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Questioner:
We are advised to worship reality personified as God, or as the Perfect Man. We
are told not to attempt the worship of the Absolute, as it is much too
difficult for a braincentred consciousness.
Maharaj:
Truth is simple and open to all. Why do you complicate? Truth is loving and
lovable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is
difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands. Being
false, it is empty, always in search of confirmation and reassurance. It is
afraid of and avoids enquiry. It identifies itself with any support, however
weak and momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses and asks for more. Therefore put
no faith in the conscious. Nothing you can see, feel, or think is so. Even sin
and virtue, merit and demerit are not what they appear. Usually the bad and the
good are a matter of convention and custom and are shunned or welcomed,
according to how the words are used.
Q: Are there not good desires and bad, high
desires and low?
M: All desires are bad, but some are worse than
others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.
Q: Even the desire to be free of desire?
M: Why desire at all? Desiring a state of
freedom from desire will not set you free. Nothing can set you free, because
you are free. See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all.
Q: It takes time to know oneself.
M: How can time help you? Time is a succession
of moments; each moment appears out of nothing and disappears into nothing,
never to reappear. How can you build on something so fleeting?
Q: What is permanent?
M: Look to yourself for the permanent. Dive deep
within and find what is real in you.
Q: How to look for myself?
M: Whatever happens, it happens to you. What you
do, the doer is in you. Find the subject of all that you are as a person.
Q: What else can I be?
M: Find out. Even if I tell you that you are the
witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the
way to your own being.
Q: My question is: How to find the way to one's
own being?
M: Give up all questions except one: 'Who am l'?
After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The 'I am' is
certain. The 'I am this' is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
Q: I am doing nothing else for the last 60
years.
M: What is wrong with striving? Why look for
results? Striving itself is your real nature.
Q: Striving is painful.
M: You make it so by seeking results. Strive
without seeking, struggle without greed.
Q: Why has God made me as I am?
M: Which God are you talking about? What is God?
Is he not the very light by which you ask the question? 'I am' itself is God.
The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the
body nor mind, and the love of the self in you is for the self in all. The two
are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two,
really one, seek unity and that is love.
Q: How am I to find that love?
M: What do you love now? The 'I am'. Give your
heart and mind to it, think of nothing else. This, when effortless and natural,
is the highest state. In it love itself is the lover and the beloved.
Q: Everybody wants to live, to exist. Is it not
self-love?
M: All desire has its source in the self. It is
all a matter of choosing the right desire.
Q: What is right and what is wrong varies with
habit and custom. Standards vary with societies.
M: Discard all traditional standards. Leave them
to the hypocrites. Only what liberates you from desire and fear and wrong ideas
is good. As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace.
Q: I grant that sin and virtue are social
norms. But there may be also spiritual sins and virtues. I mean by spiritual
the absolute. Is there such a thing as absolute sin or absolute virtue?
M: Sin and virtue refer to a person only.
Without a sinful or virtuous person what is sin or virtue? At the level of the
absolute there are no persons; the ocean of pure awareness is neither virtuous
nor sinful. Sin and virtue are invariably relative.
Q: Can I do away with such unnecessary notions?
M: Not as long as you think yourself to be a
person.
Q: By what sign shall l know that I am beyond
sin and virtue?
M: By being free from all desire and fear, from
the very idea of being a person. To nourish the ideas: 'I am a sinner' 'I am
not a sinner', is sin. To identify oneself with the particular is all the sin
there is. The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears. 'I am'
is the impersonal Being. 'I am this' is the person. The person is relative and
the pure Being -- fundamental.
Q: Surely pure Being is not unconscious, nor is
it devoid of discrimination. How can it be beyond sin and virtue? Just tell us,
please, has it intelligence or not?
M: All these questions arise from your believing
yourself to be a person. Go beyond the personal and see.
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: To think oneself as the personal is the sin
of the impersonal.
M: Again the personal point of view! Why do you
insist on polluting the impersonal with your ideas of sin and virtue? It just
does not apply. The impersonal cannot be described in terms of good and bad. It
is Being -- Wisdom -- Love -- all absolute. Where is the scope for sin there? And
virtue is only the opposite of sin.
Q: We talk of divine virtue.
M: True virtue is divine nature (swarupa).
What you are really is your virtue. But the opposite of sin which you call
virtue is only obedience born out of fear.
Q: Then why all effort at being good?
M: It keeps you on the move. You go on and on
till you find God. Then God takes you into Himself -- and makes you as He is.
Q: The same action is considered natural at one
point and a sin at another. What makes it sinful?
M: Whatever you do against your better knowledge
is sin.
Q: Knowledge depends on memory.
M: Remembering your self is virtue,
forgetting your self is sin. It all boils down to the mental or psychological
link between the spirit and matter. We may call the link psyche (antahkarana).
When the psyche is raw, undeveloped, quite primitive, it is subject to gross
illusions. As it grows in breadth and sensitivity, it becomes a perfect link
between pure matter and pure spirit and gives meaning to matter and expression
to spirit.
There is the material world (mahadakash)
and the spiritual (paramakash). Between lies the universal mind (chidakash)
which is also the universal heart (premakash). It is wise love that
makes the two one.
Q: Some people are stupid,
some are intelligent. The difference is in their psyche. The ripe ones had more
experience behind them. Just like a child grows by eating and drinking,
sleeping and playing, so is man's psyche shaped by all he thinks and feels and
does, until it is perfect enough to serve as a bridge between the spirit and
the body. As a bridge permits the traffic; between the banks, so does the
psyche bring together the source and its expression.
M: Call it love. The bridge is love.
Q: Ultimately all is experience. Whatever we
think, feel, do is experience. Behind it is the experiencer. So all we know
consists of these two, the experiencer and the experience. But the two are
really one -- the experiencer alone is the experience. Still, the experiencer
takes the experience to be outside. In the same way the spirit and the body are
one; they only appear as two.
M: To the Spirit there is no second.
Q: To whom then does the second appear? It
seems to me that duality is an illusion induced by the imperfection of the
psyche. When the psyche is perfect, duality is no longer seen.
M: You have said it.
Q: Still I have to repeat my very simple
question: who makes the distinction between sin and virtue?
M: He who has a body, sins with the body, he who
has a mind, sins with the mind.
Q: Surely, the mere possession of mind and body
does not compel to sin. There must be a third factor at the root of it. I come
back again and again to this question of sin and virtue, because now-a-days
young people keep on saying that there is no such thing as sin, that one need
not be squermish and should follow the moment's desire readily. They will
accept neither tradition nor authority and can be influenced only by solid and
honest thought. If they refrain from certain actions, it is through fear of
police rather than by conviction. Undoubtedly there is something in what they
say, for we can see how our values change from place to place and time to time.
For instance -- killing in war is great virtue today and may be considered a
horrible crime next century.
M: A man who moves with the earth will
necessarily experience days and nights. He who stays with the sun will know no
darkness. My world is not yours. As I see it, you all are on a stage
performing. There is no reality about your comings and goings. And your
problems are so unreal!
Q: We may be sleep-walkers, or subject to
nightmares. Is there nothing you can do?
M: I am doing: I did enter your dreamlike state
to tell you -- "Stop hurting yourself and others, stop suffering, wake
up".
Q: Why then don't we wake up?
M: You will. I shall not be thwarted. It may
take some time. When you shall begin to question your dream, awakening will be
not far away.
