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Questioner:
People come to you for advice. How do you know what to answer?
Maharaj:
As I hear the question, so do I hear the answer.
Q: And how do you know that your answer is
right?
M: Once I know the true source of the answers, I
need not doubt them. From a pure source only pure water will flow. I am not
concerned with people's desires and fears. I am in tune with facts, not with
opinions. Man takes his name and shape to be himself, while I take nothing to
be myself. Were I to think myself to be a body known by its name, I would not
have been able to answer your questions. Were I to take you to be a mere body,
there would be no benefit to you from my answers. No true teacher indulges in
opinions. He sees things as they are and shows them as they are. If you take
people to be what they think themselves to be, you will only hurt them, as they
hurt themselves so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in
reality, it will do them enormous good. If they ask you what to do, what
practices to adopt, which way of life to follow, answer: 'Do nothing, just be.
In being all happens naturally.'
Q: It seems to me that in your talks you use
the words 'naturally' and 'accidentally' indiscriminately. I feel there is a
deep difference in the meaning of the two words. The natural is orderly,
subject to law; one can trust nature; the accidental is chaotic, unexpected,
unpredictable. One could plead that everything is natural, subject to nature's
laws; to maintain that everything is accidental, without any cause, is surely
an exaggeration.
M: Would you like it better if I use the word
'spontaneous' instead of 'accidental'?
Q: You may use the word 'spontaneous' or
'natural' as opposed to 'accidental'. In the accidental there is the element of
disorder, of chaos. An accident is always a breach of rules, an exception, a
surprise.
M: Is not life itself a stream of surprises?
Q: There is harmony in nature. The accidental
is a disturbance.
M: You speak as a person, limited in time and
space, reduced to the contents of a body and a mind. What you like, you call
'natural' and what you dislike, you call 'accidental'.
Q: I like the natural, and the law-abiding, the
expected and I fear the law-breaking, the disorderly, the unexpected, the
meaningless. The accidental is always monstrous. There may be so-called 'lucky
accidents', but they only prove the rule that in an accident-prone universe
life would be impossible.
M: I feel there is a misunderstanding. By
'accidental' I mean something to which no known law applies. When I say
everything is accidental, uncaused, I only mean that the causes and the laws
according to which they operate are beyond our knowing, or even imagining. If
you call what you take to be orderly, harmonious, predictable, to be natural,
then what obeys higher laws and is moved by higher powers may be called
spontaneous. Thus, we shall have two natural orders: the personal and
predictable and the impersonal, or super-personal, and unpredictable. Call it
lower nature and higher nature and drop the word accidental. As you grow in
knowledge and insight, the borderline between lower and higher nature keeps on
receding, but the two remain until they are seen as one. For, in fact,
everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!
Q: Science explains a lot.
M: Science deals with names and shapes,
quantities and qualities, patterns and laws; it is all right in its own place.
But life is to be lived; there is no time for analysis. The response must be
instantaneous -- hence the importance of the spontaneous, the timeless. It is in
the unknown that we live and move. the known is the past.
Q: I can take my stand on what I feel I am. I
am an individual, a person among persons. Some people are integrated and
harmonized, and some are not. Some live effortlessly, respond spontaneously to
every situation correctly, doing full justice to the need of the moment, while
others fumble, err and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The harmonized
people may be called natural, ruled by law, while the disintegrated are chaotic
and subject to accidents.
M: The very idea of chaos presupposes the sense
of the orderly, the organic, the inter-related. Chaos and cosmos: are they not
two aspects of the same state?
Q: But you seem to say that all is chaos,
accidental, unpredictable.
M: Yes, in the sense that not all the laws of
being are known and not all events are predictable. The more you are able to
understand, the more the universe becomes satisfactory, emotionally and
mentally. Reality is good and beautiful; we create the chaos.
Q: If you mean to say that it is the free will
of man that causes accidents, I would agree. But we have not yet discussed free
will.
M: Your order is what gives you pleasure and
disorder is what gives you pain.
Q: You may put it that way, but do not tell me
that the two are one. Talk to me in my own language -- the language of an
individual in search of happiness. I do not want to be misled by non-dualistic
talks.
M: What makes you believe that you are a
separate individual?
Q: I behave as an individual. I function on my
own. I consider myself primarily, and others only in relation to myself. In
short, I am busy with myself.
M: Well, go on being busy with yourself. On what
business have you come here?
Q: On my old business of making myself safe and
happy. I confess I have not been too successful. I am neither safe nor happy.
Therefore, you find me here. This place is new to me, but my reason for coming
here is old: the search for safe happiness, happy safety. So far I did not find
it. Can you help me?
M: What was never lost can never be found. Your
very search for safety and joy keeps you away from them. Stop searching, cease
losing. The disease is simple and the remedy equally simple. It is your mind
only that makes you insecure and unhappy. Anticipation makes you insecure,
memory -- unhappy. Stop misusing your mind and all will be well with you. You
need not set it right -- it will set itself right, as soon as you give up all
concern with the past and the future and live entirely in the now.
Q: But the now has no
dimension. I shall become a nobody, a nothing !
M: Exactly. As nothing and nobody you are safe
and happy. You can have the experience for the asking. Just try.
But let us go back to what is accidental
and what is spontaneous, or natural. You said nature is orderly while accident
is a sign of chaos. I denied the difference and said that we call an event
accidental when its causes are untraceable. There is no place for chaos in
nature. Only in the mind of man there is chaos. The mind does not grasp the
whole -- its focus is very narrow. It sees fragments only and fails to perceive
the picture. Just as a man who hears sounds, but does not understand the
language, may accuse the speaker of meaningless jabbering, and be altogether
wrong. What to one is a chaotic stream of sounds is a beautiful poem to
another.
King Janaka once dreamt that he was a
beggar. On waking up he asked his Guru -- Vasishta: Am I a king dreaming of
being a beggar, or a beggar dreaming of being a king? The Guru answered: You
are neither, you are both. You are, and yet you are not what you think yourself
to be. You are because you behave accordingly; you are not because it does not
last. Can you be a king or a beggar for ever? All must change. You are what
does not change. What are you? Janaka said: Yes, I am neither king nor beggar,
I am the dispassionate witness. The Guru said. This is your last illusion that
you are a jnani, that you are
different from, and superior to, the common man. Again you identify yourself
with your mind, in this case a well-behaved and in every way an exemplary mind.
As long as you see the least difference, you are a stranger to reality. You are
on the level of the mind. When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes.
When the 'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes. When even 'I am' goes, reality alone is
and in it every 'I am' is preserved and glorified. Diversity without
separateness is the Ultimate that the mind can touch. Beyond that all activity
ceases, because in it all goals are reached and all purposes fulfilled.
Q: Once the Supreme State is reached, can it be
shared with others?
M: The Supreme State is universal, here and now;
everybody already shares in it. It is the state of being -- knowing and liking.
Who does not like to be, or does not know his own existence? But we take no
advantage of this joy of being conscious, we do not go into it and purify it of
all that is foreign to it. This work of mental self-purification, the cleansing
of the psyche, is essential. Just as a speck in the eye, by causing
inflammation, may wipe out the world, so the mistaken idea: 'I am the
body-mind' causes the self-concern, which obscures the universe. It is useless
to fight the sense of being a limited and separate person unless the roots of
it are laid bare. Selfishness is rooted in the mistaken ideas of oneself. Clarification
of the mind is Yoga.
