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Questioner:
I have noticed a new self emerging in me, independent of the old self. They
somehow co-exist. The old self goes on its habitual ways; the new lets the old
be, but does not identify itself with it.
Maharaj:
What is the main difference between the old self and the new?
Q: The old self wants everything defined and
explained. It wants things to fit each other verbally. The new does not care
for verbal explanations -- it accepts things as they are and does not seek to
relate them to things remembered.
M: Are you fully and constantly aware of the
difference between the habitual and the spiritual. What is the attitude of the
new self to the old?
Q: The new just looks at the old. It is neither
friendly nor inimical. It just accepts the old self along with everything else.
It does not deny its being, but does not accept its value and validity.
M: The new is the total denial of the old. The
permissive new is not really new. It is but a new attitude of the old. The
really new obliterates the old completely. The two cannot be together. Is there
a process of self-denudation, a constant refusal to accept the old ideas and
values, or is there just a mutual tolerance? What is their relation?
Q: There is no particular relation. They
co-exist.
M: When you talk of the old self and new, whom
do you have in mind? As there is continuity in memory between the two, each
remembering the other, how can you speak of two selves?
Q: One is a slave to habits, the other is not.
One conceptualises, the other is free from all ideas.
M: Why two selves? Between the bound and the
free there can be no relationship. The very fact of co-existence proves their
basic unity. There is but one self -- it is always now. What you call the
other self -- old or new -- is but a modality, another aspect of the one self.
The self is single. You are that self and you have ideas of what you have been
or will be. But an idea is not the self. Just now, as you are sitting in front
of me, which self are you? The old or the new?
Q: The two are in conflict.
M: How can there be conflict between what is and
what is not? Conflict is the characteristic of the old. When the new emerges
the old is no longer. You cannot speak of the new and the conflict in the same
breath. Even the effort of striving for the new self is of the old. Wherever
there is conflict, effort, struggle, striving, longing for a change, the new is
not. To what extent are you free from the habitual tendency to create and
perpetuate conflicts?
Q: I cannot say that I am now a different man.
But I did discover new things about myself, states so unlike what I knew before
that I feel justified in calling them new.
M: The old self is your own self. The state
which sprouts suddenly and without cause, carries no stain of self; you may
call it 'god'. What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow,
flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory,
mysteriously and marvellously, you may call that 'god'. It is entirely
unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all
hope yet absolutely certain. Because it is without cause, it is without
hindrance. It obeys one law only; the law of freedom. Anything that implies a
continuity, a sequence, a passing from stage to stage cannot be the real. There
is no progress in reality, it is final, perfect, unrelated.
Q: How can I bring it about?
M: You can do nothing to bring it about, but you
can avoid creating obstacles. Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it
operates. As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When
you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind
the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge.
That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. It is not in the
sky nor in the all-pervading ether. God is all that is great and wonderful; I
am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing. Yet all comes out of me -- the source
is me; the root, the origin is me.
When reality explodes in you, you may
call it experience of God. Or, rather, it is God experiencing you. God knows
you when you know yourself. Reality is not the result of a process; it is an
explosion. It is definitely beyond the mind, but all you can do is to know your
mind well. Not that the mind will help you, but by knowing your mind you may
avoid your mind disabling you. You have to be very alert, or else your mind
will play false with you. It is like watching a thief -- not that you expect
anything from a thief, but you do not want to be robbed. In the same way you
give a lot of attention to the mind without expecting anything from it.
Or, take another example. We wake and we
sleep. After a day's work sleep comes. Now, do I go to sleep or does
inadvertence -- characteristic of the sleeping state -- come to me? In other
words -- we are awake because we are asleep. We do not wake up into a really
waking state. In the waking state the world emerges due to ignorance and takes
one into a waking-dream state. Both sleep and waking are misnomers. We are only
dreaming. True waking and true sleeping only the jnani knows. We dream
that we are awake, we dream that we are asleep. The three states are only
varieties of the dream state. Treating everything as a dream liberates. As long
as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave. By imagining that you are
born as so-and-so, you become a slave to the so-and-so. The essence of slavery
is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have past and future, to have
history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop,
nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.
Q: What benefit do I derive from listening to
you?
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: What makes the difference between the person
and the witness?
M: Both are modes of consciousness. In one you
desire and fear, in the other you are unaffected by pleasure and pain and are
not ruffled by events. You let them come and go.
Q: How does one get established in the higher
state, the state of pure witnessing?
M: Consciousness does not shine by itself.
It shines by a light beyond it. Having seen the dreamlike quality of
consciousness, look for the light in which it appears, which gives it being.
There is the content of consciousness as well as the awareness of it.
Q: I know and I know that I know.
M: Quite so, provided the second knowledge is
unconditional and timeless. Forget the known, but remember that you are the knower.
Don't be all the time immersed in your experiences. Remember that you are
beyond the experience ever unborn and deathless. In remembering it, the quality
of pure knowledge will emerge, the light of unconditional awareness.
Q: At what point does one experience reality?
M: Experience is of change, it comes and goes.
Reality is not an event, it cannot be experienced. It is not perceivable in the
same way as an event is perceivable. If you wait for an event to take place,
for the coming of reality, you will wait for ever, for reality neither comes
nor goes. It is to be perceived, not expected. It is not to be prepared for and
anticipated. But the very longing and search for reality is the movement,
operation, action of reality. All you can do is to grasp the central point,
that reality is not an event and does not happen and whatever happens, whatever
comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only, the transient as
transient, experience as mere experience and you have done all you can. Then you
are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you
gave reality to events and experiences. But as soon as there is some like or
dislike, you have drawn a screen.
Q: Would you say that reality expresses itself
in action rather than in knowledge? Or, is it a feeling of sorts?
M: Neither action, nor feeling, nor thought
express reality. There is no such thing as an expression of reality. You are
introducing a duality where there is none. Only reality is, there is
nothing else. The three states of waking, dreaming and sleeping are not me and
I am not in them. When I die, the world will say -- 'Oh, Maharaj is dead!' But
to me these are words without content; they have no meaning. When the worship
is done before the image of the Guru, all takes place as if he wakes and bathes
and eats and rests, and goes for a stroll and returns, blesses all and goes to
sleep. All is attended to in minutest details and yet there is a sense of
unreality about it all. So is the case with me. All happens as it needs, yet
nothing happens. I do what seems to be necessary, but at the same time I know
that nothing is necessary, that life itself is only a make-belief.
Q: Why then live at all? Why all this
unnecessary coming and going, waking and sleeping, eating and digesting?
M: Nothing is done by me, everything just
happens I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing
them to be unreal.
Q: Were you always like this from the first
moment of enlightenment?
M: The three states rotate as usual -- there is
waking and sleeping and waking again, but they do not happen to me. They just
happen. To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless,
immovable, rocklike, unassailable; a solid mass of pure
being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it,
no torture, no calamity.
Q: Yet, you are conscious!
M: Yes and no. There is peace -- deep, immense,
unshakeable. Events are registered in memory, but are of no importance. I am
hardly aware of them.
Q: If I understand you rightly, this state did
not come by cultivation.
M: There was no coming. It was so -- always.
There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world
suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being.
Q: Was it clouded over and your sadhana
dissolved the mist? When your true state became clear to you, did it remain
clear, or did it get obscured again? Is your condition permanent or
intermittent?
M: Absolutely steady. Whatever I may do, it
stays like a rock -- motionless. Once you have awakened into reality, you stay
in it. A child does not return to the womb! It is a simple state, smaller than
the smallest, bigger than the biggest. It is self-evident and yet beyond
description.
Q: Is there a way to it?
M: Everything can become a way, provided you are
interested. Just puzzling over my words and trying to grasp their full meaning
is a sadhana quite sufficient for breaking down the wall. Nothing
troubles me. I offer no resistance to trouble -- therefore it does not stay with
me. On your side there is so much trouble. On mine there is no trouble at all.
Come to my side. You are trouble-prone. I am immune. Anything may happen -- what
is needed is sincere interest. Earnestness does it.
Q: Can I do it?
M: Of course. You are quite capable of crossing
over. Only be sincere.
