It is your daily experience, you know it. There is consciousness, there is no question of “I”. It is.
Whatever my state was prior to the child is my true state. Prior to the appearance of childhood, that is my eternal state. Because I prevail prior to anything, I ever exist. Para-atman, Para-brahman, are the titles of my state. In that state there was nothing, and in that state I have no knowledge of anything. I have no association with anyone in that state. I am always without words. I am ever non-objective, unmanifest.
Parabrahman is when the movement is frozen, there is no movement, but the potential is present.
One in ten million has perfect knowledge about the Self.
You are the Parabrahman.

70. God

Every grain of sand is God.
As long as you think yourself to be a person, God too is a person. When you are all, you see Him as all.
There are innumerable gods, each in his own universe. They create and recreate eternally. Are you going to wait for them to save you?
Brahma, Visnu, and the other gods are merely appearances in consciousness. Each appearance has its own duration, perhaps millions of years, an allotted span of existence. They are all appearances.
The Creator is a person whose body is the world. The Nameless one is beyond all gods.
God is not only true and good, he is also beautiful (satyam-shivam-sundaram). He creates beauty.....for the joy of it. Do not introduce purpose. Purpose implies movement, change, a sense of imperfection. God does not aim at beauty.....whatever he does is beautiful. Would you say that a flower is trying to be beautiful? It is beautiful by its very nature. Similarly God is perfection itself, not an effort at perfection.
What is God? Is he not the very light by which you ask the question? “I Am” itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor mind, and the love of the self in you is for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.
What I am, you are, and what you are I am. The ‘I Am’ is common to us all. Beyond the ‘I Am’ there is the immensity of light and love. We do not see it because we look elsewhere. I can only point out at the sky. Seeing of the star is your own work. Some take more time before they see the star, some take less, it depends on the clarity of their vision and their earnestness in search. These two must be their own.....the Guru can only encourage.
At every moment whatever comes to you unasked, comes from God and will surely help you, if you make the fullest use of it. It is only what you strive for, out of your own imagination and desire, that gives you trouble.
All is God’s doing, no doubt. But what is it to me, since I want nothing? What can God give me, or take away from me? What is mine is mine and was mine even when God was not. God is my devotee and did all this for me. God is not apart from me, “I Am” is the root, God is the tree. Who is to worship whom, and for what?
To help you God must know of your existence. But you and your world are dream states. In dream states you may suffer agonies. No one knows them, and no one can help you. You think God knows you? Even the world he does not know.
You have created a God because you want to beg from somebody, and that is what you call spirituality. If you want to encounter God, dive deep into your own Self. That is the storehouse of everything.
If God is not residing in your body you will not be there.
God can exist only in the heart of man, not elsewhere. Only in this body can God be realized.
You are your own God. You are your own creation and creator. There is no external God to battle with.
You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. You are the all-pervading, all-transcending reality.
There is no difference between God and yourself. You are God only. Only I exist. The “I Amness”, the manifest Brahman, and Isvara are all one.
I cannot say that I am in God, or I am God. God is the universal light and love, the universal witness. I am even beyond the universal.
Nothing can be said about God’s appearance or form or qualities, since such a god would be bound by time. At the end of time such a god would vanish, even his knowledge of having been a god. Being a god is simply wearing clothes by a beggar.
The repeating of the name of God is an effective method or sadhana during the early stage of spiritual development.
There is no creator with a vast intellect. All this is the spontaneous play of consciousness. There is no intellect behind it. Your intellect is a subsequent product of this process, so do not impose your intellect to bring about any change, leave it alone.
Nobody has created you. You are living out of your own light. There is no creator and nobody created me. The creation takes place through his mind and concepts. Through the humming in his mind, his world is created. The mind is created when non-being turns into being, then only the mind appears and functions. Worldly activities are not possible without the humming of beingness. Individuality and manifestation are the outcome of the non-being state turning into beingness, like the waking of a person from deep slumber.
What is God? Everything you see is all God, Iswara. Everything is Iswara, even the smallest atom is Iswara. Krishna said whatever is, is myself only. Saguna and nirguna, both myself only.
Gods are consciousness only.
God is the Power That Is, the Mind and Heart of the universe.
This universal consciousness is known as God, the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, Almighty. These attributes are given to God in consciousness, but the Absolute is without attributes.
God is no one else but the consciousness, which depends on food. Whenever food of the right quality and in the proper form is available and when the vital breath functions in it, the “I Amness” principle manifests itself through it. This “I Amness” is the Bhagavan, the consciousness, the godly principle.
The flame of Visnu is supposed to be ever-effulgent and lustrous. Because the flame of Visnu has entered this body it does not result in a change in quality. Whether that flame enters into an animal or a human being it does not lose its natural quality. Although you may claim it as your own, saying “I Am”, it remains one. The world of consciousness is yours, and when you realize that, you will know that you are not a person.
There is nobody else, there is you only. You are God. if God is not, you are not. If God is, you are. What you are doing is trying to identify with God, but God cannot be unless you are.
It is not that you can become God, you are God. You are godly originally, but you become something else that you are not. At present you may consider yourself to be an insignificant person of limited worth, intelligence. But actually it is not so. You are very ancient. You are infinite, eternal. You must develop the conviction that you are the Absolute. This is most important. You have to focus your attention on that only. Before the appearance of the beingness or knowingness, I, the Absolute, am already there, eternally.
You are the great Lord, the sudden explosive effulgence. Surrender to it, and you will know all. You could not see and judge the quality of light if you were not light yourself. You are that subtle knowledge.
God is the light which is the manifest world. I have realized the light, but I am not bound by it, I am not in it.
There is no separate God. There is no separate God to propitiate and who will get things done according to our will.
Realize that whatever there is true, noble and beautiful in the universe, it all comes from you, that you yourself are the source of it. The gods and goddesses that supervise the world may be wonderful and glorious beings; yet they are like the gorgeously dressed servants who proclaim the power and riches of their master.
Self-realization is God, the Self itself is God. God means the consciousness “I Am”.....It has no form, no name. Because Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna realized themselves, their consciousness, they became Godly. To abide in the Self is Godly. Consciousness in the form of a Christ, or a Krishna came, the personalities were there, and those were identified as Gods because they stabilized in their consciousness. Due to that ultimate principle only, consciousness has appeared. When this consciousness was not there, where was Christ or where was Krishna? They were the Absolute only.
This “I Amness” of yours is the unadulterated form of the Godlihood, the pure Isvara state is your beingness. Without doing anything you have the knowledge “I Am”, the conviction that you are.....that is Isvara. Your being is beginningless, but you prefer to be in that monkey form, and you are not prepared to leave that form.
The consciousness is the seed of Godliness. if we give it its true importance and pray to it, then it will flower into Godliness. If we do not give it any importance, it will not flower into Godliness.
Once one comes to the conclusion that there is nothing else except one’s Self, whom should he worship? That One is everything.
When the personality, or individuality, is no more there, there is only that Dukkha Bhagavan, the God of Sorrow. Bhagavan is this manifestation, but sorrow only. It is not involved in thought or activities.....it is just the manifestation. I am the total functioning and whatever in the functioning, at the moment has a certain significance, that I am.
The indwelling Spirit is the Godly immanence residing in this body. Inquire about that. If the indwelling Spirit quits the body, the body becomes as faecal matter.
It is only because I am that I see the world and think of God. Therefore God is because I am. If I am not, God is not.
Think continuously in terms of this formula: “I am God, there is no God without me.” When you are firmly established in this, whatever is unimportant will gradually fade away. A step further: Not the words “I am God” but that which was prior to the understanding of the words. That is God and that is you, not the words. The feeling that I am is the registration of the presence of God.
Try to expand yourself to Infinity as the manifested consciousness. There is no other God but you.
All are the expressions of God, and myself. Every particle is God, and myself. The entire beingness manifest is God, and each being is a sample of God, and myself. The knowledge “I Am” in each species is God, and myself. The very life force.....luminous, bright, radiant, indwelling principle, is God, and myself.
God is the soundless sound. All we talk about is the manifest. The Unmanifest cannot talk at all.
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. Because I Am all is.

71. The Supreme

First of all, you abide in your own Self and transcend it, and in transcending, you will realize your Ultimate.
You are the Supreme Reality beyond the world and its creator, beyond consciousness and its witness, beyond all assertions and denials. Remember it, think of it, act on it. Abandon all sense of separation, see yourself in all and act accordingly.
The world and the mind are states of being. The Supreme is not a state. It pervades all states, but is not a state of something else. It is entirely uncaused, independent, complete in itself, beyond time and space, mind and matter. It leaves no traces, there is nothing to recognize it by. You need not seek it, when all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you.
The Ultimate principle knows this beingness. The Ultimate principle cannot be approached or conditioned by any words. It is the source.
In terms of consciousness the Supreme is both creation and dissolution, concretion and abstraction, the focal and the universal. It is also neither. Words do not reach there, nor mind.
The Supreme is not affected by anything. The source is not affected by anything. The Supreme Reality is what makes everything possible. The Supreme makes everything possible, that is all.
The Universal Mind (chitakash) makes and unmakes everything. The Supreme (paramakash) imparts reality to whatever comes into being. To say that it is the universal love may be the nearest we can come to it in words. Just like love it makes everything real, beautiful, desirable.
One reaches the Supreme by renouncing all lesser desires. As long as you are pleased with the lesser, you cannot have the highest. Whatever pleases you, keeps you back. Until you realize the unsatisfactoriness of everything, its transiency and limitation, and collect your energies in one great longing, even the first step is not made. On the other hand, the integrity of the desire for the Supreme is by itself a call from the Supreme.
The Supreme is the easiest to reach for it is your very being. It is enough to stop thinking and desiring anything, but the Supreme.
In reality only the Ultimate is. The rest is a matter of name and form. As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace.....immersed in the deep silence of reality.
The universal witness, the Supreme Self never sleeps and never dies. Eternally the Great Heart beats and at each beat a new universe comes into being.
The Supreme is the sun. It is neither conscious or unconscious. Do not think of it in terms of consciousness or unconsciousness. It is the life, which contains both and is beyond both.

72. The Highest State

The Supreme State is universal, here and now; everybody already shares in it. It is the state of being.
There is no question of experiencing that Highest State, you are that state only.
When you reach the highest state you attain nothing, you will be liquidated, and you will realize that no attainment is required.
The highest state is the only natural state. It can be described only by negation, as uncaused, independent, unrelated, undivided, uncomposed, unshakeable, unquestionable, unreachable by effort. Because the highest state is supremely actual it is therefore possible, realizable, attainable.
The supreme state is not perceivable, because it is what makes perception possible. it is beyond being and not being. It is neither the mirror nor the image in the mirror. It is what is.....the timeless reality, unbelievably hard and solid.
The supreme state is neither conscious nor unconscious, it is the unselfconscious knowledge of life itself. It is the inexpressible monolithic reality.
The supreme state is entirely one and indivisible, a single solid block of reality. The only way of knowing it is to be it. The mind cannot reach it. To perceive it does not need the senses, to know it does not need the mind. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.
True Awareness, the Effulgent Light, The Ultimate State, those are only names, the meaning is the same, they are not literal. Whatever you may read is only the concepts of writers. Does it correspond with your personal knowledge?
When you cling to the body-mind you become separate from the manifested world and see different entities. In that state you will have all kinds of desires to improve yourself or somebody else. The next state is “I Amness”, in which every action is myself, every manifest thing is myself. In that state there is no question of improving. You are just manifestation, “I am everything”. Next is the unborn state, where there is no beingness to understand “I Am”. That is the highest state.
There is a state before this knowledge ‘I am’ comes upon you. If you are satisfied with ‘I am’ then you will reach the state where you consider yourself God and Brahman. But you will not go beyond it or prior to it. In the ultimate state lies the prior state. The prior state is the highest, best and original state. It is the state before this knowledge ‘I am’ ever dawned on you.
The ultimate state in spirituality is that state where no needs are felt at any time, where nothing is useful for anything.
The ultimate state is that state in which nothing exists, neither I, nor you, nor manifestation.
You must understand what you are, or what you could be when nothing is. When nothing is, you still are. What is that you? It is all one. The state when everything is and you still are, is understandable, but the state when nothing is, how can I be?
The highest state is the unborn state in which there is no experience of mind. In the process of trying to find your true identity you might even give up the Self, and in giving up the Self, you are That.
The siddha is one who has attained the ultimate state, in which God, devotee, maya and Brahman cease to exist. In the ultimate state there is no experiencer or beneficiary, because the siddha is without the concept ‘I am’. The siddha does not know that he exists in that state, because knowingness is completely obliterated.
The Eternal has no fragrance of “I Am” about itself. It does not know It is.
In the highest state there is no experiencer. Experience, experiencing, experiencer..... everything is one.
Call it silence, or void, or abeyance, the fact is that the three.....experiencer, experiencing, experience.....are not. In witnessing, in awareness, self-consciousness, the sense of being this or that, is not. Unidentified being remains. With reference to anything, it is the opposite. It is also between and beyond all opposites. It is neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, nor midway, nor beyond the two. It is by itself, not with reference to anything which may be called experience or its absence.
The ultimate state is that state in which there is a total end to this body, name and form. When there is no form, shape, colour, or name, who is there to ask anything?
The Ultimate state must come to you. You can only watch whatever happens - there is nothing you can do to get it.
Life is seeking, one cannot help seeking. When all search ceases, it is the Supreme State.
When you are really fed up with everything, including your sadhanas. 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.
When you have no feeling of happiness or misery and no feeling of “I Amness” you are in the state of Nirguna. For that you must recede back, prior to the thoughts.
The one who realizes that the consciousness is being witnessed by the universal consciousness has reached the Ultimate.
Once you get a glimpse of your true state you must stabilize there for eternity.
You are already the Ultimate, do not try to be something.
There is really no going, either beyond or prior to. That state is there. Man thinks he has to go from one state to another, but there is no going. One thinks that certain misconceptions have come to one, and that is the whole trouble. All those concepts are movements in consciousness, and once the consciousness itself disappears the movements that have come with it also disappear. You are already in that state, there is nothing to acquire.
The witnessing of the manifest world does not happen to that Ultimate principle. When you observe something you receive it, record it, and deliberate over it, therefore you are involved in it. The Ultimate does not receive or record the passing show.
The ultimate seer cannot see by seeing; but without seeing the seer sees. The ultimate seer does not belong to the realm of the beingness.
The highest state has transcended the beingness, but the beingness is still there. Together with the beingness is the Absolute.....the deep blue, benign state, without eyes.
The supreme state is that which cannot be given name and form, for it is without quality and beyond consciousness. You may say it is like a point in consciousness, which is beyond consciousness. It is the very centre of consciousness, and yet beyond consciousness. Like a hole in something is both in it and not of it. It is like an opening in the mind through which the mind is flooded with light. The opening is not even the light, and is just an opening. From the mind’s point of view an opening is just void, absence, an opening for the light of awareness to enter the mental space. By itself light can only be compared to a solid, dense, rocklike, homogeneous and changeless mass of pure awareness, free from the mental patterns of name and shape.
The state of beingness transcended is like a deer taking rest in the shadow of a tree. The colour of the shadow is neither light nor very dark, this is the borderland. neither jet black nor very bright, halfway between them, that is that shadow. Deep dark blue, like clouds, that is that state. That is also the grace of the Sat-Guru. Everything is flowing out of that state, but this principle does not claim anything, is not involved in anything that is coming out of it, but this beingness is available. This is the state of the jnani, this is a very, very, rare, natural samadhi state, the most natural state, the highest state.
The eternal is that One which you have not forgotten. That eternal state is beyond the state of remembering and forgetting.
Just as in the seed the whole tree is latent, so in the droplet “I Am” all three worlds are squeezed in. In the process of knowing that droplet, you are out of it and you watch the play as a witness. This droplet of knowingness, is a result of the food essence body; in understanding it, you are out of it. If this last step is taken, knowing that I, the Absolute, am not that droplet, the consciousness, it has to happen only once. There is no more involvement with the play of consciousness. You are in a state of no return, the eternal state.
Your true state is always there. It has not gone anywhere.

73. Absolute

There can be no experience of the Absolute as it is beyond all experience. On the other hand, the self is the experiencing factor in every experience, and thus, in a way, validates the multiplicity of experiences. The world may be full of things of great value, but if there is nobody to buy them, they have no price. The Absolute contains everything experienceable, but without the experiencer they are as nothing. That which makes the experience possible is the Absolute. That which makes it actual is the Self.
Absolutes should be experienced, not discussed. The Absolute is not an object to be recognized and stored up in memory, rather it is in the present and in feeling. It has more to do with the ‘how’ than with the ‘what’. It is in the quality, in the value. Being the source of everything, it is in everything.
How does the Absolute manifest itself? It gives birth to consciousness. All else is in consciousness.
I, the Absolute, am not the state of being.
As Absolute, I am timeless, infinite, and I am awareness without being aware of the awareness. As infinity I express myself as space, as timelessness I express myself as time. Unless there is space and duration I cannot be conscious of myself. When space and time are present there is consciousness, in consciousness the total manifestation takes place, and various phenomena come into being.
I, the Absolute, by Myself, Awareness, descend into this consciousness, and in this consciousness I express Myself in manifold ways, in innumerable forms. There is no question of individuality.
Your pure Absoluteness has no place, no shape or form. The knowledge ‘I am’ also has no shape or form. It appears and is only an illusion.
The Absolute is not this ‘I-am-ness’. ‘I-am-ness’ is sattva-parashakti, and it is the highest knowledge, but it is not ‘I’.
The Absolute is unicity, by Itself, but it is expressed in manifold ways and forms.
The Absolute state cannot be remembered, because it cannot be forgotten.
The Absolute is that principle which observes the creation and the state prior to creation, which is the no-being-ness state, the no-consciousness state, the no-I-Amness state.
We have a core ancestor, the witness of whatever is happening, the single berry out of which the very forest of shrubs with berries have grown. The ancestor is there prior to ignorance. The ancestral state of the Absolute is prior to ignorance. In the womb of ignorance the knowledge was there, and that knowledge, in maturity, had become this profuse manifestation.
The Absolute cannot be understood. Whatever you understand, you are not that. In non-understanding, you understand yourself.
The Absolute does not know himself. The Absolute does not need anything. In the Absolute there is no need of any kind, even the need to know oneself. The Absolute does not know itself, but the Absolute is offered an opportunity to understand itself through this “I Amness”, a food product.
The Absolute does not know itself at all. Our true state is not knowledge but prior to knowledge. Before beingness came to you, you were all the time there, but you were not conscious of it.
The Absolute is the state prior to the consciousness, and is always there. The Absolute, the Awareness, is the supporting principle for the consciousness.
The Absolute is beyond the consciousness which is manifest. The Absolute has no connection with this consciousness principle, but without the Absolute, consciousness cannot be. The Absolute is the support of the principle of consciousness.
The Absolute is without any external support, being totally self-supporting, yet it is itself the support for everything manifest.
Some people believe I am the cause of the consciousness, the lila (play), but I am not the cause, I am the support.
The Absolute state is the state prior to consciousness. The Absolute state is always there. It is the substratum of everything.
The Absolute unmanifest is what Is. Whatever we think about that Absolute state can only be a concept, until the consciousness ends and we are in the Absolute state.
In the Absolute state there is no one to be conscious, so there is no question of reaching the Absolute state as long as consciousness is present. The Absolute state is where knowledge is absorbed in knowledge, and knowledge is not aware of itself.
To realize your own self you must be at the borderline between “I Am” and “Not I Am”. If that “I Amness” is not there, you the Absolute are.
The “I Am” and the Absolute are not two. There is only one state, not two. When the “I Amness” is there, in that consciousness you will have many experiences, but the “I Am” and the Absolute are not two. In the Absolute the “I Amness” comes and then the experience takes place.
In the Absolute there is no individuality, no memory that I am this or that, but there is continual stirring. In the Absolute I have no occasion to say that I exist, because It is in eternity. I do not make any comments about my existence.
In the Chandogya Upanisad there is a reference to the Absolute state feeling alone and the desire to be many. This can occur at the threshold of beingness, but the ultimate state is beyond the grasp of the Upanisads.
That spark, the speck of consciousness which has delivered the universe, I the Absolute am not that speck.
There have been many dissolutions of cosmoses and universes, so also aeons have come and gone, but I the Absolute remain untouched, and my kingdom is ever quiet.
Because of the existence of the Absolute Parabrahman state a lot of incarnations have come and gone, but the Absolute remains untainted by the movement of all these incarnations.
I the Absolute am not that “I Am”
At one stage everything is yourself, sun, moon, dirt. That is the Self. All are your manifestation. But you are still beyond that. Consciousness means this world, this manifestation. If I is considered as “I Amness” then all this manifestation is myself, but one step higher, I the Absolute, am not the earth, the fire, the water, the air, nor the space. I am unblemished, untouched by anything.
The Absolute is permanent, illusion is impermanent. The Absolute always is. In the coexistence of the Absolute and Maya there is no time. The Absolute is not time-bound. Beyond illusion there is no such thing as time.
The Absolute has the aid of this five elemental beingness and body available to It to express Itself. The Absolute has nothing to do with beingness, made up of the raw material of the five elements, except to express Itself through that.
World is experiential, but you the Absolute, are non-experiential.
The Absolute is aloof.
I, the Absolute, am not the state of being. I, the Absolute, am the witness of my beingness, which is the total manifestation. I, the Absolute, am not the personal ‘I’. The personal ‘I’ cannot tolerate the impersonal beingness and is afraid of death. The factual, eternal I, the Absolute, has no fear of death. Since you identify with something unreal, there is the fear of death. You watch, nourish and protect the personal entity “I” so that it may continue on. But you watch, nourish, protect and guard that which you are not in actuality. Even the dissolution of the manifest universe, the Brahman, cannot destroy the Self. Prior to, during, and after the dissolution, I, the Absolute, ever prevail, untouched, untainted, and unchanged.
The Absolute is not affected. The eternal state prevails in spite of all happenings. Whatever tangible and visible world there is merges into nothingness. However that nothingness is also a state.....so that nothingness also goes into the Absolute state.
The Absolute cannot be caught in the domain of your experience.
The end is the beginning. You end where you start.....in the Absolute.
The Absolute alone prevails. There is nothing but the Absolute.

74. The Source

Look back, look back, go to the source, the seed.
By its very nature the mind is outward turned. It always tends to seek for the source of things among the things themselves. To be told to look for the source within, is, in a way, the beginning of a new life.
Go back to the source. Go back to the point from where you seem to have come. By meditation constantly return to that point, give full attention to that point. Go back to the source, take your stand in your original state.
Nobody existed prior to me.
The source and end are the same point. once this is understood, you are released from that point.
Consciousness itself is the source of everything.
In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there you are at home everywhere.
Find the source of the primary concept ‘I am’, and transcend it. Having transcended it you will not have anything to tell the world, because the world wants activities. So this knowledge will remain only with yourself and there will be no one interested in it.
You must witness all this trouble. You are to look straight at the face of it, the origin of it, the whole of it, and find out from where it is. Look at that centre from where this knowledge has appeared on you. Concentrate on that only. When you reach that core you will find rays of light emanating from it. Whatever you see is only the play of light. Merge into that centre, be one with it.
Be in that source which is the light behind consciousness, You are not the consciousness. What is happening is that Mula-Maya.
Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to the source and abide there. It is not in the sky nor in the all-pervading ether. God is all that is great and wonderful. I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing. Yet all comes out of me.....the source is me. The root, the origin is me.
The total is open and available, but you will not take it. You are attached to the little person you think yourself to be. Your desires are narrow, your ambitions.....petty. After all, without a centre of perception where would be the manifested? Unperceived, the manifested is as good as the unmanifested. And you are the perceiving point, the non-dimensional source of all dimensions. Know yourself as the total. There is enough space in a point for an infinity of universes. There is no lack of capacity. Self-limitation is the only problem. But you cannot run away from yourself. However far you go, you come back to yourself and to the need of understanding this point, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything.
People stop at seeing the manifest only. Go behind the manifest and see that the manifest and unmanifest are not two.....they are one. The manifest is seen as dark, the unmanifest as light, but what is is the same thing.....That which perceives both. Go to the source without which neither light or darkness could be cognized. The source is the subject, not an object.
There are levels of consciousness, but not in awareness. Awareness is of one block, homogeneous. Its reflection in the mind is love and understanding. There are levels of clarity in understanding, and intensity in love, but not in their source. The source is simple and single, but its gifts are infinite. Do not take the gifts for the source, realize yourself as the source.
The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source. The source is the Inexhaustible Possibility.

75. Awareness

Here and now, through all your bodies and souls shines awareness, the pure light of chit (universal consciousness). 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. Find the spark of life that weaves the tissues of your body and be with it. It is the only reality the body has. The spark of life is beyond time. Birth and death are but points in time. Life weaves eternally its many webs. The weaving is in time, but life itself is timeless. Whatever name and shape you give to its expressions, it is like the ocean..... never changing, ever changing.
Awareness comes as if from a higher dimension.
There is no proprietor behind the feeling of awareness. It only is. It is beyond description, words cannot be of any use. That is the permanent state and this manifestation is only its movement.
While the mind is centred in the body, and consciousness is centred in the mind, awareness is free. The body has its urges, and mind its pains and pleasures. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert, and unafraid, without desire and fear. Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself.
The element of pure cognition, is awareness free from all personal distortions. Unless you admit the reality of chit, you will never know yourself. The body and the mind are only symptoms of ignorance, of misapprehension. Behave as if you were pure awareness, bodiless and mindless, spaceless and timeless, beyond where and when and how. Learn to accept its reality. Make your mind and body express the real which is all and beyond all.
True awareness (samvid) is a state of pure witnessing, without the least attempt to do anything about the event witnessed. Your thoughts and feelings, words and actions, may also be a part of the event; you watch all in the full light of clarity and understanding. You understand precisely what is going on, because it does not affect you. It may seem to be an attitude of cold aloofness, but it is not really so. Once you are in it, you will find that you love what you see, whatever may be its nature. This choiceless love is the touchstone of awareness. If it is not there, you are merely interested.....for some personal reasons.
There can be no experience beyond consciousness. yet there is the experience of just being. There is a state beyond consciousness, which is not unconscious. Some call it super-consciousness, or pure consciousness, or supreme consciousness. It is awareness free from the subject-object nexus.
Which is first, consciousness or awareness? 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. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens.
Awareness and consciousness are not the same. Awareness is primordial, it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. There can be no consciousness without awareness, but there can be awareness without consciousness, e.g.. as in deep sleep. Awareness is absolute, consciousness is relative to its content since consciousness is always consciousness of something. Consciousness is partial and changeful, awareness is total, changeless calm and silent, and is the common matrix of every experience.
Consciousness comes and goes, awareness shines immutably.
When there is a person there is also consciousness. ‘I Am’, mind, consciousness, denote the same state. If you say ‘I am aware’, it only means ‘I am conscious of thinking about being aware’. There is no ‘I Am’ in awareness.
When the content of consciousness is viewed without likes and dislikes, the consciousness of it is awareness. But there is still a difference between awareness as reflected in consciousness and pure awareness beyond consciousness. Reflected awareness, the sense: ‘I am aware’ is the witness, while pure awareness is the essence of reality. Reflection of the sun in a drop of water is a reflection of the sun, no doubt, but not the sun itself. Between awareness reflected in consciousness as the witness, and pure awareness, there is a gap, which the mind cannot cross.
Awareness is not limited to consciousness. It is of all that is. Consciousness is of duality. There is no duality in awareness. It is one single block of pure cognition.
There is the true Awareness, from which comes consciousness, which is the feeling “I Am”. Be one with your consciousness and that is all that you can do. Consciousness is manifesting itself through all this, and you are before the consciousness. The consciousness is the soul of this manifest world, and you, the Absolute, are the soul of the consciousness.
Since it is awareness that makes consciousness possible, there is awareness in every state of consciousness. Therefore the very consciousness of being conscious is already a movement in awareness. Interest in your new stream of consciousness takes you to awareness. It is not a new state, it is at once recognized as the original, basic existence, which is life itself and also love and joy.
Whatever may be the experience, true or false, the fact of an experience taking place cannot be denied. It is its own proof. Watch yourself closely, and you will see that whatever be the content of consciousness, the witnessing of it does not depend on the content. Awareness is itself, and does not change with the event. The event may be pleasant or unpleasant, minor or important, awareness is the same. Take note of the peculiar nature of pure awareness, its natural self-identity, without the least trace of self-consciousness, and go to the root of it, and you will soon realize that awareness is your true nature, and nothing you may be aware of you can call your own.
Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality. In awareness you seek not what pleases, but what is true.
At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its very nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.....effortlessly and spontaneously. As long as it is merely aware there are no problems. But when the discriminative mind comes into being and creates distinctions, pleasure and pain arise. During sleep the mind is in abeyance and so are pain and pleasure. The process of creation continues, but no notice is taken. The mind is a form of consciousness, and consciousness is an aspect of life. Life creates everything, but the Supreme is beyond all.
The universe is cradled in consciousness (maha tattva), which arises where there is perfect order and harmony (mama sattva). As all waves are in the ocean, so are all things physical and mental in awareness. Hence awareness itself is all important, not the content of it. Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly.
The five senses and the four functions of the mind.....memory, thought, understanding and selfhood; the five elements.....earth, water, fire, air and ether; the two aspects of creation.....matter and spirit, are all contained in awareness.
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.
Awareness does not feel “I Amness”. The knowledge of the entire universe merges into that highest state. The qualitative manifestation called Bhagavan, all the titles and statuses, and everything else, have merged into Nothingness. The Ishvara, the universal manifestation, has become one without the subjectivity even.
Realize that your true nature is that of pure light only, and both the perceived and the perceiver come and go together. That which makes both possible, and yet is neither, is your real being, which means not being a ‘this’ or ‘that’, but pure awareness of being and not-being. When awareness is turned on itself, the feeling is of not-knowing. When it is turned outward, the knowables come into being. To say: ‘I know myself’ is a contradiction in terms for what is ‘known’ cannot be ‘myself’.
The beginning of a new life is when awareness takes the place of consciousness. In consciousness there is the ‘I’, who is conscious, while awareness is undivided, awareness is aware of itself. The ‘I Am’ is a thought, while awareness is not a thought; there is no ‘I am aware’ in awareness. Consciousness is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of consciousness, but awareness is beyond all.....being as well as not-being.
The totality of conscious experiences is nature. As a conscious self you are part of nature. As awareness you are beyond. Seeing nature as mere consciousness is awareness.
Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutters of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.

76. Realization

Realization consists in discovering the source and abiding there.
What happened at realization? Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. I saw that in the ocean of pure awareness, on the surface of the universal consciousness, the numberless waves of the phenomenal worlds arise and subside beginninglessly and endlessly. As consciousness they are all me. As events they are all mine. There is a mysterious power that looks after them. That power is awareness, Self, Life, God, whatever name you give it. It is the foundation, the ultimate support of all that is, just like gold is the basis for all gold jewellery. And it is so intimately ours!
At the moment of realization you might see many things, e.g. you might see lights. These lights are atma-jyoti, the light of the Self, Self-illumination. You might also have visions of various gods. [Some yogis claim the awakening of Kundalini and the attainment of supernatural powers]. In the process of trying to experience and observe everything, it is easy to forget the way toward Self-realization. Some people are studying everything as if it were on a screen, and this means they still desire to be in an experiential state. They do not transcend that.
Hold on to the sense of ‘I Am’ to the exclusion of everything else. When thus the mind becomes completely silent, it shines with a new light and vibrates with a new knowledge. It all comes spontaneously. Just like emerging from sleep or a state of rapture you feel rested, and yet you cannot explain why and how you come to feel so well, in the same way on realization you feel complete, fulfilled, free from the pleasure-pain complex, and yet not always able to explain what happened, why and how. You can only put it in negative terms: ‘Nothing is wrong with me any longer.’ It is only by comparison with the past that you know that you are out of it. You are just yourself. Do not try to convey it to others. If you can, it is not the real thing. Be silent and watch it expressing itself in action. After the disappearance of everything, whatever remains, that you are, neti, neti.
All realization is only sharing. You enter a wider consciousness and share in it.
Some people have realized. They have stabilized in the consciousness. They have understood the godhead, that they are God, but could not transcend it. Brahman is brih (= world) together with aham (= I am). Brahman is ‘I am the world’.
My teacher told me to hold on to the sense ‘I Am’ tenaciously and not 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. My realization was neither sudden nor gradual. One is what one is timelessly. It is the mind that realizes as and when it gets cleared of desires and fears. 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. 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 the 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. Will the search come to an end? No, the seeker will dissolve, the search will remain. The search is the ultimate and timeless reality. Search 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 bliss of the real. But here we mean by search, the search for oneself as the root of being conscious, as the light beyond the mind. This search will never end, while the restless craving for all else must end, for real progress to take place. One has to understand that the search for reality, or God, or Guru, and the search for the self, are the same; when one is found, all are found. When ‘I Am’ and ‘God is’ become in your mind indistinguishable, then something will happen and you will know without a trace of doubt that God is because you are, you are because God is. The two are one.
I was undeceived, that is all. I used to create a world and populate it.....now I don’t do it any more. The mind ceased producing events. The ancient and ceaseless search stopped. I wanted nothing, expected nothing, accepted nothing as my own. There was no ‘me’ left to strive for. Even the bare ‘I Am’ faded away. The other thing that I noticed was that I lost all my habitual certainties. Earlier I was sure of so many things, now I am sure of nothing. My not knowing was in itself knowledge of the fact that all knowledge is ignorance, that ‘I do not know’ is the only true statement the mind can make.
I did nothing for my realization. It just happened. My teacher told me that the reality is within me. I looked within and found it there, exactly as my teacher told me. To see reality is as simple as to see one’s face in a mirror. Only the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all the levels, is needed to reflect the reality. Be clear and quiet, alert and detached, all else will happen by itself.
Self-realization is not an acquisition. It is more of the nature of understanding. Once arrived at, it cannot be lost.
Self-realization cannot come from outside. Unless it is within you, signifying you are that, you will not be able to understand it. Self-realization means I am completely full and do not want to know anything. Self-realization is not something to be reached, it must be there already. You are perfect right from the beginning. Your mind is trying to create a goal. Self-realization is already there. There is no spiritual progress. There is no path, no instruction, no method, no technique, at all. You are all One, not two.
You think it will take much time if you just wait for self-realization. But what have you to wait for when it is already here and now? You have only to look and see. Look at your self, at your own being. Do not rely on time. Time is death. Who waits.....dies. Life is now only. Do not talk about past and future.....they exist only in your mind.
There can be progress only in the preparation (sadhana). Realization is sudden. The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return. There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate in a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.
No one who is Self-realized can be still worried what will happen to him.
How can there be knowledge of the conditioned without the unconditioned? There must be a source from which all this flows, a foundation on which all stands. Self-realization is primarily the knowledge of one’s conditioning and the awareness that the infinite variety of conditions depends on our infinite ability to be conditioned and to give ride to variety. To the conditioned mind the unconditioned appears as the totality as well as the absence of everything. Neither can be directly experienced, but this does not make it non-existent.
Nothing is happening. Therefore there is no preconditioning. The vital force is moving, and it is in its nature to move. In the objective sense the things happen of themselves. In your dream the things happen of themselves. In the same way things are also happening here in life. Whatever work you do is at that stage of knowledge, but that work will not help one’s realization. Nothing helps Realization. There is no specific practice to reach Realization.
Self-remembrance is in the mind, self-realization is beyond the mind. The image in the mirror is of the face beyond the mirror. To fulfil a desire you must keep your mind on it. If you want to know your true nature, you must have yourself in mind all the time, until the secret of your being stands revealed.
To realize yourself you have to go within. You cannot realize yourself by studying what happens in nature.
You cannot see the true unless you are at peace. A quiet mind is essential for right perception, which again is required for self-realization.
You reach perfection by keeping quiet. Do your work in the world, but inwardly keep quiet. Then all will come to you. Do not rely on your work for realization. It may profit others, but not you. Your hope lies in keeping silent in your mind and quiet in your heart. Realized people are very quiet.
What is realized in self-realization? To know that the known cannot be me or mine, is liberation enough. Freedom from self-identification with a set of memories and habits, the state of wonder at the infinite reaches of the being, its inexhaustible creativity and total transcendence, the absolute fearlessness born from the realization of the illusoriness and transiency of every mode of consciousness.....flow from a deep and inexhaustible source. To know the source as the source, and appearance as appearance, and oneself as the source only, is self-realization.
Realization is of the fact that you are not a person. Therefore to realize cannot be the duty of the person whose destiny is to disappear. Its destiny is the duty of him who imagines himself to be the person. Find out who he is, and the imagined person will dissolve. Freedom is from something. What are you to be free from? Obviously, you must be free from the person you take yourself to be, for it is the idea you have of yourself that keeps you in bondage.
The realized man eats, drinks and sleeps. The same power that moves the universe, move him too. Higher knowledge, the knowledge of Reality, is inherent in man’s true nature. The realized man knows what others merely hear, but do not experience. The realized man is always right, there is not the least flaw in his understanding and compassion. In action, others betray their bondage. With the realized man the experience: “I am the world, the world is mine” is supremely valid.....he thinks, feels and acts integrally and in unity with all that lives. The realized man knows that nothing needs changing. Because he is no longer bound by appearances, he does not identify himself with the name and shape. He uses memory, but memory cannot use him.
A realized man is neither ordinary, nor extraordinary. Just being aware and affectionate.....intensely. He looks at himself without indulging in self-definitions and self-identifications. He does not know himself as anything apart from the world. He is the world. He is completely rid of himself. He is not rich, for he has nothing; he is not poor, for he gives abundantly. He is just property-less. He has lost the capacity for identifying himself with anything. He is without location, placeless, beyond space and time, beyond the world, beyond words and thoughts. He is without any distinction whatsoever into inner and outer, mine and yours, good and bad.
The attitude of the realized man is that of total detachment, aloofness, standing apart.
The realized man is not related to anybody and anything. Not even to a self, whatever that self may be. He remains forever.....undefined. He is within and beyond.....intimate and unapproachable. ‘You alone are.’
With some realization comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable.
The idea ‘I am self-realized’ is a mistake. There is no ‘I am this’, ‘I am that’ in the Natural State.
One who is self-realized is not even aware of his very existence. The self-realized principle witnesses the manifest principle, which is the life force together with the beingness. All actions happen spontaneously, everything just happens around him.
Everything is spontaneous, and this manifestation has no cause. If you ask the type of question such as: ‘Why so few become realized, Siddhas?’.....nothing can be pointed out as a cause. The question cannot be answered.
Actually no one is realized, there is only pure knowledge. It is only for reasons of communication that we say a person is realized. The knowledge has realized that it is knowledge; that is all that has happened. I am not the body, I am not the words. When knowledge recognizes this, it is called Self-Realization.

77. The Self

When I met my Guru, he told me: “You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I Am’, find your real self”. I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took me only three years to realize my true nature. My Guru died soon after I met him, but it made no difference. I remembered what he told me and persevered.
The urge to find oneself is a sign that you are getting ready. The impulse always comes from within. Unless your time has come, you will have neither the desire nor the strength to go for self-enquiry wholeheartedly.
Search for what you are. Without it all is trouble. Find out who you are, how did you come to live, longing for truth, goodness, and beauty in a world full of evil.
As long as you are engrossed in the world, you are unable to know yourself. To know yourself turn away your attention from the world, and turn it within.
‘Nothing is me’ is the first step. ‘Everything is me’ is the next. Both hang on the idea that ‘there is a world’. When this too is given up, you remain what you are.....the non-dual Self. You are it here and now.
If you say that you do not know your self, how do you know that you do not know your self? Your direct insight tells you that yourself you know first, for nothing exists to you without your being there to experience its existence. You imagine you do not know your self because you cannot describe yourself. Whatever can be described cannot be your self, and what you are cannot be described. You can only know your self by being yourself without any attempt at self-definition and self-description. Once you have understood that you are nothing perceivable or conceivable, that whatever appears in the field of consciousness cannot be your self, you will apply yourself to the eradication of all self-identification, as the only way that can take you to a deeper realization of your self. You literally progress by rejection. to know that you are neither in the body, nor in the mind, though aware of both, is already self-knowledge.
The mirror reflects the image, but the image does not improve the mirror. You are neither the mirror nor the image in the mirror. Having perfected the mirror so that it reflects correctly, truly, you can turn the mirror round and see in it a true reflection of yourself.....true as far as the mirror can reflect. But the reflection is not yourself.....you are the seer of the reflection. Understand it clearly.....whatever you may perceive you are not what you perceive. You can see both the image and the mirror. You are neither. Who are you? The answer is not in words. The nearest you can say in words is: I am what makes perception possible, the life beyond the experiencer and his experience. Separate yourself both from the mirror and the image in the mirror, and stand completely alone, all by yourself. You are yourself without knowing it. There is nothing wrong with you as the Self, it is the mirror that is not clear and true and therefore gives you false images. Learn to separate yourself from the image and the mirror, keep on remembering: I am neither the mind nor its ideas.
You can be considered under three aspects: the personal (vyakti), the super-personal (vyakta), and the impersonal (avyakta). The Avyakta is the universal and real pure ‘I’, the Vyakta is its reflection in consciousness as ‘I Am’, the Vyakti is the totality of physical and vital processes? On the level of the mind this is right, beyond the mental level not a word applies.
To look for the self on the mental level is futile. Stop searching, and see.....it is here and now. Wherever there is conflict, effort, struggle, striving, longing for a change, the self is not. There is but one self.....it is always now. The self is single.
Once you had the taste of your own self you will find it everywhere and at all times. Therefore it is so important that you should come to it. Once you know it, you will never lose it. But you must give yourself the opportunity through intensive, even arduous meditation.
The person alone is objectively observable. The observer is beyond observation. What is observable is not the real self.
Before you can accept God, you must accept yourself. The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs courage to go further. What helps is silence. Look at yourself in total silence, do not describe yourself. Look at the being you believe you are and remember.....you are not what you see. ‘This I am not.....what am I?’ is the movement of self-enquiry. Resolutely reject what you are not, until the real Self emerges in its glorious nothingness, its ‘not-a-thing-ness’.
I am not a thing, neither are you. I am neither matter nor energy, neither body nor mind.
You are neither the perceived nor the perceiver. You are not even the perceiving, but that which makes all this possible.
I am nowhere to be found! I am not a thing to be given a place among things. All things are in me, but I am not among things.
I am what I am, neither with form nor formless, neither conscious nor unconscious. I am outside all these categories. You cannot find me by mere denial; I am as well everything as nothing. Nor both, nor either. These definitions apply to the Lord of the Universe, not to me. I am complete and perfect. I am the beingness of being, the knowingness of knowing, the fullness of happiness. I cannot be reduced to emptiness!
If the world disturbs you, it is because you think yourself big enough to be affected by the world. It is not so. You are so small that nothing can pin you down. It is your mind that gets caught, not you. Know yourself as you are.....a mere point in consciousness, dimensionless and timeless. The point, by mere contact with the mind, draws its picture of the world. The picture is complex and extensive. Do not be misled by the picture, remain aware of the tiny point, which is everywhere in the picture.
You are the pure awareness that illumines consciousness and its infinite content.
I am neither conscious nor unconscious. I am beyond the mind and its various states and conditions. Distinctions are created by the mind and apply to the mind only. I am pure consciousness itself, unbroken awareness of all that is. I am 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.
Who talks? That which hears the question, answers it. Who is it? Not who, but what. I am not a person in your sense of the word, although I may appear a person to you. I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in which all happens. I am also beyond all existence and cognition, pure bliss of being. There is nothing I feel separate from, hence I am all. No thing is me, so I am nothing. The same power that makes the fire burn and the water flow, the seeds sprout and the trees grow, makes me answer your questions. There is nothing personal about me, although 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?
Life will escape, the body will die, but it will not affect me in the least. Beyond space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of existence.
There is no darkness in the midst of light. Self-forgetfulness is the darkness. When we are absorbed in other things, in the not-self, we forget the self. This is natural, but we also forget the self through excess of attachment. Wisdom lies in never forgetting the self as the ever-present source of both the experiencer and his experience.
Give you undivided attention to the most important in your life.....yourself. Of your personal universe you are the centre. Without knowing the centre you cannot know anything else. Just as you cannot see your face, but only its reflection in the mirror, so you can know only your image reflected in the stainless mirror of pure awareness. You get such a stainless mirror by removing stains. The ancient teaching is fully valid.....See the stains and remove them. The nature of the perfect mirror is such that you cannot see it. Whatever you can see is bound to be a stain. Turn away from it, know it as unwanted. All perceivables are stains, the entire world is a stain, but the universe is of tremendous value, because by going beyond it you realize yourself. You will know why it came into being in the first instance when it ends. For you, it will end. It began now, it will end now. It does not end now because you do not let it. You do not want to let it end. All your life is connected with it. Your past and future, your desires and fears, all have their roots in the world. Without the world where are you, who are you? Find a foothold beyond, and all will be clear and easy.
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.
What is to be universal.....not as a concept, but as a way of life? Not to separate, not to oppose, but to understand and love whatever contacts you, is living universally. To be able to say truly: I am the world, the world is me, I am at home in the world, the world is my own. Every existence is my existence, every consciousness is my consciousness, every sorrow is my sorrow, and every joy is my joy.....this is universal life. Yet my real being, and yours too, is beyond the universe and, therefore beyond the categories of the particular and the universal. It is what it is, totally self-contained and independent.
There is no ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’. There is the Self, the only Self of all. Misled by the diversity of names and shapes, minds and bodies, you imagine multiple selves. We both are the Self. The talk of personal self and universal self is the learner's stage. Go beyond duality.
You must realize that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.
You are both the essence and the substance of all there is.
All is you and yours. There is nobody else. This is a fact.
You alone and the double mirror are there. Between the two, your forms and names are numberless. There is a painter painting a picture. The picture is called the world, the painter is called God. I am neither. I do not create, nor am I created. I contain all, nothing contains me.
The outer self and the inner both are imagined. The obsession of being an ‘I’ needs another obsession with a ‘super-I’ to get cured, as one needs another thorn to remove a thorn, or another poison to neutralize a poison. All assertion calls for a denial, but this is the first step only. The next is to go beyond both.
You can only be what you are in reality; you can only appear what you are not You have never moved away from imperfection. All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal. As the sun knows not darkness, so does the self know not the non-self. It is the mind, which by knowing the other, becomes the other. Yet the mind is nothing else but the self. It is the self that becomes the other, the not-self, and yet remains the self. All else is an assumption. Just as a cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it, so does assumption obscure reality without destroying it. The very idea of destruction of reality is ridiculous, the destroyer is always more real than the destroyed. Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation, is false. All is one.....this is the ultimate solution of every conflict.
In reality all existence, every form, is my own, within my consciousness. But I am beyond consciousness, and therefore, in consciousness I cannot say what I am. Yet I am. I cannot tell what I am because words can describe only what I am not. Who am I has no answer. No experience can answer it, because the self is beyond experience. Because the question ‘Who am I?’ has no answer in consciousness, it therefore helps to go beyond consciousness. I am and because I am, all is.
I cannot say that I know myself. I know that I am not describable nor definable. There is a vastness beyond the farthest reaches of the mind. That vastness is my home. That vastness is myself. And that vastness is also love.
It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. What you can point out as this or that cannot be yourself.
You need not know what you are. Enough to know what you are not. What you are you will never know, for every discovery reveals new dimensions to conquer. The unknown has no limits.
Only when you know yourself as entirely alien and different from the body, will you find respite from the mixture of fear and craving inseparable from the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea. Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from, only self knowledge can help you. By self-knowledge is meant full knowledge of what you are not. Such knowledge is attainable and final. But to the discovery of what you are there can be no end. The more you discover, the more there remains to discover.
Neither consciousness, nor the ‘I Am’ at the centre of it, are you. Your true being is entirely unselfconscious, completely free from all self-identification with what it may be, gross, subtle, or transcendental.
Being the source of both knowledge and power, the self is beyond both.
Truth and love are man’s real nature, and mind and heart are the means of its expression.
The very nature of the self is love. It is loved, loving and loveable. 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.
The self is being.....awareness.....bliss. Awareness of being is bliss.
It is your fixed idea that you must be something or other; that blinds you. By knowing yourself what exactly do you come to know? All that you are not. What you are, you already are. By knowing what you are not, you are free of it and remain spontaneously and effortlessly in your own natural state. Ultimately you are the denial of all you are not.
You cannot try to be your Self, because you are your Self.
The self is the source of all, and of all.....the final destination. Nothing is external.

78. The Original State

There are two states of myself: One is time-bound, and proceeds from a particular point to a particular point, where that which was perceptible becomes imperceptible. The second is my original sate, which was imperceptible and remains. The two states are merely to be understood, there is nothing else to be done.
Your original state, the real state, is that state in which you were before you acquired this knowledge ‘I Am’. Only after you got this knowledge ‘I Am’ did you identify with the body-mind. Everything that you have acquired will go, but your original state is the Truth, and it will remain.
I take my stand in the original state where I was not aware that I am.
The original state is reached when everything has been given up, when nothing creates attachment any longer, when there is attachment to neither knowledge nor worldly pleasures, when there is no attachment for even consciousness, when all impurity of any kind has disappeared.
Once this consciousness is made clean of anything, you automatically reach the original state. In the original state all knowledge will be there. All that is necessary to know your original state is to understand, give up self-identification with the body, and realize that you have no form or name.
Your true nature is such that you are not aware of the consciousness or the waking and sleep states.
People come to the Guru with a certain set of concepts. He holds the mirror before them of what they are as phenomena, and ultimately they realize that as phenomena they are nothing, and when consciousness departs they will reach their original state which was before the body-cum-consciousness arose. In that original state there was no experience, even now any experience that one thinks one has is only a concept. In that state before consciousness arose, there was no query of “Who am I?” because there was no one who wanted to know that answer. This question arises only in consciousness. Anything in consciousness is only a concept and therefore it has to be wrong.

79. Impersonal Being

Nothing stops you from being a jnani here and now, except fear. You are afraid of being impersonal, of impersonal being.

80. Causes and Causation

Causation means succession in time of events in space, the space being physical or mental. Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind. Nothing in existence has a particular cause. The entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing, and nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is incorrect. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite, and it is a manifestation, or expression, of a principle fundamentally and totally free.
All that happens is the cause of all that happens.
Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen.
In every event the entire universe is reflected. The ultimate cause is untraceable. The very idea of causation is only a way of thinking and speaking. We cannot imagine uncaused emergence. This, however, does not prove the existence of causation.
There is no such thing as a separate person. That which does not exist cannot have a cause. Even taking the empirical point of view, it is obvious that everything is the cause of everything, that everything is as it is, because the entire universe is as it is.
To realize the Eternal is to become the Eternal, the whole, the universe, with all it contains. Every event is the effect and the expression of the whole, and is in fundamental harmony with the whole. All response from the whole must be right, effortless, and instantaneous. It cannot be otherwise if it is right. Thought feeling and action must be one and simultaneous with the situation that calls for them. It comes from him who was present at your birth and will witness your death.
The word ‘accidental’ means something to which no known law applies. When I say everything is accidental, uncaused, I only mean that the causes and laws according to which they operate are beyond our knowledge, or even imagining. Not all laws of being are known and not all events are predictable. We call an event accidental when its causes are untraceable. If you call what you take to be orderly, predictable, to be natural, then what obeys higher laws and is moved by higher powers, may be called spontaneous. Thus two natural orders: the personal and predictable, and the impersonal and unpredictable. As you grow in knowledge and insight, the borderline between these lower and higher natures keeps on receding, but the two remain until they are seen as one. For, in fact, everything is most wonderfully inexplicable! 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.
For everything there are innumerable causal factors. But the source of all that is, is the Infinite Possibility, the Supreme Reality, which is you, and which throws its power and light and love on every experience. But this source is not a cause, and no cause is a source. Therefore everything is uncaused. You may trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is because the universe is as it is.
Things are as they are, and nobody in particular is responsible. The idea of personal responsibility comes from the illusion of agency.
You are to be accused for responsibility for all that is happening. Except you, who could be the accused? Who is there but you, your sense of “I Amness”? In your beingness, millions of sins are committed and now you want to evade responsibility by clinging to, and hiding within, an individuality. All these happenings are your own creations only.
As long as you believe yourself to be a body, you will ascribe causes to everything. I do not say things have no causes. Each thing has innumerable causes. It is as it is, because the world is as it is. Every cause in its ramifications covers the universe. For whatever happens, all the universe is responsible, and you are the source of the universe.
All the time you look for origins and causes . Causality is in the mind only. Memory gives the illusion of continuity, and repetitiveness creates the idea of causality. When things repeatedly happen together, we tend to see a causal link between them. It creates a mental habit, but a habit is not a necessity.
Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause. Consciousness contains all. In consciousness all is possible. You can have causes if you want them, in your world. Another may be content with a single cause.....God’s will. The root cause is one: the sense “I Am”.
Once you create for yourself a world in time and space, governed by causality, you are bound to search for and find causes for everything. You put a question and impose an answer. From the highest point of view the world has no cause. Everything is uncaused.
Do not worry so much about causation, as things themselves are transient causes do not matter. Let comes what comes, and let go what goes.
The urge to achieve is also an expression of the total universe. It merely shows that the energy potential has risen at a particular point. It is the illusion of time that makes you talk of causality. When the past and the future are seen in the timeless now, as parts of a common pattern, the idea of cause and effect losses its validity, and creative freedom takes its place.

81. Creation

The world consists of matter, energy, and intelligence. They manifest themselves in many ways. Desire and imagination create the world and intelligence reconciles the two, and causes a sense of harmony and peace. To me it all happens. I am aware, yet unaffected.
Creation - reflection - rejection : Brahma - Vishnu - Shiva : this is the eternal process. All things are governed by it. The One includes the Three, and you are the One, and you shall be free of the world process.
After the stage of creation, comes the stage of examination and reflection, and finally the stage of abandonment and forgetting. The consciousness remains, but in a latent, quiet state.
Consciousness is pure in the beginning and pure in the end. In between it gets contaminated by imagination which is at the root of creation. To know it as it is, is realization and timeless peace.
Neither God nor the universe have come to tell you that they have created you. The mind obsessed by the idea of causality invents creation, and then wonders who is the creator? The mind itself is the creator. Even this is not quite true for the created and its creator are one. The mind and the world are not separate. Understand that what you think to be the world is your own mind. ‘I Am’ is an ever-present fact, while ‘I am created’ is an idea.
Be aware that whatever happens, happens to you, by you, through you, that you are the creator, enjoyer, and destroyer, of all you perceive. Then you will not be afraid.

82. Dissolution

Evolution will be heading finally towards dissolution, towards destruction.

83. Love

I love those who are in search of light.
Are awareness and love one and the same? Of course. Awareness is dynamic, love is being. Awareness is love in action. By itself the mind can actualize any number of possibilities, but unless they are prompted by love they are valueless. Love precedes creation. Without it there is only chaos.
Love is a state of being. Sex is energy. Love is wise, sex is blind. Once the true nature of love and sex is understood there will be no conflict or confusion.
Without love all is evil. Life itself without love is evil.
Life is love and love is life. What keeps the body together but love? What is desire but love of the self? What is fear but the urge to protect? And what is knowledge but the love of truth? The means and forms may be wrong, but the motive behind is always love.....love of the me and the mine. The me and the mine may be small, or may explode and embrace the universe, but love remains.
You love yourself. 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.
When you are hurt, you cry. Why? Because you love yourself. Do not bottle up your love by limiting it to the body, keep it open. It will then be love for all. When all the false 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.
Try to be that love which is not conditioned by the body-mind. If you are that love, it is total, complete love, but if it arises out of your body-mind, that is the root cause of your misery. Detachment comes only after you are free from bodily love. Be free from the body-mind state and be in the state of love, and that will be the source of all bliss.
If you feel that stream of love flowing, it is your own pure consciousness which is flowing. Do not think that you are loving somebody, or caring for the Guru, or that the Guru must care for you. It is your own Self which is wanting to know and which is flowing with love. That love is the Self loving the Self.
That which you are, your true self, you love it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find your true self, 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 it.
Reality expressed in action makes the action meaningful and beautiful. What does the real gain through its expressions? Nothing whatsoever. What can it gain? But it is in the nature of love to express itself, to affirm itself, to overcome difficulties. Once you have understood that the world is love in action, you will look at it quite differently.
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.
Nothing can make you love. You are love itself.....when you are not afraid. Your very nature is love. Your own beingness is love and bliss. You have directed your love at objects. By stabilizing in beingness you collect all the love which was diffused and spread outside. It is not a question of loving others, but directly knowing what “you are”. This love is the universal love. Universal love is not directed at any particular person or thing, it is very much like space. Space does not say I am exclusively for so and so, does not make love privately to someone. That love is universal. Primary love is “love to be”, only after that can you think of loving others.
Love is will, the will to share your happiness with all. Being happy.....making happy.....this is the rhythm of love.
Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus of awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil nor ugliness. It hopes, it trusts, it loves.
Do not try to love somebody, be love. When you are love, that love will be useful to humanity. Most people limit their love to an individual.
The sun does not shine for individuals.
Total love is the very nature of consciousness. When this feeling arises there is nothing you can do.....how can one embrace the entire ocean.
The feeling of love for others, consciously and deliberately, cannot be done. That feeling of love must be understood, and then love will unfold itself. Those who have understood love for the Self, this consciousness, “I Am”, as the true love, have themselves become love. All has merged in them.
All the experiences of suffering are the result of love. The requisite for all this play of love and hate is that love for beingness, existence, which gives rise to all pain and miseries. You have to face it because you love to be. Prior to any love, that love for being is there.
This beingness itself is the love. It is most natural and therefore I love all others because I love myself. The fountain of my love for others springs from the love to be.
The sense of being is expressed through the body as a consequence of the all-pervading Absolute. This sense of being is deeply infatuated with itself and is termed atma-prem, Self-love. It is also guna, Siva, and Brahman. It is the Self-love that is functioning through different bodies. Since there is only this principle expressing itself, in different ways, through the different vehicles, there is no you, no “I”, no he.
This chemical which makes the body function is the smallest of the small, and the biggest of the big. It contains the entire universe, it is itself love and God. That chemical, the consciousness, provides the light which enables the world to get on. That love is not individual love, the indwelling principle in all beings is that love, the life force. Begin with this emotional love and dwell in your beingness.
Stop imagining yourself being or doing this and that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and loveable.
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.
Circumstance and conditions rule the ignorant. The knower of reality is not compelled. The only law he obeys is that of love.
The Supreme Reality manifests itself in innumerable ways. Infinite in number are its names and shapes. All arise, all merge in the same ocean, the source of all is one. Looking for causes and results is but the pastime of the mind. What is is loveable. Love is not a result, it is the very ground of being. Wherever you go, you will find being, consciousness and love. Why and what for make preferences?
People fight for what they imagine they love. If you go into the motives, you will find love, love of oneself and of one’s own. What is limited to a few cannot be called love. Love is boundless. All is loved and loveable. Nothing is excluded.
What is love? When the sense of distinction and separation is absent, you may call it love. To see myself in everybody and everybody in myself most certainly is love.
My thumb touches my forefinger. Both touch and are touched. When my attention is on the thumb, the thumb is the feeler and the forefinger.....the self. Shift the focus of attention and the relationship is reversed. I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at and experience the kind of consciousness it has: I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousnss.....love. You may give it any name you like. Love says: ‘I am everything’. Wisdom says: ‘I am nothing’. Between the two my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
In love there is not the one even, how can there be two? Love is the refusal to separate, to make distinctions. Before you can think of unity, you must first create duality. When you truly love, you do not say: ‘I love you’. Where there is mentation, there is duality.
In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds. Love in freedom is love of all. When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all you love each. One and all are not exclusive.
All devotion, liking, and love, is dissolved for a jnani, but whatever he does is for others.

84. Imagination

I make no distinction between the body and the universe. Each is the cause of the other; each is the other, in truth. But I am out of it. The moment you allow your imagination to spin, it at once spins out a universe. There is only imagination. It has absorbed you so completely that you just cannot grasp how far from reality you have wandered. No doubt imagination is richly creative, universe within universe are built on it. Yet they are all in space and time, past and future, which just do not exist.
It is the mystery of imagination, that the world seems to be so real. You are a slave of your imagination. ‘Here I am sitting in front of you. What part of it is imagination?’ The whole of it. Even time and space are imagined. ‘Does it mean that I do not exist?’ I too do not exist. All existence is imaginary.
If you diligently investigate the knowable, it dissolves, and only the unknowable remains. But with the first flicker of imagination and interest the unknowable is obscured and the known comes to the forefront.
Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable, can be yourself, you are free of your imaginations. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realization. We miss the real by lack of attention, and create the unreal by excess of imagination.

85. Ignorance

The primary ignorance is about our “I Amness”. We have taken it as the Ultimate, that is ignorance. We presume that this consciousness is the eternal, the Ultimate, that is the mistake. This “I Am” principle is there provided the waking state and deep sleep are there. You are not the waking state, you are not the deep sleep, you the Absolute are not that “I Am”.
Ignorance and knowledge are in the mind, not in the real.
Knowledge is relative to the known. In a way it is the counterpart of ignorance. Where ignorance is not, where is the need for knowledge? By themselves neither ignorance nor knowledge have being. They are only states of mind, which again is but an appearance of movement in consciousness which is in its essence immutable.
Before you ask about ignorance, enquire first: who is the ignorant? When you say you are the ignorant, you do not know you have imposed the concept of ignorance over the actual state of your thoughts and feelings. Examine them as they occur, give them your full attention and you will find that there is nothing like ignorance, only inattention.
An ignorant man is ignorant of his ignorance. You can say that ignorance does not exist, for the moment it is seen it is no more. Therefore you may call it unconsciousness or blindness. To know that you do not know, and do not understand, is true knowledge, the knowledge of a humble heart.
Ignorance never was. Truth is in the discovery, not in the discovered. And to discovery there is no beginning and no end. Question the limits, go beyond, set yourself tasks apparently impossible.....this is the way.

86. Me and Mine

Attachment is born along with the sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. Find the true meaning of these words and you will be free of all bondage. You have a mind which is spread in time. One after another all things happen to you, and the memory remains. The memory of past pains and pleasures, which are essential to all organic life, remains as a reflex, dominating behaviour. This reflex takes the shape of ‘I’ and uses the body and the mind for its purposes, which are invariably in search for pleasure or flight from pain. Recognize the ‘I’ as it is, a bundle of desires and fears, and the sense of ‘mine’ as embracing all things and people needed for the purpose of avoiding pain and securing pleasure. Created by the mind, the ‘I’ and the ‘mine’ are false ideas, having no foundation in reality, and they rule their creator as long as it takes them to be true. When questioned, they dissolve. The ‘I’ and ‘mine’, having no existence in themselves, need a support which they find in the body. The body becomes their point of reference. For reality to be, the ideas of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ must go. They will go if you will let them. Then your normal natural state reappears, in which you are neither the body nor the mind, neither the ‘me’ nor the ‘mine’, but in a different state of being altogether. It is pure awareness of being, without being this or that, without any self-identification with anything in particular, or in general. In that pure light of consciousness there is nothing, not even the idea of nothing. There is only light.
Conscious merit is mere vanity.
Finally come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’.

87. Surrender

The true teacher will not imprison his disciple in a prescribed set of ideas, feelings, and actions. On the contrary, he will show him the need to be free from all ideas and set patterns of behaviour. Satsang, the company of the noble, does not mould, it liberates. Beware of all that makes you dependent. Most of the so-called ‘surrenders to the Guru’ end in disappointment, if not in tragedy. Fortunately an earnest seeker will disentangle himself in time, the wiser for the experience.
Surrender to the Guru.....why exteriorize? Surrender to your own self, of which everything is an expression. Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realize your true nature. Verbal self-surrender, even when accompanied by feeling, is of little value and breaks down under stress. At best it shows an aspiration, not an actual fact.
When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one’s past, present, and future, with one’s physical and spiritual security and standing, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty; then the Guru is not important, for the disciple has broken the shell of self-defence. Complete self-surrender by itself is liberation.

88. Gunas

It is all the play of the gunas. When I identify myself with them, I am their slave. When I stand apart, I am their master.
Once consciousness or knowledge ‘I am’ is in existence, it cannot stand still. Consciousness is equivalent to ‘movement’. All movement takes place through the gunas. The gunas are inherent in the knowledge ‘I am’. Consciousness continues to vibrate and expresses itself through the gunas. The gunas act according to the form that has resulted from a particular food. Action and behaviour result from the combinations of the gunas.
Guna is the quality of beingness. Beingness is the three-aspected sattva guna.
Sattva is the essence of the food you eat. The body is nothing but food for the consciousness. The quality of sattva is the beingness or the knowledge that we are, the ‘I’-consciousness. During meditation sattva quality becomes predominant, and consequently the mind become purified, then knowledge of the Self is possible. The quality of sattva is this knowledge, this ‘I’-consciousness, this beingness.
The sattva guna is the thread around which Brahman and the manifest universe are strung.
There is primordial sattva, moolasattva, the origin of sattva, the original essence, present in the body, which produces the knowledge that you exist.
This quality of beingness, the knowledge ‘I am’, cannot tolerate itself. It cannot bear itself alone, just knowing itself. Therefore Rajoguna takes the beingness for a journey in various activities, so that it does not dwell only in itself. Tamoguna provides one with the facility to claim authorship or doership for all the activities, such as the feeling: ‘I am the doer.’ But the truth is that whatever is happening is not your doing, but happens because of the play happening in the three gunas. You are completely apart from that. You the Absolute are experiencing sattvaguna, the knowledge ‘I am’, but you are not ‘I-am-ness’.
The sattva is pure and strong always. It is like the sun. It may seem obscured by clouds and dust, but only from the point of view of the perceiver. Deal with the causes of obscuration.
Sattva is truth, goodness, harmony, beauty. Sattva does not make use of things and people.....it fulfils them.
The sattva guna, the universal harmony, plays its games against tamas and rajas, the forces of darkness and despair. In sattva there is always change and progress, in rajas there is change and regress, while tamas stands for chaos. The three Gunas play eternally against each other.
Sattva is the radiance of your real nature. You can always find it beyond the mind and its many worlds. But if you want a world, you must accept the three gunas as inseparable - matter, energy, life - one in essence, distinct in appearance. They mix and flow.....in consciousness.
Inertia (tamas) and restlessness (rajas) work together and keep clarity and harmony (sattva) down. Tamas and Rajas must be conquered before Sattva can appear.
Watch the influence of tamas and rajas in you and on you. Be aware of them in operation, watch their expression in your thoughts, words and deeds, and gradually their grip on you will lessen, and the clear light of sattva will emerge.
All the three gunas are bound by and charged with emotions, but are not the truth.
The three gunas, sattva, rajas, tamas, are in both matter and mind, because the two, matter and mind, are not separate. It is only the absolute that is beyond gunas. In fact, the gunas are but points of view, ways of looking. They exist only in the mind. Beyond the mind all distinctions cease.
The jnani is beyond the attributes of the three gunas and is beyond emotions. A jnani cannot be involved in thinking and emotions. This appearance and disappearance of the feelings and emotions is the very nature of the three gunas, and not your nature.
Whatever happens is happening only in the world of the gunas. By becoming increasingly detached from all worldly activities the gunas are transcended, and one no longer lives in their world. Involvement with the gunas results in desires for things from the world. Understanding that one is not the gunas results in desiring nothing.
The knowledge that ‘I Am’ has come to you out of your sattva guna that is beingness. The three gunas, sattva, rajas, tamas, are playing here in the manifestation. The quality of sattva is to know that you are, and to provide you with that basis on which to act. Rajas is the motivating factor, it makes you move about. Tamas is inertia, consolidation.
Your being as a person depends on violence to others. Your very body is a battlefield, full of dead and dying. Existence implies violence. There is little of non-violence in nature. Do you realize that as long as you have a self to defend, you must be violent? So we are all sub-human and only a few are human. It is clarity and charity that makes us human. The subhuman, the humanoids, are dominated by tamas and rajas, and the humans by sattva. Clarity and charity is sattva as it affects mind and action. But the real is beyond sattva.
All creation, every creature, is made up of the five elements, and the behaviour of each creature depends on the combination of the three gunas. There is no question of being responsible for anything that happens in the world. It is only by taking delivery of responsibility that one suffers.
Tamas obscures, rajas distorts, sattva harmonizes. Harmony and beauty, understanding and affection are all expressions of reality. It is reality in action, the impact of spirit on matter. With the maturing of the sattva all desires and fears come to an end. The real being is reflected in the mind undistorted. Matter is redeemed, spirit is revealed. The two are seen as one. They were always one, but the imperfect mind saw them as two.
Like water is shaped by the container, so is everything determined by conditions (gunas). But as light remains itself regardless of the colours it brings out, so does the real remain real, regardless of conditions in which it is reflected.

89. Action

If you are ignorant of your real being, whatever you do must turn to ashes. As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface, and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity. You must put in true worth before you can expect something real.
There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangle you in the results of your efforts.
You cannot avoid action. It happens, like everything else.
Where action is needed, action happens. Man is not the actor. His is to be aware of what is going on. His very presence is action. Be empty of all mental content, of all imagination and effort, and the very absence of obstacles will cause reality to rush in. The window is the absence of the wall, and it gives air and light because it is empty. If you really want to help a person, keep away. If you are emotionally committed to helping, you will fail to help. You may be very busy and be very pleased with your charitable nature, but not much will be done. A man is really helped when he is no longer in need of help. All else is just futility. What you can do is limited. The self alone is unlimited. Give limitlessly.....of yourself. All else you can give in small measures only. To help is your very nature. Even when you eat and drink you help your body. For yourself you need nothing. You are pure giving, beginningless, endless, inexhaustible. Do not rush into activity. When you see sorrow and suffering, be with it. Be with sorrow and lay bare its roots.....helping to understand is real help.
You imagine being and doing as identical. It is not so. The mind and the body move and change and cause other minds and bodies to move and change, and that is called doing, action. I see that it is in the nature of action to create further action, like fire that continues by burning, I neither act nor cause others to act. I am timelessly aware of what is going on.
It is because of the identification with the body that the activities are claimed.
If something is to happen, it will happen by itself. Although activities are happening spontaneously, you want to claim doership for them. Such a claim arises from your identity with the body-mind.
You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. It all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Nothing is by you and for you. It is because of your illusion that you are the doer you cannot keep your mind quiet. In reality things are done to you, not by you.
Any action that one takes depends on a certain image that one has about oneself, and that image remains only so long as consciousness is there.
The witness is that which says ‘I know’. The person says ‘I do’. Now to say ‘I know’ is not untrue.....it is merely limited. But to say ‘I do’ is altogether false, because there is nobody who does, all happens by itself, including the idea of being a doer.
There is a difference between work and mere activity. Activity is based on desire and fear, on longing to possess and enjoy, of fear of pain and annihilation. Work is by the whole for the whole, activity is by oneself for oneself.
Strive without seeking results. Why look for results? Striving itself is your real nature. You make striving painful by seeking results.
The saints and Yogis, by immense efforts and sacrifices, acquire many powers and can do much good in the way of helping people and inspiring faith, yet it does not make them perfect. It is not a way to reality, but merely an enrichment of the false.
Self-awareness tells you at every step what needs be done. When all is done, the mind remains quiet.
Do not believe yourself to be the doer. Let the actions happen through you. Do not say that these actions are good and those are bad. It is not your responsibility. Witness the consciousness acting, and have no involvement in the actions of the consciousness.
The universe is full of action, but there is no actor. There are numberless persons small and big and very big, who through identification, imagine themselves as acting, but it does not change the fact that the world of action (mahadakash) is one single whole in which all depends on, and affects all. The stars affect us deeply and we affect the stars. Step back from action to consciousness, leave action to the body and the mind, it is their domain. Remain as pure witness, until even witnessing dissolves in the Supreme.
What is done under pressure of society and circumstance does not matter much, for it is mostly mechanical, mere reacting to impacts. It is enough to watch oneself dispassionately 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 secret is in action, here and now. Discard whatever you think yourself to be and act as if you were absolutely perfect, whatever your idea of perfection may be. All you need is courage. Behave the best you know, do what you think you should. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, you can always correct them, only intentions matter. The shape things take is not within your power, the motives of your actions are. Action does not lead to perfection, perfection is expressed in action. When you realize your own being your behaviour will be perfect, spontaneously.
Beingness sustains itself by occupation, but whatever you gain has no value, and the one who gains also has no value. It is a hollow game, that is taken to be important in your ignorant phase. We give undue importance to things that come and go.
Attend to your duties.....they are not personal, they are the manifest consciousness, they belong to all. Do your work. When you have a moment free, look within. It is important not to miss the opportunity when it presents itself. Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. You must also have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. The silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing.
First words, then silence. One must be ripe for silence. Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly, you do not need to ask for help. Indifferent to results, you are willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for recognition and assistance. You just do what needs be done, leaving success and failure to the unknown. For everything is caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavour is but one. Yet such is the magic of man’s mind and heart that the most improbable happens when human will and love pull together.
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. In reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depth there is perfect peace.
There is no doer. It is an error to claim to be the doer. When beingness is there the manifestation is there, and the actions happen in the realm of that consciousness.
There is no question of doing. The seeker will understand that it was not his true nature which was doing all this, but that which was labelled ‘born’, that is the consciousness which has identified with the body and the states of waking and sleeping. The whole bundle is what was doing and you are not that.
Whatever efforts you make, either physically or intellectually, will be essentially the efforts of the body-mind. Let the body-mind do its work. There is nothing for you to do. Whatever happens will happen by itself, with your conviction that you are totally apart from body and mind.
There is only one thing to do: care for others as much as you care for yourself. Behave as if they were all yours. In truth you do not help others, because there are no others.
The daily life is a life of action. Whether you like it or not, you must function. Whatever you do for your own sake accumulates and becomes explosive; one day it goes off and plays havoc with you and your world. When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others is dangerous. How is one to work then? Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work’s own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning. Make nothing a means to something else. Bind not. God does not create one thing to serve another. Each is made for its own sake. Because it is made for itself, it does not interfere. You are using things and people for purposes alien to them, and you play havoc with the world and yourself.
When you realize the Truth what can you do? Many great men have come, and they can do nothing different, make no change.
Everybody wants to be active, but where do his actions originate? There is no central point; each action begets another, meaninglessly and painfully, in endless succession. The alternation of work and pause is not there. First find the immutable centre where all movement takes birth. Just like a wheel turns round an axle, so you must be always at the axle in the centre and not whirling at the periphery.
The false “I” takes the credit for doing things, but you are the knower, not the doer.
Any effort you make will land you in further trouble. From the Guru accept the knowledge, not the psuedo-identity. Just keep whatever you have heard from the Guru in mind as true, and then act in whatever way arises spontaneously.
Do not arrogate to yourself the doership of anything.....it is all happening. You do not realize that you do nothing. Everything happens. Just be.
Unless there is movement, restlessness, turmoil, you do not call it action. Chaos is movement for movement’s sake. True action does not displace, it transforms. A change of place is mere transportation; a change of heart is action. Just remember, nothing perceivable is real. Activity is not action. Action is hidden, unknown, unknowable. You can only know the fruit.
There is nothing to be done. Let it flow, just watch, do nothing about it.
Acting as a personality, an illusion, would not be correct. Whatever actions happen through you, without your involvement as a personality, are the appropriate, spontaneous actions.
Although you can do what you like, just know that you are not the doer, it is just happening.
You must have the conviction that you are the consciousness. Thereafter there is nothing for you to do, leave it to the consciousness to do what is to be done. Whatever happens, happens spontaneously.
Whatever is happening is spontaneous and all activity is part of the total manifestation.
I just do the needful. I do not worry about the future. A right response to every situation is in my nature. I do not stop to think what to do. I act and move on. Results do not affect me. I do not even care whether they are good or bad. Whatever they are, they are.....if they come back to me, I deal with them afresh. Or, rather, I happen to deal with them afresh. There is no sense of purpose in my doing anything. Things happen as they happen.....not because I make them happen, but it is because I am that they happen. In reality nothing ever happens. When the mind is restless, it makes Shiva dance, like the restless waters of the lake make the moon dance. It is all appearance, due to wrong ideas.
Until you know your Self you will not know what you need or do not need. Whatever you do until that moment, when you know your Self, is useless.
Once you know yourself, it is immaterial what you do.
Remember this “I Am” principle, and without the command or direction of this principle, do nothing.
Whatever spiritual things you aspire to know are all happening in this objective world, in the illusion. All your activities, material and spiritual, are in this illusion. All is dishonesty, fraud.
You imagine yourself to be in control, and you also imagine yourself to be responsible. Let go the illusion of personal control and personal responsibility. One implies the other. Both are in the mind only. There is a universal power which is in control and is responsible. Realize the One Mover behind all that moves and leave all to Him. I know for certain that all is one. Differences do not separate. Either you are responsible for nothing, or for everything. To imagine that you are in control and responsible for one body only is the aberration of the body-mind.
God is the All-Doer, the jnani is a non-doer. God himself does not say: “I am doing all.” To Him things happen by their own nature. To the jnani all is done by God.
A particular form has come about through a particular food, and through the combination of the gunas will act according to the form which it has taken. The worm will act like a worm, a man like a man, etc. The qualities are predestined. behaviour and action take place according to the combination of the three gunas.
For the jnani who has reached the state of no-beingness, the appearances will continue to happen. How does he act? It is something like acting in a dream world. In the dream world everything is happening, you are not doing anything. From that highest state only witnessing of the beingness and the activities of the beingness happen.
The jnani appears to hear and see and talk and act, but to him it just happens. The body-mind machine looks after it, but leaves him out of it. He does not worry about words and actions, they just happen and leave him unconcerned, for in his world nothing ever goes wrong.
Remembering yourself is not enough, action must follow conviction. If you think you lack courage it is because you are not fully convinced. Complete conviction generates both desire and courage. In meditation you consider the teaching received, in all its aspects and repeatedly, until out of clarity confidence is born, and with confidence.....action. Conviction and action are inseparable. If action does not follow conviction, examine your convictions, do not accuse yourself of lack of courage. Self-depreciation will take you nowhere. Without clarity and emotional assent of what use is will? Clarity is not enough. Energy comes from love.....you must love to act.....whatever the shape and object of your love. Without clarity and charity courage is destructive.
Action delayed is action abandoned. There may be other chances for other actions, but the present moment is lost.....irretrievably lost. All preparation is for the future, you cannot prepare for the present. Acting in the now is not much helped by your preparations. Clarity is now, action is now. Thinking of being ready impedes action, and action is the touchstone of reality.
To help is my nature. Setting things right is my very nature, which is satyam (the true), shivam (the good), sundaram (the beautiful). If a man comes, he is sure to get help. Because he was destined to get help, he came. I cannot help some and refuse others. All who come are helped, for such is the law. Only the shape help takes varies according to the need. He cannot get help from within because he will not listen. His mind is turned outward. But in fact all experience is in the mind, and even his coming to me and getting help is all within himself. Instead of finding an answer within himself, he imagines an answer from without. To me there is no me, no man, and no giving. All this is merely a flicker in the mind. I am infinite peace and silence in which nothing appears, for all that appears.....disappears. Nobody comes for help, nobody offers help, nobody gets help. It is all but a display in consciousness. The pure mind sees things as they are.....bubbles in consciousness. These bubbles are appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, without having been real. No particular cause can be ascribed to them, for each is caused by all and affects all. Each bubble is a body and all these bodies are mine. There is no power as separate from me. It is inherent in my very nature. Call it creativity. In whatever role I may appear and whatever function I may perform.....I remain what I am: the “ I Am” immovable, unshakeable, independent. What you call the universe, nature, is my spontaneous creativity. Whatever happens.....happens. But such is my nature that it all ends in joy.
It is total. It has not to do anything for Itself because It is perfect and complete in Itself.
Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutralizes the action. Everything happens, but there is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end it is as if nothing happened.

90. Bondage

The dream continues, you have not succeeded in waking up, because you have not understood that you are dreaming. This is the essence of bondage.....the mixing of the real with unreal. In your present state only the sense ’I Am’ refers to reality. The ‘what’ and the ‘how I am’ are illusions imposed by destiny. or accident.
One has got into bondage by identifying with a name and form. In truth one is that which is timeless, spaceless and without identity. We make the mistake of seeking truth with a form.
Your imaginary bondage is by habit only. You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates. Change your ways of feeling and thinking, examine them closely. Begin to question. The most obvious things are the most doubtful. You have spent so much time building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it. In fact demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered. All hangs on the idea ‘I Am’. Examine it very thoroughly. It lies at the root of every trouble. It is a sort of skin that separates you from the reality. The real is both within and without the skin, but the skin itself is not the real. This ‘I Am’ idea was not born with you. You could have lived very well without it. It came later due to your self-identification with the body. It created an illusion of separation where there was none. It made you a stranger in your own world, and made the world alien and inimical. Without the sense of ‘I Am’ life goes on. There are moments when we are without the sense of ‘I Am’, at peace and happy. With the return of ‘I Am’ the trouble starts.
A stage can be reached when one feels deeply that whatever is being done is happening, and on has not got anything to do with it. Next, that whatever is happening is not happening really. Whatever is happening is an illusion. Then one feels that one is being lived, that whatever one is doing, one is not doing, but is made to do it.
You think you are living, but you are merely being lived.
Am I free to desire? Oh no, you are compelled to desire. In Hinduism the very idea of free will is non-existent, so there is no word for it. Will is commitment, fixation, bondage. To be free in the world you must be free of the world. Otherwise your past decides for you and your future. Between what had happened and what must happen you are caught. Call it destiny or karma, but never.....freedom.
The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real, because you think of it all the time. Cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist. You need not forget; when desire and fear end, bondage also ends. It is the emotional involvement, the pattern of likes and dislikes which we call character and temperament, that create the bondage.
Whether you plan or do not plan, life goes on. But in life itself a little whorl arises in the mind, which indulges in fantasies and imagines itself dominating and controlling life. Life itself is desireless. But the false self wants to continue.....pleasantly. Therefore it is always engaged in ensuring one’s continuity. Life is unafraid and free. As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.
Abandon all self-concern, do not worry about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing. The basic anxiety for yourself must go. Give up the bondage of self-concern and be what you are.....intelligence and love in action.
Mind is the very foundation of your bondage and your liberation. The mind creates bondage and it also liberates.

91. Moksha-Liberation

Non-identification, when natural and spontaneous, is liberation.
To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite.....the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge.....liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you have created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream. Enquiry also wakes you up. You need not wait for suffering; enquiry into happiness is better, for the mind is in harmony and peace.
Externalization is the first step to liberation. if you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and just watch them. Step away and look. The physical events will go on happening, but by themselves they have no importance.
Few reach the state of complete dispassion and detachment. It is a very high state, the very threshold of liberation.
If you want to escape this vortex in which you are caught, you must go to the centre. Dive deep inside.
My Guru showed me my true nature.....and the true nature of the world. Having realized that I am one with, and yet beyond the world, I became free from all desire and fear. I did not reason out that I should be free.....I found myself free.....unexpectedly, without the least effort. This freedom from desire and fear remained with me since then. Another thing I noticed was that I do not need to make an effort; the deed follows the thought, without delay and friction, thoughts become self-fulfilling. The main change was in the mind; it became motionless and silent, responding quickly, but not perpetuating the response. Spontaneity became a way of life, the real became natural and the natural became real. And above all, infinite affection, love, dark and quiet, radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful, significant and auspicious.
Holy company will take you to the river, but the crossing is your own. Freedom cannot be gained nor kept without will-to-freedom.
Once the beingness, the “I Know”, has been extinguished and merged into the universal consciousness, there will be nothing to be the seed of the next birth. There will be no individuality. Passions and desires will have been assimilated into what is called the atmosphere, and be universal in that sense.
Freedom comes through renunciation. All possession is bondage.
To know the Self as the only reality, and all else as temporal and transient is freedom.
Liberation is from the personal. In liberation both the subject and object of ambition are no longer. Liberation is not the result of some means skilfully applied, nor of circumstances. It is beyond the causal process. Nothing can compel it, nothing can prevent it. We are free ‘here and now’, it is only the mind that imagines bondage. Nothing stands in the way of your liberation, and it can happen here and now, but for your being more interested in other things.
When the person is eliminated, nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being, awareness, love, will shine in full splendour. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.
There is a power in the universe working for enlightenment and liberation. We call it Sadashiva, who is ever present in the hearts of men. It is the unifying factor. Unity liberates. Freedom unites. Ultimately nothing is mine or yours, everything is ours. Just be one with yourself, and you will be one with all, at home in the entire universe.
Liberation is of the self from its false and self-imposed ideas. It is not contained in some particular experience, however glorious. One is always free.
Without the body, how can the idea ‘I-am-not-the-body’ come into being? The idea I-am-free’ is as false as the idea ‘I-am-in-bondage’. Find out the ‘I am’ common to both and go beyond.
One will be immediately liberated when one realizes: “I have nothing to do with the affairs of Prakriti and Purusa”. Understand that this is the universal play of Prakriti and Purusa. You are not that, and you are not in that. When you investigate this whole process you will find that you are not in it. Then you are free from the cycle.
You act in terms of an entity, identified with a body. Whatever name and form there is belongs to that material, and that material is not you. When the material disintegrates, what does the name refer to? Only one in ten million goes to the crux of the matter, analyzes what it is, comes to a conclusion, and gets liberated, all by himself. The one who gets liberated is the consciousness, there is no entity.
The concept “I Am” comes spontaneously and goes spontaneously. Amazingly when it appears, it is accepted as real. You are totally free when you have understood the unreality of that “I Am”. One who is completely rid of coming and going, and finally completely rid of the concept that “I Am”, is completely liberated.
Do not rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond the mind altogether.
Real liberation is to know that you are nothing. All your knowledge, including yourself, is liquidated.....then you are liberated.
Nothing, physical or mental, can give you freedom. You are free once you understand that your bondage is of your own making and you cease forging the chains that bind you.
Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one’s own, to be used. Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, the courage to believe that you are free already, and to act on it.
There is no bondage at all, bondage is imaginary. The only bondage is your constant memory that you are the body. There is nothing happening, nobody is bound, therefore there is no question of liberation.
There is only a total functioning of the manifest consciousness and there is no individual entity, therefore there is no question of liberation, or birth or death, or a doer doing anything.
In this process of functioning that becomes manifest, if you accept something as an individual event then it affects you as an individual. If you do not take delivery as an individual but as total functioning, then you are free of whatever is happening.
Liberation is a condition that is quiet and detached, and inescapably beyond the reach of all self-concern, all selfish consideration. You may call it death; to me it is living at its most meaningful and intense, for I am one with life in its totality and fullness.
Stay at the source of your being and then all chains will snap asunder and you will be liberated. You will transcend time, and you will be beyond the reach of time’s tentacles, and you shall prevail in Eternity. This is a state of ecstatic beatitude beyond words, the self subsiding blissfully in the Self, awareness in total quietude. This state can only be attained by drinking ceaselessly the nectar of the Guru’s sacred feet.....the guru-charan-amrita.

92. Perfection

It is the ever greedy mind that creates ideas of progress and evolution towards perfection.
Do not expect perfection. There is no perfection in manifestation.
You are after perfection.....in the future. We are intent on finding it.....in the now. The limited only is perfectible. The unlimited is already perfect. You are perfect, only you do not know it. Learn to know yourself. All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Make love of your self perfect. Give your self infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond.
You are already perfect, here and now. The perfectible is not you.
When you understand that you are perfect, only then do you know that a mistake has been made. Is there any time to correct the mistakes?
Perfection of the mind is the human task, for matter and spirit meet in the mind.

93. Change-The Unchangeable

Consciousness is always of movement, of change. There can be no such thing as changeless consciousness. Changelessness wipes out the consciousness immediately. A man deprived of outer and inner sensations blanks out, or goes beyond consciousness and unconsciousness into the birthless and deathless state. Only when spirit and matter come together consciousness is born.
Enjoyment is a state of mind.....it comes and goes. Its very impermanence makes it perceivable. You cannot be conscious of what does not change. All consciousness is consciousness of change.
The known, the changing, is what you live with. The unchangeable is of no use to you. It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable, that you are ready for the turning round and stepping into what can be described, when seen from the level of the mind, as emptiness and darkness. For the mind craves for content and variety, while reality is, to the mind, contentless and invariable.
Only the changeable can be thought of and talked about. The unchangeable can only be realized in silence. Once realized, it will deeply affect the changeable, itself remaining unaffected.
You are responsible only for what you can change. All you can change is only your attitude. There lies your responsibility.
You cannot change your circumstances, but your attitudes you can change.
Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change. You may change your body or your mind, but it is always something external to you that has changed, not yourself. Do not try to reform yourself, just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting. Only when the very idea of changing is seen as false and abandoned, the changeless can come into its own.
Truth is permanent. The real is changeless. What changes is not real. what is real does not change. What in you does not change? The observer in you does not perish.

94. Opposites

There is no knowledge separate as worldly knowledge and spiritual knowledge. There is no Guru and no disciple, there is no God and no devotee. There are no opposites.....they are a polaristic duality, not two separate parts, but two parts of the same one.
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 independent 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. I stand totally aloof from all transient things.
All manifestation is in the opposites: pleasure and pain, good and bad, high and low, progress and regress, rest and strife.....they all come and go together, and as long as there is a world, its contradictions will be there. There may also be periods of perfect harmony, of bliss and beauty, but only for a time. What is perfect, returns to the source of all perfection, and the opposites play on.

95. Good/Bad-Right/Wrong

Relatively what causes suffering is wrong, what alleviates suffering is right. Absolutely, what brings you back to reality is right, and what dims reality is wrong.
You accept certain things as good and virtuous, and reject other as bad or sinful, but these are only the concepts you have acquired in the world, and there is no basis for the distinction. Sin and virtue, merit and demerit are not what they appear. Usually the bad and the good are matter of convention and custom and are shunned or welcomed, according to how the words are used.
Whatever you do against your better knowledge is sin. Remembering your self is virtue, forgetting yourself is sin. True virtue is divine nature (svarupa). What you are really is your virtue. But the opposite of sin, which you call virtue, is only obedience born out of fear.
As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace. Sin and virtue refer to a person only. Without a sinful or virtuous person what is sin or virtue? At the level of the Absolute there are no persons; the ocean of pure awareness is neither virtuous nor sinful. Sin and virtue are invariably relative.
Selfishness is the source of all evil.
There is no good and no evil. In every concrete situation there is only the necessary and the unnecessary. The needful is right, the needless is wrong. In my real world even what you call evil is the servant of the good and therefore necessary. It is like fevers that clear the body of impurities.
I know no sin, nor sinner. Any such distinction and valuation do not bind me. Everybody behaves according to his nature. It cannot be helped, nor need be regretted.

96. Duality

All division is in the mind (chitta); there is none in reality (chit).
You have some experiences and you try to benefit from them, but remember that whatever is going to be of use to you ultimately is going to harm you. Wherever there is use there is also dis-use in this world of duality. Whatever you like is going to create harm for you. Whatever you like the most is, in the end, going to be most harmful for you, even when it is the Paramatman. Whatever appears on you as knowledge, and you try to understand it, is going to be a cause of very great sorrow for you.
At first no one is. Instantly one is, and then two. The question is how can these two reduce to one, and finally to nothing? Out of nothingness spontaneously the sense of beingness is felt.....this is one. Later when the sense of beingness knows “I Am”, duality begins. Then after the duality has arisen, the sense of beingness identifies with the form. Even the sense of being is not correctly referred to as ‘one’, since in this state only the sense of being prevails, and there is no need to say even ‘one’. With the sense of otherness, which is duality, both one and two appear simultaneously. To say something is, “I” must be there first. If “I” am not, I cannot say something is. So the fundamental principle of spirituality is that “I” must be there, before anything else can be. This “I” is the beingness which is first.
I am present and I know that I am present.....that is duality.
The beginning of duality is when you know that you are. This is the primary duality, the very source of illusion.
The appearance of this primary concept “I Am” is the beginning of duality. This “I Amness” is otherness. It is an expression of duality. The Absolute has no number. The Absolute is before counting starts. With that little movement “I Am” this counting started. I started counting with myself.
The false self and the true self appear to be two, but on investigation they are found to be one. Duality lasts only as long as it is not questioned. The trinity: mind, self and spirit (vyakti, vyakta, avyakta) person, manifest, unmanifest, when looked into, becomes unity. These are only modes of experiencing: of attachment, of detachment, of transcendence.
The particular and the universal are inseparable. They are two aspects of the nameless, as seen from without and within.
It is entirely the identity with the body that makes you feel that there are two.
The words ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ are relative to the body only; in reality all is one, the outer being merely a projection of the inner.
You are taking duality so much for granted, that you do not even notice it., while to me variety and diversity do not create separation.
There is nothing wrong with duality, as long as it does not create conflict. Multiplicity and variety without strife is joy. In pure consciousness there is light. For warmth, contact is needed. Above the unity of being is the union of love. Love is the meaning and purpose of duality.
If you observe carefully from mind through consciousness to awareness, you find that the sense of duality persists. When you go beyond awareness there is a state of non-duality, in which there is no cognition, only pure being, which may be as well called non-being, if by being you mean being something in particular.
In the world duality always exists. Manifestation can only take place in duality because of identification with the body-mind. When you are no longer identified with the body, duality does not arise. You and I are only knowledge, and there is no form or design to knowledge.
The seer and the seen appear only when there is seeing. They are attributes of seeing. When you say ‘I am seeing this’, ‘I am’ and ‘this’ come with seeing, not before. You cannot have an unseen ‘this’ nor an unseeing ‘I am’. In the triplicity; the known, knowing, and the knower, only the knowing is a fact. The ‘I am’ and ‘this’ are doubtful. Who knows? What is known? There is no certainty, except that there is knowing. Knowing is a reflection of your true nature along with being and loving. The knower and the known are added by the mind. It is in the nature of the mind to create a subject-object duality where there is none.
Plurality and diversity are the play of the mind only. Reality is one. Duality is only at the body-mind level. In the all-pervading universal consciousness millions of births take place every day, but in its basic Absoluteness it is ajanma, the Unborn. Although as universal consciousness it is multi-qualitative, as the Absolute state it is nirguna, non-qualitative.
The Absolute cannot be experienced. It is not an objective affair. When I am unicity then that is pure awareness which is not aware of its awareness, and there can be no subject and object.....therefore there can be no witnessing. Any manifestation, any functioning, any witnessing, can only take place in duality. There has to be a subject and an object, they are two, but they are not two, they are two ends of the same thing. When consciousness stirs, duality arises.
At the very centre is the false idea of oneself as a thing different and separate from other things. In reality you are not a thing, nor separate. You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility. Because you are, all can be. The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become.
All existence in separation and limitation is painful. When you are willing and able to live integrally, in oneness with all life, as pure being, you have gone beyond all need of help.

97. Balance

Inner peace demands harmony between the inner and the outer.
The law of balance rules supreme and accounts are squared in the end.

End.

Understanding the philosophy of Nisargadatta and Advaita Vedanta

Nisargadatta The Philosophy part 2

Nisargadatta ThePhilosophy

Part 2

Chapters 50 - 97