The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself. Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
J. Krishnamurti.
—
*
Questioner: I was born in the United States, and the last fourteen months I have spent in Sri Ramanashram; now I am on my way back to the States where my mother is expecting me.
Maharaj: What are your plans?
Q: I may qualify as a nurse, or just marry and have babies.
M: What makes you want to marry?
Q: Providing a spiritual home is the highest form of social service I can think of. But, of course, life may shape otherwise. I am ready for whatever comes.
M: These fourteen months at Sri Ramanashram, what did they give you? In what way are you different from what you were when you arrived there?
Q: I am no longer afraid. I have found some peace.
M: What kind of peace is it? The peace of having what you want, or not wanting what you do not have?
Q: A little of both, I believe. It was not easy at all. While the Ashram is a very peaceful place, inwardly I was in agonies.
M: When you realise that the distinction between inner and outer is in the mind only, you are no longer afraid.
Q: Such realisation comes and goes with me. I have not yet reached the immutability of absolute completeness.
M: Well, as long as you believe so, you must go on with your sadhana, to disperse the false idea of not being complete. Sadhana removes the super-impositions. When you realise yourself as less than a point in space and time, something too small to be cut and too short-lived to be killed, then, and then only, all fear goes. When you are smaller than the point of a needle, then the needle cannot pierce you — you pierce the needle!
Q: Yes, that is how I feel sometimes — indomitable. I am more than fearless — I am fearlessness itself.
M: What made you go to the Ashram?
Q: I had an unhappy love affair and suffered hell. Neither drink nor drugs could help me. I was groping and came across some books on Yoga. From book to book, from clue to clue — I came to Ramanashram.
M: Were the same tragedy to happen to you again, would you suffer as much, considering your present state of mind?
Q: Oh no, I would not let myself suffer again. I would kill myself.
M: So you are not afraid to die!
Q: I am afraid of dying, not of death itself. I imagine the dying process to be painful and ugly.
M: How do you know? It need not be so. It may be beautiful and peaceful. Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment.
Q: I am fully aware that my fear of death is due to apprehension and not knowledge.
M: Human beings die every second, the fear and the agony of dying hangs over the world like a cloud. No wonder you too are afraid. But once you know that the body alone dies and not the continuity of memory and the sense of ‘I am’ reflected in it, you are afraid no longer.
Q: Well, let us die and see.
M: Give attention and you will find that birth and death are one, that life pulsates between being and non-being, and that each needs the other for completeness. You are born to die and you die to be reborn.
Q: Does not detachment stop the process?
M: With detachment the fear goes, but not the fact.
Q: Shall I be compelled to be reborn? How dreadful!
M: There is no compulsion. You get what you want. You make your own plans and you carry them out.
Q: Do we condemn ourselves to suffer?
M: We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood. If we are sensitive and intelligent, we need not suffer. Pain is a call for attention and the penalty of carelessness. Intelligent and compassionate action is the only remedy.
Q: It is because I have grown in intelligence that I would not tolerate my suffering again. What is wrong with suicide?
M: Nothing wrong, if it solves the problem. What, if it does not? Suffering caused by extraneous factors — some painful and incurable disease, or unbearable calamity — may provide some justification, but where wisdom and compassion are lacking, suicide cannot help. A foolish death means foolishness reborn. Besides there is the question of karma to consider. Endurance is usually the wisest course.
Q: Must one endure suffering, however acute and hopeless?
M: Endurance is one thing and helpless agony is another. Endurance is meaningful and fruitful, while agony is useless.
Q: Why worry about karma? It takes care of itself anyhow.
M: Most of our karma is collective. We suffer for the sins of others, as others suffer for ours. Humanity is one. Ignorance of this fact does not change it. We could have been much happier people ourselves, but for our indifference to the sufferings of others.
Q: I find I have grown much more responsive.
M: Good. When you say it, what do you have in mind? Yourself, as a responsive person within a female body?
Q: There is a body and there is compassion and there is memory and a number of things and attitudes; collectively they may be called a person.
M: Including the ‘I am’ idea?
Q: The ‘I am’ is like a basket that holds the many things that make a person.
M: Or, rather, it is the willow of which the basket is woven. When you think of yourself as a women, do you mean that you are a women, or that your body is described as female?
Q: It depends on my mood. Sometimes I feel myself to be a mere centre of awareness.
M: Or, an ocean of awareness. But are there moments when you are neither man nor women, not the accidental, occasioned by circumstances and conditions?
Q: Yes, there are, but I feel shy to talk about it.
M: A hint is all that one can expect. You need not say more.
Q: Am I allowed to smoke in your presence? I know that it is not the custom to smoke before a sage and more so for a women.
M: By all means, smoke, nobody will mind. We understand.
Q: I feel the need of cooling down.
M: It is very often so with Americans and Europeans. After a stretch of sadhana they become charged with energy and frantically seek an outlet. They organise communities, become teachers of Yoga, marry, write books — anything except keeping quiet and turning their energies within, to find the source of the inexhaustible power and learn the art of keeping it under control.
Q: I admit that now I want to go back and live a very active life, because I feel full of energy.
M: You can do what you like, as long as you do not take yourself to be the body and the mind. It is not so much a question of actual giving up the body and all that goes with it, as a clear understanding that you are not the body. A sense of aloofness, of emotional non-involvement.
Q: I know what you mean. Some four years ago I passed through a period of rejection of the physical; I would not buy myself clothes, would eat the simplest foods, sleep on bare planks. It is the acceptance of the privations that matters, not the actual discomfort. Now I have realised that welcoming life as it comes and loving all it offers, is best of it. I shall accept with glad heart whatever comes and make the best of it. If I can do nothing more than give life and true culture to a few children — good enough; though my heart goes out to every child, I cannot reach all.
M: You are married and a mother only when you are man-women conscious. When you do not take yourself to be the body, then the family life of the body, however intense and interesting, is seen only as a play on the screen of the mind, with the light of awareness as the only reality.
Q: Why do you insist on awareness as the only real? Is not the object of awareness as real, while it lasts?
M: But it does not last! Momentary reality is secondary; it depends on the timeless.
Q: Do you mean continuous, or permanent?
M: There can be no continuity in existence. Continuity implies identity in past, present and future. No such identity is possible, for the very means of identification fluctuate and change. Continuity, permanency, these are illusions created by memory, mere mental projections of a pattern where no pattern can be; Abandon all ideas of temporary or permanent, body or mind, man or women; what remains? What is the state of your mind when all separation is given up? I am not talking of giving up distinctions, for without them there is no manifestation.
Q: When I do not separate, I am happily at peace. But somehow I lose my bearings again and again and begin to seek happiness in outer things. Why is my inner peace not steady, I cannot understand.
M: Peace, after all, is also a condition of the mind.
Q: Beyond the mind is silence. There is nothing to be said about it.
M: Yes, all talk about silence is mere noise.
Q: Why do we seek worldly happiness, even after having tasted one’s own natural spontaneous happiness?
M: When the mind is engaged in serving the body, happiness is lost. To regain it, it seeks pleasure. The urge to be happy is right, but the means of securing it are misleading, unreliable and destructive of true happiness.
Q: Is pleasure always wrong?
M: The right state and use of the body and the mind are intensely pleasant. It is the search for pleasure that is wrong. Do not try to make yourself happy, rather question your very search for happiness. It is because you are not happy that you want to be happy. Find out why you are unhappy. Because you are not happy you seek happiness in pleasure; pleasure brings in pain and therefore you call it worldly; you then long for some other pleasure, without pain, which you call divine. In reality, pleasure is but a respite from pain. Happiness is both worldly and unworldly, within and beyond all that happens. Make no distinction, don’t separate the inseparable and do not alienate yourself from life.
Q: How well I understand you now! Before my stay at Ramanashram I was tyrannised by conscience, always sitting in judgment of myself. Now I am completely relaxed, fully accepting myself as I am. When I return to the States, I shall take life as it comes, as Bhagavan’s grace, and enjoy the bitter along with the sweet. This is one of the things I have learnt in the Ashram — to trust Bhagavan. I was not like this before. I could not trust.
M: Trusting Bhagavan is trusting yourself. Be aware that whatever happens, happens to you, by you, through you, that you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive and you will not be afraid. Unafraid, you will not be unhappy, nor will you seek happiness.
In the mirror of your mind all kinds of pictures appear and disappear. Knowing that they are entirely your own creations, watch them silently come and go, be alert, but not perturbed. This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of Yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.
Q: I find that the thought of death frightens me because I do not want to be reborn. I know that none compels, yet the pressure of unsatisfied desires is overwhelming and I may not be able to resist.
M: The question of resistance does not arise. What is born and reborn is not you. Let it happen, watch it happen.
Q: Why then be at all concerned?
M: But you are concerned! And you will be concerned as long as the picture clashes with your own sense of truth, love and beauty. The desire for harmony and peace is in eradicable. But once it is fulfilled, the concern ceases and physical life becomes effortless and below the level of attention. Then, even in the body you are not born. To be embodied or bodyless is the same to you. You reach a point when nothing can happen to you. Without body, you cannot be killed; without possessions you cannot be robbed; without mind, you cannot be deceived. There is no point where a desire or fear can hook on. As long as no change can happen to you, what else matters?
Q: Somehow I do not like the idea of dying.
M: It is because you are so young. The more you know yourself the less you are afraid. Of course, the agony of dying is never pleasant to look at, but the dying man is rarely conscious.
Q: Does he return to consciousness?
M: It is very much like sleep. For a time the person is out of focus and then it returns.
Q: The same person?
M: The person, being a creature of circumstances, necessarily changes along with them, like the flame that changes with the fuel. Only the process goes on and on, creating time and space.
Q: Well, God will look after me. I can leave everything to Him.
M: Even faith in God is only a stage on the way. Ultimately you abandon all, for you come to something so simple that there are no words to express it.
Q: I am just beginning. At the start I had no faith, no trust; I was afraid to let things happen. The world seemed to be a very dangerous and inimical place. Now, at least I can talk of trusting the Guru or God. Let me grow. Don’t drive me on. Let me proceed at my own pace.
M: By all means proceed. But you don’t. You are still stuck in the ideas of man and women, old and young, life and death. Go on, go beyond. A thing recognised is a thing transcended.
Q: Sir, wherever I go people take it to be their duty to find faults with me and goad me on. I am fed up with this spiritual fortune making. What is wrong with my present that it should be sacrificed to a future, however glorious? You say reality is in the now. I want it. I do not want to be eternally anxious about my stature and its future. I do not want to chase the more and the better. Let me love what I have.
M: You are quite right; do it. Only be honest — just love what you love — don’t strive and strain.
Q: This is what I call surrender to the Guru.
M: Why exteriorise? Surrender to your own self, of which everything is an expression.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself. Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
J. Krishnamurti
The jnani or liberated sage no longer has an individual identity to be concerned or embarrassed about, and his psychosomatic apparatus, the body, carries out its normal functions in the normal way without his even being aware of them. The wisdom he speaks is being said not by an individual personality but by the universal Consciousness, which has no shape or form.
Ramesh Balsekar
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Rumi
IS ‘THINKING’ REALLY NECESSARY IN DAILY LIVING?
Is it not possible to live our daily lives without constantly creating concepts and objects in our mind?
Unfortunately, for most of us, thinking has become such a significant part of our daily living that it seems almost impossible to live without constant thinking, because we think of such a state as being a state of stupor or even idiocy. But that is just not so. A mind that is not agitated, a mind that is not distracted by its own imaginings, a mind that is ‘open’ can look at any problem simply and directly. This is so for the simple reason that such a mind is not functioning in the background of tradition, prejudice, conditioning of hope and despair.
It is a fact of life that, except in the laboratory or on the drawing board, thinking – conceptualizing – is generally self-centered and self-protecting. A problem can be solved only if it is seen as a whole, not in fragmentation.
The problem needs to be seen with an awareness that is without condemnation or justification, without self-centeredness. For the problem to be solved totally, together with its root, it is necessary to be totally aware of the pettiness and self centeredness of our usual mode of thinking. Then there ARISES a state of intelligence or wisdom which is neither personal nor impersonal. It is only in such a state of tranquility of mind that the problem itself is seen with such a transparent clarity that there is no need of any solution to the problem. More often that not, the problem itself disappears.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
Even abstention from action leads to action in a fool, while even the action of the wise man brings the fruits of inaction.
If, however inadequately, enlightenment could be described in terms of qualities, I see them as unconditional love, compassion, stillness, and joy without cause. Existence in time is only a reflection of those qualities, and whilst I maintain and invest my belief in my separate identity, I can only again express a reflection of those qualities and not be their essence.
Whilst I do not know who I am, I am bereft.
Enlightenment, however, has another quality, which is the bridge between the timeless and my illusory sense of separation. That quality is presence. Presence is our constant nature but most of the time we are interrupting it by living in a state of expectation, motivation or interpretation. We are hardly ever at home. In order to rediscover our freedom we need to let go of these projections and allow the possibility of presence. Its real discovery, or our access to it, can only be made within the essence of what is. This is where spontaneous aliveness resides and where we can openly welcome the unknown.
Only here, in present awareness of simply what is, can there be freedom from self-image.
To live passionately is to let go of everything for the wonder of timeless presence. When we are courageous enough to allow this we suddenly rediscover that we are the sole source of all and everything.
Presence is not to be confused with “being here now” which is a continuous process of the separate self and has no direct relevance to liberation.
Presence is a quality of welcoming, open awareness which is dedicated to simply what is. There can still be someone who is aware and there is that of which they are conscious… the sound of running water, the taste of tea, the feeling of fear, or the weight and texture of sitting on a seat. And then there can be a letting go of the one who is aware, and all that remains is presence. All of this is totally without judgement, analysis, wish to reach conclusion or to become. There is no traffic and no expectation. There is simply what is.
At first it is enough to allow dedicated aware-ness to what is. Letting go of the one who is aware can easily follow, but it can never be a task.
I cannot ‘do’ presence, simply because I am presence. So there is no process to learn because I cannot learn or achieve something that I already am.
Presence is totally effortless and is nearer to me than breathing. Presence can only be allowed and recognised. What I tend to do most of the time is sidestep it or interrupt it.
Existence would not be if it were not for presence. I am presence and you are presence. If we were not present, existence would not be.
Presence emanates from the source of all and everything known or unknown. And that is what we are. We are the sole source of our own unique creation.
There can be presence or we can remain separate. There can be openness or we can invest in manipulation. There can be a welcoming of the continuous simplicity and wonder of simply what is or we can be imprisoned by the limitations of our expectations. All is appropriate.
Presence is the light in the darkness. It is atomic. One moment of presence brings more light to the world than a thousand years of “good works”. In presence all action is uncluttered and unsullied. It is spontaneity born from stillness.
In allowing presence, however, we embrace a kind of death. What dies is all expectation, judgement and effort to become. What dies is the stuff of separation, the sense of self-identity, which can only function in the illusory world of past and future, memory and expectation. For it will be found that if we let go into simply what is, we will be in a place of unknowing.
That is how the embracing of presence is a kind of death. What dies is the dream of individuality. What we let go of is our incessant need to feel that we are a separate entity… that we will continue as a fraction of the whole. And in that letting go we come to see that all death is a rebirth into liberation.
For what we open up to in presence is the possi-bility of entering oneness, the rediscovery of what we really are. This is the bridge between the world of separation and enlightenment which once crossed, is no more.
When there is presence the self is no more. We stand astride the living paradox and allow the emergence of freedom from the incessant traffic of becoming. It is a welcoming of the open secret.
When there is presence there is awareness and this is the light that enters the darkness. The light enters the darkness and dissipates those illusions that appear to interrupt oneness. Awareness does not divide or suppress and thereby give energy to the unreal. It simply sees what is and brings the light which allows that which is illusory to evaporate.
There is never any situation in which we cannot be united with the present. Isn’t that wonderful?! I will say it again. Presence is available in any situation, or put another way, freedom is already continuously available.
There is sufficient in every day to be present with… pain, fear, the sound of a car, wind in the trees, my body in the chair, a pen in my fingers, emotional pain, habits, abounding self-judgement, guilt, walking, the taste of cheese, being in a hurry, being lazy, being in control, and the guru mind which insists that presence is non-productive and that I should be doing something “spiritual”, or at the very least, useful. Presence shines wherever it will, on any part of existence.
If I try to bring light to one aspect of my story in particular, I disturb the natural flow and counter-point of the opportunities that life and my innate wisdom presents to me. For presence is not a task, and it cannot be used by my will. It is not a spiritual exercise or a tool to get somewhere, like prayer or formal meditation. Directly I attempt to harness it to a task I have already tried to constrain that which is beyond limitation.
Presence is all-encompassing and is its own reward. It isn’t trying to get anywhere, and if I am, I have already interrupted it.
However, when there is presence the whole being relaxes into its embrace. There are no more questions and there is no more striving. The mind departs the throne, the body relaxes, the breathing evens out and the perception becomes global. I rest in that which never comes and never goes away.
When there is presence there is total intimacy and the senses are heightened to a degree previously unrecognised… I see and touch in innocence, I taste and smell for the first time, and hear a new sound that is vital, fresh and unknown.
There is a subtle feeling of risk and serenity in presence. It is the first and last step. It moves beyond time and self-identity and provides the ground in which the discovery of what I am is made immediately and directly available.
When there is presence, all that is illusory falls away, and what is left is real, vital and passionately alive. Life full on… not my life, not anyone’s life, but simply life.
Presence does not bring heaven down to earth or raise earth up to heaven. All is one.
Tony Parsons
The ignorant reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.
Huang-po