You, as the person, imagine that the
Guru is interested in you as a person. Not at all. To him you are a
nuisance and a hindrance to be done away with. He actually aims at
your elimination as a factor in consciousness.
*
You concentrate, you meditate, you
torture your mind and body, you do all sorts of unnecessary things,
but you miss the essential which is the elimination of the person.
*
M: Understand first that you are not
the person you believe yourself to be. What you think yourself to be
is mere suggestion or imagination. You have no parents, you were not
born, nor will you die. Either trust me when I tell you so, or arrive
to it by study and investigation. The way of total faith is quick,
the other is slow but steady. Both must be tested in action. Act on
what you think is true -- this is the way to truth.
*
Questioner: Before one can realise
one's true nature need not one be a person? Does not the ego have its
value?
Maharaj: The person is of little use.
It is deeply involved in its own affairs and is completely ignorant
of its true being. Unless the witnessing consciousness begins to play
on the person and it becomes the object of observation rather than
the subject, realisation is not feasible. It is the witness that
makes realisation desirable and attainable.
Q: There comes a point in a person's
life when it becomes the witness.
M: Oh, no. The person by itself will
not become the witness. It is like expecting a cold candle to start
burning in the course of time. The person can stay in the darkness of
ignorance forever, unless the flame of awareness touches it.
Q: Who lights the candle?
M: The Guru. His words, his presence.
*
Q: Can the person become aware of
itself by itself?
M: Yes, it happens sometimes as a
result of much suffering The Guru wants to save you the endless pain.
*
Once you realise that the person is
merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to
fret and worry.
*
M: When you believe yourself to be a
person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons,
only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the
person ceases.
*
M: The person is a very small thing.
Actually it is a composite, it cannot be said to exist by itself.
Unperceived, it is just not there. It is but the shadow of the mind,
the sum total of memories. Pure being is reflected in the mirror of
the mind, as knowing. What is known takes the shape of a person, based on memory and habit. It is but a
shadow, or a projection of the knower onto the screen of the mind.
Q: The mirror is there, the reflection
is there. But where is the sun?
M: The supreme is the sun.
*
M: All I know is that whatever depends,
is not real. The real is truly independent. Since the existence of
the person depends on the existence of the world and it is
circumscribed and defined by the world, it cannot be real.
Q: It cannot be a dream, surely.
M: Even a dream has existence, when it
is cognised and enjoyed, or endured. Whatever you think and feel has
being. But it may not be what you take it to be. What you think to be
a person may be something quite different.
Q: I am what I know myself to be.
M: You cannot possibly say that you are
what you think yourself to be! Your ideas about yourself change from
day to day and from moment to moment. Your self-image is the most
changeful thing you have. It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of a
passer by. A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult, and your
image of yourself, which you call your person, changes deeply. To
know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are
not. And to know what you are not you must watch yourself carefully,
rejecting all that does not necessarily go with the basic fact: 'I
am'. The ideas: I am born at a given place, at a given time, from my
parents and now I am so-and-so, living at, married to, father of,
employed by, and so on, are not inherent in the sense 'I am'. Our
usual attitude is of 'I am this'. Separate consistently and
perseveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what
it means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that'. All our
habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard
sometimes, but clear understanding helps a lot. The clearer you
understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in
negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your
search and realise your limitless being.
*
Q: What exactly do you mean when you
ask me to stop being a person?
M: I do not ask you to stop being --
that you cannot. I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born,
have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a
beginning -- it is not as hard as you think.
*
Q: Why do you keep on dismissing the
person (vyakti) as of no importance? Personality is the primary fact
of our existence. It occupies the entire stage.
M: As long as you do not see that it is
mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire, you will think
yourself to be a person -- living, feeling, thinking, active,
passive, pleased or pained. Question yourself, ask yourself. 'Is it
so?' 'Who am l'? 'What is behind and beyond all this?' And soon you
will see your mistake. And it is in the very nature of a mistake to
cease to be, when seen.
*
In the great mirror of consciousness
images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And
memory is material -- destructible, perishable, transient. On such
flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence -- vague,
intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: 'I-am-so-and-so'
obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe
that we are born to suffer and to die.
*
Have your being outside this body of
birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist
because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be
free. You are not a person.
*
M: I am calling you back to yourself.
All I ask you is to look at yourself, towards yourself, into
yourself.
Q: To what purpose?
M: You live, you feel, you think. By
giving attention to your living, feeling and thinking, you free
yourself from them and go beyond them. Your personality dissolves and
only the witness remains. Then you go beyond the witness. Do not ask
how it happens. Just search within yourself.
*
Q: How is it that in spite of so much
instruction and assistance we make no progress?
M: 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 realise that immense ocean of pure awareness,
which is both mind and matter and beyond both.
Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I
feel myself to be a small and separate person, one amongst many.
M: Your being a person is due to the
illusion of space and time; you imagine yourself to be at a certain
point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your
self-identification with the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist
in succession, they have their span in time and make you imagine
yourself, because of memory, as having duration. In reality time and
space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of
perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like
words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a
convention. How old are you?
Q: Forty-eight!
M: What makes you say forty-eight? What
makes you say: I am here? Verbal habits born from assumptions. The
mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality.
All is here and now, but we do not see it.
*
Self-limitation is the very essence of
personality.
Q: How can I become universal?
M: But you are universal. You need not
and you cannot become what you are already. Only cease imagining
yourself to be the particular. What comes and goes has no being. It
owes its very appearance to reality. You know that there is a world,
but does the world know you? All knowledge flows from you, as all
being and all joy. realise that you are the eternal source and accept
all as your own. Such acceptance is true love.
Q: All you say sounds very beautiful.
But how has one to make it into a way of living?
M: Having never left the house you are
asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all.
Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease
imagining.
Q: It is not a matter of achievement,
but of understanding.
M: Don't try to understand! Enough if
you do not misunderstand. Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It
is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.
What is beginningless cannot have a cause. It is not that you knew
what you are and then you have forgotten. Once you know, you cannot
forget. Ignorance has no beginning, but can have an end. Enquire: who
is ignorant and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The world is
full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace.
These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of
chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into
being only when you are born in a body. No body -- no world. First
enquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will
come later.
Q: What you say sounds convincing, but
of what use is it to the private person, who knows itself to be in
the world and of the world?
M: Millions eat bread, but few know all
about wheat. And only those who know can improve the bread.
Similarly, only those who know the self, who have seen beyond the
world, can improve the world. Their value to private persons is
immense, for they are their only hope of salvation. What is in the
world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world you
must step out of it.
Q: But can one step out of the world?
M: Who was born first, you or the
world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by
it; once you realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in
you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body
remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it.
*
M: You speak as a person, limited in
time and space, reduced to the contents of a body and a mind. What
you like, you call 'natural' and what you dislike, you call
'accidental'.
*
Just as light destroys darkness by its
very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination. To see that
all knowledge is a form of ignorance is itself a movement of reality.
The witness is not a person. The person comes into being when there
is a basis for it, an organism, a body. In it the absolute is
reflected as awareness. Pure awareness becomes self-awareness. When
there is a self, self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self
to witness, there is no witnessing either. It is all very simple; it
is the presence of the person that complicates. See that there is no
such thing as a permanently separate person and all becomes clear.
*
Q: All you say sounds beautifully
convincing. yet my feeling of being just a person in a world strange
and alien, often inimical and dangerous, does not cease. Being a
person, limited in space and time, how can I possibly realise myself
as the opposite; a de-personalised, universalised awareness of
nothing in particular?
M: You assert yourself to be what you
are not and deny yourself to be what you are. You omit the element of
pure cognition, of awareness free from all personal distortions.
Unless you admit the reality of chit, you will never know yourself.
Q: What am I to do? I do not see myself
as you see me. Maybe you are right and I am wrong, but how can I
cease to be what I feel I am?
M: A prince who believes himself to be
a beggar can be convinced conclusively in one way only: he
must behave as a prince and see what
happens. Behave as if what I say is true and judge by what actually happens. All I ask is the
little faith needed for making the first step. With experience will
come confidence and you will not need me any more. I know what you
are and I am telling you. Trust me for a while.
*
Q: Kindly allow me to come back to my
first question. How does the error of being a person originate?
M: The absolute precedes time.
Awareness comes first. A bundle of memories and mental habits
attracts attention, awareness gets focalised and a person suddenly
appears. Remove the light of awareness, go to sleep or swoon away --
and the person disappears. The person (vyakti) flickers, awareness
(vyakta) contains all space and time, the absolute (avyakta) is.
*
You realise that the person you became
at birth and will cease to be at death is temporary and false. You
are not the sensual, emotional and intellectual person, gripped by
desires and fears. Find out your real being. What am l? is the fundamental
question of all philosophy and psychology. Go into it deeply.
*
Q: What makes me limited and
superficial?
M: 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.
*
You are not what you think yourself to
be, I assure you. The image you have of yourself is made up from
memories and is purely accidental.
*
You have never been, nor shall ever be
a person. Refuse to consider yourself as one. But as long as you do
not even doubt yourself to be a Mr. S0-and-so, there is little hope.
When you refuse to open your eyes, what can you be shown?
*
Q: And no trace remains of the person?
M: A vague memory remains, like the
memory of a dream, or early childhood. After all, what is there to
remember? A flow of events, mostly accidental and meaningless. A
sequence of desires and fears and inane blunders. Is there anything
worth remembering? The person is but a shell imprisoning you. Break
the shell.
Q: Whom are you asking to break the
shell? Who is to break the shell?
M: Break the bonds of memory and
self-identification and the shell will break by itself. There is a
centre that imparts reality to whatever it perceives. All you need is
to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give
reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no
confirmation. Things are as they are, because you accept them as they
are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve. 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. Pleasure and pain
are momentary. It is simpler and easier to disregard them than to act
on them.
*
M: First you create a world, then the
'I am' becomes a person, who is not happy for various reasons. He
goes out in search of happiness, meets a Guru who tells him: 'You are
not a person, find who you are'. He does it and goes beyond.
Q: Why did he not do it at the very
start?
M: It did not occur to him. He needed
somebody to tell him.
*
The person may be conscious, but is not
aware of being conscious. It is completely identified with what it
thinks and feels and experiences. The darkness that is in it is of
its own creation. When the darkness is questioned, it dissolves. The
desire to question is planted by the Guru. In other words, the
difference between the person and the witness is as between not
knowing and knowing oneself.
*
Q: How does the person come into being?
M: Exactly as a shadow appears when
light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure
self-awareness is obstructed by the 'I-am-the-body' idea. And as the
shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land,
so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find
and lose according to the pattern of destiny.
*
Step back from action to consciousness,
leave action to the body and the mind; it is their domain. Remain as
pure witness, till even witnessing dissolves in the Supreme.
Imagine a thick jungle full of heavy
timber. A plank is shaped out of the timber and a small pencil to
write on it. The witness reads the writing and knows that while the
pencil and the plank are distantly related to the jungle, the writing
has nothing to do with it. It is totally super-imposed and its
disappearance just does not matter. The dissolution of personality is
followed always by a sense of great relief, as if a heavy burden has
fallen off.
*
Q: An individual with a weak sense of
personality -- is he nearer self-realisation?
M: Take the case of a young child. The
sense of 'I-am' is not yet formed, the personality is rudimentary.
The obstacles to self knowledge are few, but the power and the
clarity of awareness, its width and depth are lacking. In the course
of years awareness will grow stronger, but also the latent
personality will emerge and obscure and complicate. Just as the
harder the wood, the hotter the flame, so the stronger the
personality, brighter the light generated from its destruction.
*
M: Nothing is wrong with you, but the
ideas you have of yourself are altogether wrong. It is not you who
desires, fears and suffers, it is the person built on the foundation
of your body by circumstances and influences. You are not that
person. This must be clearly established in your mind and never lost
sight of. Normally, it needs a prolonged sadhana, years of
austerities and meditation.
Q: My mind is weak and vacillating. I
have neither the strength nor the tenacity for sadhana. My case, is
hopeless.
M: In a way yours is a most hopeful
case. There is an alternative to sadhana, which is trust. If you
cannot have the conviction born from fruitful search, then take
advantage of my discovery, which I am so eager to share with you. I
can see with the utmost clarity that you have never been, nor are,
nor will be estranged from realty, that you are the fullness of
perfection here and now and that nothing can deprive you of your
heritage, of what you are. You are in no way different from me, only
you do not know it. You do not know what you are and therefore you
imagine your self to be what you are not. Hence desires and fear and
overwhelming despair. And meaningless activity in order to escape.
Just trust me and live by trusting me.
I shall not mislead you. 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.
With action bliss will come and, with bliss, conviction. After all,
you doubt yourself because you are in sorrow. Happiness, natural,
spontaneous and lasting cannot be imagined. Either it is there, or it
is not. Once you begin to experience the peace, love and happiness
which need no outer causes, all your doubts will dissolve. Just
catch hold of what I told you and live by it.
Q: You are telling me to live by
memory?
M: You are living by memory anyhow. I
am merely asking you to replace the old memories by the memory of
what I told you. As you were acting on your old memories, act on the
new one. Don't be afraid. For some time there is bound to be a
conflict between the old and the new, but if you put yourself
resolutely on the side of the new, the strife will soon come to an
end and you will realise the effortless state of being oneself, of
not being deceived by desires and fears born of illusion.
*
Q: So, there is no need to worship, to
pray, to practice Yoga?
M: A little of daily sweeping, washing
and bathing can do no harm. Self-awareness tells you at every step
what needs be done. When all is done, the mind remains quiet.
Now you are in the waking state, a
person with name and shape, joys and sorrows. The person was not
there before you were born, nor will be there after you die. Instead
of struggling with the person to make it become what it is not, why
not go beyond the waking state and leave the personal life
altogether? It does not mean the extinction of the person; it means
only seeing it in right perspective.
*
Q: By his grace I shall be made happy,
powerful and peaceful.
M: What ambitions! How can a person
limited in time and space, a mere body-mind, a gasp of pain between
birth and death, be happy? The very conditions of its arising make
happiness impossible. Peace, power, happiness, these are never
personal states, nobody can say ‘my peace’, ‘my power’ --
because ‘mine’ implies exclusivity, which is fragile and
insecure.
*
M: Realisation is of the fact that you
are not a person. Therefore, it 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.
Q: How is the person removed?
M: By determination. Understand that it
must go and wish it to go -- it shall go if you are earnest about it.
Somebody, anybody, will tell you that you are pure consciousness, not
a body-mind. Accept it as a possibility and investigate earnestly.
You may discover that it is not so, that you are not a person bound
in space and time. Think of the difference it would make!
Q: If I am not a person, then what am
I?
M: Wet cloth looks, feels, smells
differently as long as it is wet. When dry it is again the normal
cloth. Water has left it and who can make out that it was wet? Your
real nature is not like what you appear to be. Give up the idea of
being a person, that is all. You need not become what you are anyhow.
There is the identity of what you are and there is the person
superimposed on it. All you know is the person, the identity -- which
is not a person -- you do not know, for you never doubted, never
asked yourself the crucial question -- ‘Who am I’. The identity
is the witness of the person and sadhana consists in shifting the
emphasis from the superficial and changeful person to the immutable
and ever-present witness.
Q: How is it that the question ‘Who
am I’ attracts me little? I prefer to spend my time in the sweet
company of saints.
M: Abiding in your own being is also
holy company. If you have no problem of suffering and release from
suffering, you will not find the energy and persistence needed for
self-enquiry. You cannot manufacture a crisis. It must be genuine.
Q: How does a genuine crisis happen?
M: It happens every moment, but you are
not alert enough. A shadow on your neighbour’s face, the immense
and all-pervading sorrow of existence is a constant factor in your
life, but you refuse to take notice. You suffer and see others
suffer, but you don’t respond.
*
The person should be carefully examined
and its falseness seen; then its power over you will end. After all,
it subsides each time you go to sleep. In deep sleep you are not a
self-conscious person, yet you are alive. When you are alive and
conscious, but no longer self-conscious, you are not a person
anymore. During the waking hours you are, as if,
on the stage, playing a role, but what are you when the play is over? You are what you are; what you
were before the play began you remain when it is over. Look at
yourself as performing on the stage of life. The performance may be
splendid or clumsy, but you are not in it, you merely watch it; with
interest and sympathy, of course, but keeping in mind all the time
that you are only watching while the play -- life -- is going on.
*
M: To insist, to resist, are contained
in the will to be. Remove the will to be and what remains? Existence
and non-existence relate to something in space and time; here and
now, there and then, which again are in the mind. The mind plays a
guessing game; it is ever uncertain; anxiety-ridden and restless. You
resent being treated as a mere instrument of some god, or Guru, and
insist on being treated as a person, because you are not sure of your
own existence and do not want to give up the comfort and assurance of
a personality. You may not be what you believe yourself to be, but it
gives you continuity, your future flows into the present and becomes
the past without jolts. To be denied personal existence is
frightening, but you must face it and find your identity with the
totality of life.
*
M: 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. What is your worth?
Q: By what measure shall I measure it?
M: Look at the content of your mind.
You are what you think about. Are you not most of the time busy with
your own little person and its daily needs?
The value of regular meditation is that
it takes you away from the humdrum of daily routine and reminds you
that you are not what you believe yourself to be. But even
remembering is not enough -- action must follow conviction. Don't be
like the rich man who has made a detailed will, but refuses to die.
Q: Is not gradualness the law of life?
M: Oh, no. The preparation alone is
gradual, the change itself is sudden and complete. Gradual change
does not take you to a new level of conscious being. You need courage
to let go.
*
M: All attributes are personal. The
real is beyond all attributes.
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