Awareness is free, unattached and unshaken
Chapter 48 from the book
“I am That” of Sri Nisargadatta Majaraj
Questioner: I have just arrived from Sri
Ramanashram. I have spent seven months there.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: What practice were you following at the Ashram?
Questioner: As far as I could, I
concentrated on the 'Who am l'?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Which way were you doing it? Verbally?
Questioner: In my free moments during
the course of the day. Sometimes I was murmuring to myself 'Who am l?' 'I am,
but who am l?' Or, I did it mentally. Occasionally I would have some nice
feeling, or get into moods of quiet happiness. On the whole I was trying to be quiet
and receptive, rather than laboring for experiences.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: What were you actually experiencing when you were in the right mood?
Questioner: A sense of inner stillness,
peace and silence.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Did you notice yourself becoming unconscious?
Questioner: Yes, occasionally and for a
very short time. Otherwise I was just quiet, inwardly and outwardly.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: What kind of qiet was it? Something akin to deep sleep, yet conscious all
the same. A sort of wakeful sleep?
Questioner: Yes. Alertly asleep.
(jagrit-sushupti).
Nisargadatta Maharaj: The main thing is to be free of negative emotions -- desire, fear etc.,
the 'six enemies' of the mind. Once the mind is free of them, the rest will
come easily. Just as cloth kept in soap water will become clean, so will the
mind get purified in the stream of pure feeling.
When you sit quiet and watch yourself, all kinds of things may come to the
surface. Do nothing about them, don't react to them; as they have come so will
they go, by themselves. All that matters is mindfulness, total awareness of
oneself or rather, of one's mind.
Questioner: By 'oneself' do you mean the
daily self?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Yes, the person, which alone is objectively observable. The observer is
beyond observation. What is observable is not the real self.
Questioner: I can always observe the
observer, in endless recession.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: You can observe the observation, but not the observer. You know you are
the ultimate observer by direct insight, not by a logical process based on
observation. You are what you are, but you know what you are not. The self is
known as being, the not-self is known as transient. But in reality all is in
the mind. The observed, observation and observer are mental constructs. The
self alone is.
Questioner: Why does the mind create all
these divisions?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: To divide and particularise is in the mind's very nature. There is no
harm in dividing. But separation goes against fact. Things and people are
different, but they are not separate. Nature is one, reality is one. There are
opposites, but no opposition.
Questioner: I find that by nature I am
very active. Here I am advised to avoid activity. The more I try to remain
inactive, the greater the urge to do something. This makes me not only active
outwardly, but also struggling inwardly to be what by nature I am not. Is there
a remedy against longing for work?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: There is a difference between work and mere activity. All nature works.
Work is nature, nature is work. On the other hand, activity is based on desire
and fear, on longing to possess and enjoy, on fear of pain and annihilation.
Work is by the whole for the whole, activity is by oneself for oneself.
Questioner: Is there a remedy against
activity?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Watch it, and it shall cease. Use every opportunity to remind yourself
that you are in bondage, that whatever happens to you is due to the fact of
your bodily existence. Desire, fear, trouble, joy, they cannot appear unless
you are there to appear to. Yet, whatever happens, points to your existence as
a perceiving centre. Disregard the pointers and be aware of what they are
pointing to. It is quite simple, but it needs be done. What matters is the
persistence with which you keep on returning to yourself.
Questioner: I do get into peculiar
states of deep absorption into myself, but unpredictably and momentarily. I do
not feel myself to be in control of such states.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: The body is a material thing and needs time to change. The mind is but a
set of mental habits, of ways of thinking and feeling, and to change they must
be brought to the surface and examined. This also takes time. Just resolve and
persevere, the rest will take care of itself.
Questioner: I seem to have a clear idea
of what needs be done, but I find myself getting tired and depressed and
seeking human company and thus wasting time that should be given to solitude
and meditation.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Do what you feel like doing. Don't bully yourself. Violence will make you
hard and rigid. Do not fight with what you take to be obstacles on your way.
Just be interested in them, watch them, observe, enquire. Let anything happen
-- good or bad. But don't let yourself be submerged by what happens.
Questioner: What is the purpose in reminding
oneself all the time that one is the watcher?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: The mind must learn that beyond the moving mind there is the background
of awareness, which does not change. The mind must come to know the true self
and respect it and cease covering it up, like the moon which obscures the sun
during solar eclipse. Just realize that nothing observable or experienceable is
you, or binds you. Take no notice of what is not yourself.
Questioner: To do what you tell me I
must be ceaselessly aware.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: 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.
Questioner: As I can make out, you give
distinct meanings to the words 'mind', 'consciousness', and 'awareness'.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Look at it this way. The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when
you do not look at them. When you know what is going on in your mind, you call
it consciousness. This is your waking state -- your consciousness shifts from
sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, from idea to idea, in
endless succession. Then comes awareness, the direct insight into the whole of
consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like a river, flowing
ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself for a moment with
some particular ripple and call it: 'my thought'. All you are conscious of is
your mind; awareness is the cognisance of consciousness as a whole.
Questioner: Everybody is conscious, but
not everybody is aware.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Don't say: 'everybody is conscious'. Say: 'there is consciousness', in
which everything appears and disappears. Our minds are just waves on the ocean
of consciousness. As waves they come and go. As ocean they are infinite and
eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence. These
are all metaphors of course; the reality is beyond description. You can know it
only by being it.
Questioner: Is the search for it worth
the trouble?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Without it all is trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively and
happily and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are.
While the mind is 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. Meditate on it as your true being and try to
be it in your daily life, and you shall realise it in its fullness.
Mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind
itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the
toy.
By looking tirelessly, I became quite empty and with that emptiness all came
back to me except the mind. I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.
Questioner: As you talk to us just now,
are you unconscious?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: 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 in a more real state than yours. I am undistracted by the
distinctions and separations which constitute a person. As long as the body
lasts, it has its needs like any other, but my mental process has come to an
end.
Questioner: You behave like a person who
thinks.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Why not? But my thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and
purposeful.
Questioner: If your thinking is
unconscious, how do you know that it is right?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: There is no desire, nor fear to thwart it. What can make it wrong? Once I
know myself and what I stand for, I do not need to check on myself all the
time. When you know that your watch shows correct time, you do not hesitate
each time you consult it.
Questioner: At this very moment who
talks, if not the mind?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: That which hears the question, answers it.
Questioner: But who is it?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Not who, but what. I'm not a person in your sense of the word, though 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, though the language and the style may appear personal. A person is a
set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no such
pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear -- how can there be a
pattern?
Questioner: Surely, you will die.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: 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.
Questioner: May I be permitted to ask
how did you arrive at your present condition?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: My teacher told me to hold on to the sense 'I am' tenaciously and not to
swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a
comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching.
All I did was to remember his teaching, his face, his words constantly. This
brought an end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am
-- unbound.
Questioner: Was your realization sudden
or gradual.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Neither. One is what one is timelessly. It is the mind that realizes as
and when it get cleared of desires and fears.
Questioner: Even the desire for realization?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: The desire to put an end to all desires is a most peculiar desire, just
like the fear of being afraid is a most peculiar fear. One stops you from
grabbing and the other from running. You may use the same words, but the states
are not the same. The man who seeks realisation is not addicted to desires; he
is a seeker who goes against desire, not with it. A general longing for
liberation is only the beginning; to find the proper means and use them is the
next step. The seeker has only one goal in view: to find his own true being. Of
all desires it is the most ambitious, for nothing and nobody can satisfy it;
the seeker and the sought are one and the search alone matters.
Questioner: The search will come to an
end. The seeker will remain.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: No, the seeker will dissolve, the search will remain. The search is the
ultimate and timeless reality.
Questioner: Search means lacking,
wanting, incompleteness and imperfection.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: No, it means refusal and rejection of the incomplete and the imperfect.
The search for reality is itself the movement of reality. In a way all search
is for the real bliss, or the bliss of the real. But here we mean by search the
search for oneself as the root of being conscious, as the light beyond the
mind. This search will never end, while the restless craving for all else must
end, for real progress to take place.
One has to understand that the search for reality, or God, or 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.
Questioner: Since all is preordained, is
our self-realization also preordained? Or are we free there at least?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Destiny refers only to name and shape. Since you are neither body nor
mind, destiny has no control over you. You are completely free. The cup is
conditioned by its shape, material, use and so on. But the space within the cup
is free. It happens to be in the cup only when viewed in connection with the
cup. Otherwise it is just space. As long as there is a body, you appear to be
embodied. Without the body you are not disembodied -- you Just are.
Even destiny is but an idea. Words can be put together in so many ways!
Statements can differ, but do they make any change in the actual? There are so
many theories devised for explaining things -- all are plausible, none is true.
When you drive a car, you are subjected to the laws of mechanics and chemistry:
step out of the car and you are under the laws of physiology and biochemistry.
Questioner: What is meditation and what
are its uses?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: As long as you are a beginner certain formalised meditations, or prayers
may be good for you. But for a seeker for reality there is only one meditation
-- the rigorous refusal to harbour thoughts. To be free from thoughts is itself
meditation.
Questioner: How is it done?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very
observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet,
keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.
Questioner: I heard of holding on to one
thought in order to keep other thoughts away. But how to keep all thoughts
away? The very idea is also a thought.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Experiment anew, don't go by past experience. Watch your thoughts and
watch yourself watching the thoughts. The state of freedom from all thoughts
will happen suddenly and by the bliss of it you shall recognize it.]
Questioner: Are you not at all concerned
about the state of the world? Look at the horrors in East Pakistan [1971, now
Bangla Desh]. Do they not touch you at all?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: I am reading newspapers, I know what is going on! But my reaction is not
like yours. You are looking for a cure, while I am concerned with prevention.
As long as there are causes, there must also be results. As long as people are
bent on dividing and separating, as long as they are selfish and aggressive,
such things will happen. If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must
have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed;
it must come from within. Those who abhor war must get war out of their system.
Without peaceful people how can you have peace in the world? As long as people
are as they are, the world must be as it is. I am doing my part in trying to
help people to know themselves as the only cause of their own misery. In that
sense I am a useful man. But what I am in myself, what is my normal state
cannot be expressed in terms of social consciousness and usefulness.
I may talk about it, use metaphors or parables, but I am acutely aware that it
is just not so. Not that it cannot be experienced. It is experiencing itself!
But it cannot be described in the terms of a mind that must separate and oppose
in order to know.
The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and
the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor,
always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no
trace on the paper. So is my mind -- the impressions keep on coming, but no
trace is left.
Questioner: Why do you sit here talking
to people? What is your real motive?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: No motive. You say I must have a motive. I am not sitting here, nor
talking: no need to search for motives. Don't confuse me with the body. I have
no work to do, no duties to perform. That part of me which you may call God
will look after the world. This world of yours, that so much needs looking
after, lives and moves in your mind. Delve into it, you will find your answers
there and there only. Where else do you expect them to come from? Outside your
consciousness does anything exist?
Questioner: It may exist without my ever
knowing it.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: What kind of existence would it be? Can being be divorced from knowing?
All being, like all knowing, relates to you. A thing is because you know it to
be either in your experience or in your being. Your body and your mind exist as
long as you believe so. Cease to think that they are yours and they will just
dissolve. By all means let your body and mind function, but do not let them
limit you. If you notice imperfections, just keep on noticing: your very giving
attention to them will set your heart and mind and body right.
Questioner: Can I cure myself of a
serious illness by merely taking cognisance of it?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: Take cognisance of the whole of it, not only of the outer symptoms. All
illness begins in the mind. Take care of the mind first, by tracing and
eliminating all wrong ideas and emotions. Then live and work disregarding
illness and think no more of it. With the removal of causes the effect is bound
to depart.
Man becomes what he believes himself to be. Abandon all ideas about yourself
and you will find yourself to be the pure witness, beyond all that can happen
to the body or the mind.
Questioner: If I become anything I think
myself to be, and I start thinking that I am the Supreme Reality, will not my
Supreme Reality remain a mere idea?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: First reach that state and then ask the question.
