Do what you feel like doing – Nisargadatta

Do what you feel like doing – Nisargadatta

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: 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.

M: 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.

I Am That
Awareness is Free
Item 48

Turn away from desire or fear – Nisargadatta

Turn away from desire or fear – Nisargadatta

Maharaj: You are back in India! Where have you been, what have you seen?

Questioner: I come from Switzerland. I stayed there with a remarkable man who claims to have realized. He has done many Yogas in his past and had many experiences that passed away. Now he claims no special abilities, nor knowledge; the only unusual thing about him is connected with sensations; he is unable to separate the seer from the seen. For instance, when he sees a car rushing at him, he does not know whether the car is rushing at him, or he at a car. He seems to be both at the same time, the seer and the seen. They become one. Whatever he sees, he sees himself. When I asked him some Vedantic questions he said: ‘I really cannot answer. I do not know. All I know is this strange identity with whatever I perceive. You know, I expected anything but this.’
He is on the whole a humble man; he makes no disciples and in no way puts himself on a pedestal. He is willing to talk about his strange condition, but that is all.
Maharaj: Now he knows what he knows. All else is over. At least he still talks. Soon he may cease talking.

Q: What will he do then?
M: Immobility and silence are not inactive. The flower fills the space with perfume, the candle — with light. They do nothing yet they change everything by their mere presence. You can photograph the candle, but not its light. You can know the man, his name and appearance, but not his influence. His very presence is action.

Q: Is it not natural to be active?
M: 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 must you be always at the axle in the centre and not whirling at the periphery.

Q: How do I go about it in practice?
M: Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away from it.

Q: By suppressing my thoughts and feelings I shall provoke a reaction.
M: I am not talking of suppression. Just refuse attention.

Q: Must I not use effort to arrest the movements of the mind?
M: It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet — you just find your way between.

Q: If I use my will to control the mind, it only strengthens the ego.
M: Of course. When you fight, you invite a fight. But when you do not resist, you meet with no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

Q: How long will it take me to get free of the mind?
M: It may take a thousand years, but really no time is required. All you need is to be in dead earnest. Here the will is the deed. If you are sincere, you have it. After all, it is a matter of attitude. Nothing stops you from being a gnani here and now, except fear. You are afraid of being impersonal, of impersonal being. 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.

Q: No question of reconditioning, changing, or eliminating the mind?
M: Absolutely none. Leave your mind alone, that is all. Don’t go along with it. After all, 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. It is exactly as Christ said ‘Resist not evil’. By resisting evil you merely strengthen it.

Q: Yes, I see now. All I have to do is to deny existence to evil. Then it fades away. But does it not boil down to some kind of auto-suggestion?
M: The auto-suggestion is in full swing now, when you think yourself to be a person, caught between good and evil. What I am asking you to do is to put an end to it, to wake up and see things as they are.
About your stay in Switzerland with that strange friend of yours: what did you gain in his company?

Q: Nothing absolutely. His experience did not affect me at all. One thing I have understood: there is nothing to search for. Wherever I may go, nothing waits for me at the end of the journey. Discovery is not the result of transportation.
M: Yes, you are quite apart from anything that can be gained or lost.

Nisargatta Maharaj – I Am That
What is Pure, Unalloyed, Unattached is Real
Item 72

The Supreme is the easiest to reach – Nisargadatta

The Supreme is the easiest to reach – Nisargadatta

Questioner: What is the link between the Self (Vyakta) and the Supreme (Avyakta)?
Maharaj: From the self’s point of view the world is the known, the Supreme — the Unknown. The Unknown gives birth to the known, yet remains Unknown. The known is infinite, but the Unknown is an infinitude of infinities. Just like a ray of light is never seen unless intercepted by the specs of dust, so does the Supreme make everything known, itself remaining unknown.

Q: Does it mean that the Unknown is inaccessible?
M: Oh, no. 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.

Q: And if I desire nothing, not even the Supreme?
M: Then you are as good as dead, or you are the Supreme.

Q: The world is full of desires. Everybody wants something or other. Who is the desirer? The person or the self?
M: The self. All desires, holy and unholy, come from the self; they all hang on the sense ‘I am’.

Q: I can understand holy desires (satyakama) emanating from the self. It may be the expression of the bliss aspect of the Sadchitananda (Beingness — Awareness — Happiness) of the Self. But why unholy desires?
M: All desires aim at happiness. Their shape and quality depend on the psyche (antahkarana). Where inertia (tamas) predominates, we find perversions. With energy (rajas), passions arise. With lucidity (sattva) the motive behind the desire is goodwill, compassion, the urge to make happy rather than be happy. But the Supreme is beyond all, yet because of its infinite permeability all cogent desires can be fulfilled.

Q: Which desires are cogent?
M: Desires that destroy their subjects, or objects, or do not subside on satisfaction are self-contradictory and cannot be fulfilled. Only desires motivated by love, goodwill and compassion are beneficial to both the subject and object and can be fully satisfied.

Q: All desires are painful, the holy as well as the unholy.
M: They are not the same and pain is not the same. Passion is painful, compassion — never. The entire universe strives to fulfill a desire born of compassion.

Q: Does the Supreme know itself? Is the Impersonal conscious?
M: The source of all has all. Whatever flows from it must be there already in seed form. And as a seed is the last of innumerable seeds, and contains the experience and the promise of numberless forests, so does the Unknown contain all that was, or could have been and all that shall or would be. The entire field of becoming is open and accessible; past and future co-exist in the eternal now.

Q: Are you living in the Supreme Unknown?
M: Where else?

Q: What makes you say so?
M: No desire ever arises in my mind.

Q: Are you then unconscious?
M: Of course not! I am fully conscious, but since no desire or fear enters my mind, there is perfect silence.

Q: Who knows the silence?
M: Silence knows itself. It is the silence of the silent mind, when passions and desires are silenced.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
The Supreme is Beyond All
Item 20

The Supreme is Beyond All – Nisargadatta

The Supreme is Beyond All – Nisargadatta

Questioner: You say, reality is one. Oneness, unity, is the attribute of the person. Is then reality a person, with the universe as its body?
Maharaj: Whatever you may say will be both true and false. Words do not reach beyond the mind.

Q: I am just trying to understand. You are telling us of the Person, the Self and the Supreme. (vyakti, vyakta, avyakta). The light of Pure Awareness (pragna), focussed as ‘I am’ in the Self (jivatma), as consciousness (chetana) illumines the mind (antahkarana) and as life (prana) vitalizes the body (deha). All this is fine as far as the words go. But when it comes to distin- guishing in myself the person from the Self and the Self from the Supreme, I get mixed up.
M: The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme which ap- pears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

Q: When I look at myself, I find I am several persons fighting among themselves for the use of the body.
M: They correspond to the various tendencies (samskara) of the mind.

Q: Can I make peace between them?
M: How can you? They are so contradictory! See them as they are — mere habits of thoughts and feelings, bundles of memories and urges.

Q: Yet they all say ‘I am’.
M: It is only because you identify yourself with them. Once you realize that whatever appears before you cannot be yourself, and cannot say ‘I am’, you are free of all your ‘persons’ and their demands. The sense ‘I am’ is your own. You cannot part with it, but you can impart it to anything, as in saying: I am young. I am rich etc. But such self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

Q: I can now understand that I am not the person, but that which, when reflected in the person, gives it a sense of being. Now, about the Supreme? In what way do I know myself as the Supreme?
M: The source of consciousness cannot be an object in con- sciousness. To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility.

Q: Are there many sources or one for all?
M: It depends how you look at it, from which end. The objects in the world are many, but the eye that sees them is one. The higher always appears as one to the lower and the lower as many to the higher.

Q: Shapes and names are all of one and the same God?
M: Again, it all depends on how you look at it. On the verbal level everything is relative. Absolutes should be experienced, not discussed.

Q: How is the Absolute experienced?
M: It is not an object to be recognized and stored up in memory. It is in the present and in feeling rather. 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.

Q: If it is the source, why and how does it manifest itself?
M: It gives birth to consciousness. All else is in consciousness.

Q: Why are there so many centres of consciousness?
M: The objective universe (mahadakash) is in constant move- ment, projecting and dissolving innumerable forms. Whenever a form is infused with life (prana), consciousness (chetana) ap- pears by reflection of awareness in matter.

Q: How is the Supreme affected?
M: What can affect it and how? The source is not affected by the vagaries of the river nor is the metal — by the shape of the jewellery. Is the light affected by the picture on the screen? The Supreme makes everything possible, that is all.

Q: How is it that some things do happen and some don’t?
M: Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause.

Q: No purposeful action is then possible?
M: All I say is that 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’.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
The Supreme is Beyond All
Item 20

Chanting, Meditation etc. of any use ? – Nisargadatta

Chanting, Meditation etc. of any use ? – Nisargadatta

Q: What is better — repetition of God’s name, or meditation?
M: Repetition will stabilize your breath. With deep and quiet breathing vitality will improve, which will influence the brain and help the mind to grow pure and stable and fit for meditation. Without vitality little can be done, hence the importance of its protection and increase. Posture and breathing are a part of Yoga, for the body must be healthy and well under control, but too much concentration on the body defeats its own purpose, for it is the mind that is primary in the beginning. When the mind has been put to rest and disturbs no longer the inner space (chidakash), the body acquires a new meaning and its transformation becomes both necessary and possible.

Q: Do you advocate complete passivity?
M: Clarity and charity is action. Love is not lazy and clarity directs. You need not worry about action, look after your mind and heart. Stupidity and selfishness are the only evil.

Q: Are austerities and penances of any use?
M: To meet all the vicissitudes of life is penance enough! You need not invent trouble. To meet cheerfully whatever life brings is all the austerity you need.

Q: What about sacrifice?
M: Share willingly and gladly all you have with whoever needs — don’t invent self-inflicted cruelties.

Q: What is self-surrender?
M: Accept what comes.

Q: Will complete solitude be of any benefit?
M: It depends on your temperament. You may work with others and for others, alert and friendly, and grow more fully than in solitude, which may make you dull or leave you at the mercy of your mind’s endless chatter. Do not imagine that you can change through effort. Violence, even turned against yourself, as in austerities and penance, will remain fruitless.

Q: I cannot make out a gnani, nor can gnana be conquered by appropriate means. It is all so confusing!
Q: It is all due to your complete misunderstanding of reality. Your mind is steeped in the habits of evaluation and acquisition and will not admit that the incomparable and unobtainable are waiting timelessly within your own heart for recognition. All you have to do is to abandon all memories and expectations.

Q: I am afraid of mistakes. So many things I tried — nothing came out of them.
M: You gave too little of yourself, you were merely curious, not earnest.

Q: I don’t know any better.
M: At least that much you know. Knowing them to be superficial gives no value to your experiences, forget them as soon as they are over. Live a clean, selfless life, that is all.

Q: Is morality so important?
M: Don’t cheat, don’t hurt — is it not important? Above all you need inner peace — which demands harmony between the inner and the outer. Do what you believe in and believe in what you do. All else is waste of energy and time.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Abandon Memories and Expectations – Item 96

What are Reality and its Expressions – Nisargadatta

What are Reality and its Expressions – Nisargadatta

Questioner: What is the relation between reality and its expressions?

Maharaj: No relation. In reality all is real and identical. As we put it, 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. Once you have understood that no- thing 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. You have to give your heart and mind to these things and brood over them repeatedly. It is like cooking food. You must keep it on the fire for some time before it is ready.

Q: Am I not under the sway of destiny, of my karma? What can I do against it? What I am and what I do is predetermined. Even my so-called free choice is predetermined; only I am not aware of it and imagine myself to be free.

M: Again, it all depends how you look at it. Ignorance is like a fever — it makes you see things which are not there. Karma is the divinely prescribed treatment. Welcome it and follow the instructions faithfully and you will get well. A patient will leave the hospital after he recovers. To insist on immediate freedom of choice and action will merely postpone recovery. Accept your destiny and fulfill it — this is the shortest way to freedom from destiny, though not from love and its compulsions. To act from desire and fear is bondage, to act from love is freedom.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

Link between Happiness and Consciousness – Nisargadatta

Link between Happiness and Consciousness – Nisargadatta

Questioner: If happiness is not conscious and consciousness — not happy, what is the link between the two?

Maharaj: Consciousness being a product of conditions and circums-tances, depends on them and changes along with them. What is independent, uncreated, timeless and changeless, and yet ever new and fresh, is beyond the mind. When the mind thinks of it, the mind dissolves and only happiness remains.

Q: When all goes, nothingness remains.

M: How can these be nothing without something? Nothing is only an idea, it depends on the memory of something. Pure being is quite independent of existence, which is definable and describable.

Q: Please tell us: beyond the mind does consciousness continue, or does it end with the mind?

M: Consciousness comes and goes, awareness shines immutably.

Q: Who is aware in awareness?

M: 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.

Q: What about witnessing?

M: Witnessing is of the mind. The witness goes with the witnessed. In the state of non-duality all separation ceases.

Q: What about you? Do you continue in awareness?

M: The person, the ‘I am this body, this mind, this chain of memories, this bundle of desires and fears’ disappears, but something you may call identity, remains. It enables me to be- come a person when required. Love creates its own necessities, even of becoming a person.

Q: It is said that Reality manifests itself as existence — consciousness — bliss. Are they absolute or relative?

M: They are relative to each other and depend on each other. Reality is independent of its expressions.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

Experience of happiness and adventure – Nisargadatta

Experience of happiness and adventure – Nisargadatta

Maharaj: The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

Questioner: What remains to discover?

M: The universe without and the immensity within as they are in reality, in the great mind and heart of God. The meaning and purpose of existence, the secret of suffering, life’s redemption from ignorance.

Q: If being happy is the same as being free from fear and worry, cannot it be said that absence of trouble is the cause of happiness?

M: A state of absence, of non-existence cannot be a cause; the pre-existence of a cause is implied in the notion. Your natural state, in which nothing exists, cannot be a cause of becoming; the causes are hidden in the great and mysterious power of memory. But your true home is in nothingness, in emptiness of all content.

Q: Emptiness. and nothingness — how dreadful!

M: You face it most cheerfully, when you go to sleep! Find out for yourself the state of wakeful sleep and you will find it quite in harmony with your real nature. Words can only give you the idea and the idea is not the experience. All I can say is that true happiness has no cause and what has no cause is immovable. Which does not mean it is perceivable, as pleasure. What is perceivable is pain and pleasure; the state of freedom from sorrow can be described only negatively. To know it directly you must go beyond the mind addicted to causality and the tyranny of time.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

You are Not the Mind – Nisargadatta

You are Not the Mind – Nisargadatta

Maharaj.: My world is free from opposites, of mutually destructive discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rock-like; this peace and silence are my body.

Questioner: What you say reminds me of the Dharmakaya of the Buddha.

M: May be. We need not run off with terminology. Just see the person you imagine yourself to be as a part of the world you perceive within your mind and look at the mind from the outside, for you are not the mind. After all, your only problem is the eager self-identification with whatever you perceive. Give up this habit, remember that you are not what you perceive, use your power of alert aloofness. See yourself in all that lives and your behaviour will express your vision. Once you realize that there is nothing in this world, which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase. But when you know yourself as beyond space and time — in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable — you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are — against fear there is no other remedy.

You have to learn to think and feel on these lines, or you will remain indefinitely on the personal level of desire and fear, gaining and losing, growing and decaying. A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness. It cannot be otherwise. We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely we know where to seek it. Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions. Only what is compatible with your real being can make you happy and the world, as you perceive it, is its outright denial.

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 perception, confined with the contrast between the two. The same with happiness. Usually you have to be sad to know gladness and glad to know sadness. True happiness is un-caused and this cannot disappear for lack of stimulation. It is not the opposite of sorrow, it includes all sorrow and suffering.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

How can one be Happy among Suffering – Nisargadatta

How can one be Happy among Suffering – Nisargadatta

Questioner: How can one remain happy among so much suffering?

Maharaj: One cannot help it — the inner happiness is overwhelmingly real. Like the sun in the sky, its expressions may be clouded, but it is never absent.

Q: When we are in trouble, we are bound to be unhappy.

M: Fear is the only trouble. Know yourself as independent and you will be free from fear and its shadows.

Q: What is the difference between happiness and pleasure?

M: Pleasure depends on things, happiness does not.

Q: If happiness is independent, why are we not always happy?

M: As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall also believe that in their absence we must be miserable. Mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs. Hence the importance of convincing oneself that one need not be prodded into happiness; that, on the contrary, pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite.

But why talk of happiness at all? You do not think of happiness except when you are unhappy: A man who says: ‘Now I am happy’, is between two sorrows — past and future. This happiness is mere excitement caused by relief from pain. Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as: ‘there is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about’. After all, the ultimate purpose of all Sadhana is to reach a point, when this conviction, instead of being only verbal, is based on the actual and ever-present experience.

Q: Which experience?

M: The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

Q: What remains to discover?

M: The universe without and the immensity within as they are in reality, in the great mind and heart of God. The meaning and purpose of existence, the secret of suffering, life’s redemption from ignorance.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

You are Beyond Space and Time – Nisargadatta

You are Beyond Space and Time – Nisargadatta

Questioner: You keep on saying that I was never born and will never die. If so, how is it that I see the world as one which has been born and will surely die?

Maharaj: You believe so because you have never questioned your belief that you are the body which, obviously, is born and dies. While alive, it attracts attention and fascinates so completely that rarely does one perceive one’s real nature. It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath. The world is but the surface of the mind and the mind is infinite. What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains. This reality is so concrete, so actual, so much more tangible than mind and matter, that compared to it even diamond is soft like butter. This overwhelming actuality makes the world dream-like, misty, irrelevant.

Q: This world, with so much suffering in it, how can you see it as irrelevant. What callousness!

M: It is you who is callous, not me. If your world is so full of suffering, do something about it; don’t add to it through greed or indolence. I am not bound by your dreamlike world. In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. My world is free from opposites, of mutually destructive discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rock-like; this peace and silence are my body.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Chapter: You are Beyond Space and Time – Item 94

Mind is restlessness itself – Nisargadatta

Mind is Restlessness itself – Nisargadatta

Questioner: The root of all desires and fears is the same — the longing for happiness.
Maharaj: The happiness you can think of and long for, is mere physical or mental satisfaction. Such sensory or mental pleasure is not the real, the absolute happiness.

Q: Even sensory and mental pleasures and the general sense of well-being which arises with physical and mental health, must have their roots in reality.
M: They have their roots in imagination. A man who is given a stone and assured that it is a priceless diamond will be mightily pleased until he realizes his mistake; in the same way pleasures lose their tang and pains their barb when the self is known. Both are seen as they are — conditional responses, mere reactions, plain attractions and repulsions, based on memories or preconceptions. Usually pleasure and pain are experienced when expected. It is all a matter of acquired habits and convictions.

I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargatta Maharaj
Chapter: Mind is restlessness itself
Item 34