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Questioner:
I have come frown England and I am on my way to Madras. There I shall meet my
father and we shall go by car overland to London. I am to study psychology, but
I do not yet know what I shall do when I get my degree. I may try industrial
psychology, or psychotherapy. My father is a general physician, I may follow
the same line.
But this does not exhaust my interests.
There are certain questions which do not change with time. I understand you
have some answers to such questions and this made me come to see you.
Maharaj:
I wonder whether I am the right man to answer your questions. I know little
about things and people. I know only that I am, and that much you also know. We
are equals.
Q: Of course I know that I am. But I do not
know what it means.
M: What you take to be the 'I' in the 'I am' is
not you. To know that you are is natural, to know what you are is the
result of much investigation. You will have to explore the entire field of
consciousness and go beyond it. For this you must find the right teacher and
create the conditions needed for discovery. Generally speaking, there are two
ways: external and internal. Either you live with somebody who knows the Truth
and submit yourself entirely to his guiding and moulding influence, or you seek
the inner guide and follow the inner light wherever it takes you. In both cases
your personal desires and fears must be disregarded. You learn either by
proximity or by investigation, the passive or the active way. You either let
yourself be carried by the river of life and love represented by your Guru, or
you make your own efforts, guided by your inner star. In both cases you must
move on, you must be earnest. Rare are the people who are lucky to find
somebody worthy of trust and love. Most of them must take the hard way, the way
of intelligence and understanding, of discrimination and detachment (viveka-vairagya).
This is the way open to all.
Q: I am lucky to have come
here: though I am leaving tomorrow, one talk with you may affect my entire
life.
M: Yes, once you say 'I want to find Truth', all
your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits,
feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a
most radical transformation.
Q: Once I have made up my mind to find The
Reality, what do I do next?
M: It depends on your temperament. If you are
earnest, whatever way you choose will take you to your goal. It is the
earnestness that is the decisive factor.
Q: What is the source of earnestness?
M: It is the homing instinct, which makes the
bird return to its nest and the fish to the mountain stream where it was born.
The seed returns to the earth, when the fruit is ripe. Ripeness is all.
Q: And what will ripen me? Do I need
experience?
M: You already have all the experience you need,
otherwise you would not have come here. You need not gather any more, rather
you must go beyond experience. Whatever effort you make, whatever method (sadhana)
you follow, will merely generate more experience, but will not take you beyond.
Nor will reading books help you. They will enrich your mind, but the person you
are will remain intact. If you expect any benefits from your search, material,
mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It
gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the
freedom from the false.
Q: Surely truth gives you the power to help
others.
M: This is mere imagination, however noble! In
truth you do not help others, because there are no others. You divide people
into noble and ignoble and you ask the noble to help the ignoble. You separate,
you evaluate, you judge and condemn -- in the name of truth you destroy it. Your
very desire to formulate truth denies it, because it cannot be contained in
words. Truth can be expressed only by the denial of the false -- in action. For
this you must see the false as false (viveka) and reject it (vairagya).
Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing. It lays open the road
to perfection.
Q: When do I know that I have discovered truth?
M: When the idea 'this is true', 'that is true'
does not arise. Truth does not assert itself, it is in the seeing of the false
as false and rejecting it. It is useless to search for truth, when the mind is
blind to the false. It must be purged of the false completely before truth can
dawn on It.
Q: But what is false?
M: Surely, what has no being is false.
Q: What do you mean by having no being? The
false is there, hard as a nail.
M: What contradicts itself, has no being. Or it
has only momentary being, which comes to the same. For, what has a beginning
and an end has no middle. It is hollow. It has only the name and shape given to
it by the mind, but it has neither substance nor essence.
Q: If all that passes has no being, then the
universe has no being either.
M: Who ever denies it? Of course the universe
has no being.
Q: What has?
M: That which does not depend for its existence,
which does not arise with the universe arising, nor set with the universe
setting, which does not need any proof, but imparts reality to all it touches.
It is the nature of the false that it appears real for a moment. One could say
that the true becomes the father of the false. But the false is limited in time
and space and is produced by circumstances.
Q: How am I to get rid of the false and secure
the real?
M: To what purpose?
Q: In order to live a better, a more
satisfactory life, integrated and happy.
M: Whatever is conceived by the mind must be
false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. The real is inconceivable
and cannot be harnessed to a purpose. It must be wanted for its own sake.
Q: How can I want the inconceivable?
M: What else is there worth wanting? Granted,
the real cannot be wanted, as a thing is wanted. But you can see the unreal as
unreal and discard it. It is the discarding the false that opens the way to the
true.
Q: I understand, but how does it look in actual
daily life?
M: Self-interest and self-concern are the focal
points of the false. Your daily life vibrates between desire and fear. Watch it
intently and you will see how the mind assumes innumerable names and shapes,
like a river foaming between the boulders. Trace every action to its selfish
motive and look at the motive intently till it dissolves.
Q: To live, one must look after oneself, one
must earn money for oneself.
M: You need not earn for yourself, but you may
have to -- for a woman and a child. You may have to keep on working for the sake
of others. Even just to keep alive can be a sacrifice. There is no need
whatsoever to be selfish. Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is
seen and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
Q: There is a minimum of needs.
M: Were they not supplied since you were
conceived? Give up the bondage of self-concern and be what you are --
intelligence and love in action.
Q: But one must survive!
M: You can't help surviving! The real you is
timeless and beyond birth and death. And the body will survive as long as it is
needed. It is not important that it should live long. A full life is better
than a long life.
Q: Who is to say what is a full life? It
depends on my cultural background.
M: If you seek reality you must set yourself
free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and
feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be
discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all
abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such,
so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your
welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop
thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need
absolutely nothing.
It does not mean that you must be
brainless and foolhardy, improvident or indifferent; only the basic anxiety for
oneself must go. You need some food, clothing and shelter for you and yours,
but this will not create problems as long as greed is not taken for a need.
Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined.
Q: What am I if not human?
M: That which makes you think that you are a
human is not human. It is but a dimensionless point of consciousness, a
conscious nothing; all you can say about yourself is: 'I am.' You are pure
being -- awareness -- bliss. To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come
to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand
aloof in pure awareness of the transient as transient, imaginary as imaginary,
unreal as unreal. It is not at all difficult, but detachment is needed. It is
the clinging to the false that makes the true so difficult to see. Once you
understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are
nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the now. Eternity in time
is mere repetitiveness, like the movement of a clock. It flows from the past
into the future endlessly, an empty perpetuity. Reality is what makes the
present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely
mental. If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is
always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not
allow your mind to go out of yourself in search. When you want something, ask
yourself: do I really need it? and if the answer is no, then just drop it.
Q: Must I not be happy? I may not need a thing,
yet if it can make me happy, should I not grasp it?
M: Nothing can make you happier than you are.
All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness
worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
Q: Don't I need a lot of experience before I
can reach such a high level of awareness?
M: Experience leaves only memories behind and
adds to the burden which is heavy enough. You need no more experiences. The
past ones are sufficient. And if you feel you need more, look into the hearts
of people around you. You will find a variety of experiences which you would
not be able to go through in a thousand years. Learn from the sorrows of others
and save yourself your own. It is not experience that you need, but the freedom
from all experience. Don't be greedy for experience; you need none.
Q: Don't you pass through experiences yourself?
M: Things happen round me, but I take no part in
them. An event becomes an experience only when I am emotionally involved. I am
in a state which is complete, which seeks not to improve on itself. Of what use
is experience to me?
Q: One needs knowledge, education.
M: To deal with things knowledge of things is
needed. To deal with people, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself
you need nothing. Be what you are: conscious being and don't stray away from
yourself.
Q: University education is most useful.
M: No doubt, It helps you to earn a living. But
it does not teach you how to live. You are a student of psychology. It may help
you in certain situations. But can you live by psychology? Life is worthy of
the name only when it reflects Reality in action. No university will teach you
how to live so that when the time of dying comes, you can say: I lived well I
do not need to live again. Most of us die wishing we could live again. So many
mistakes committed, so much left undone. Most of the people vegetate, but do
not live. They merely gather experience and enrich their memory. But experience
is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of
the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both.
Q: But experience is most useful. By experience
you learn not to touch a flame.
M: I have told you already that knowledge is
most useful in dealing with things. But it does not tell you how to deal with
people and yourself, how to live a life. We are not talking. of driving a car,
or earning money. For this you need experience. But for being a light unto
yourself material knowledge will not help you. You need something much more
intimate and deeper than mediate knowledge, to be your self in the true sense
of the word. Your outer life is unimportant. You can become a night watchman
and live happily. It is what you are inwardly that matters. Your inner peace
and joy you have to earn. It is much more difficult than earning money. No
university can teach you to be yourself. The only way to learn is by practice.
Right away begin to be yourself. Discard all you are not and go ever deeper.
Just as a man digging a well discards what is not water, until he reaches the
water-bearing strata, so must you discard what is not your own, till nothing is
left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing which the
mind can hook on to. You are not even a human being. You just are -- a
point of awareness, co-extensive with time and space and beyond both, the
ultimate cause, itself uncaused. If you ask me: 'Who are you?' My answer would
be: 'Nothing in particular. Yet, I am.'
Q: If you are nothing in particular, then you
must be the universal.
M: What is to be universal -- not as a concept,
but as a way of life? Not to separate, not to oppose, but to understand and
love whatever contacts you, is living universally. To be able to say truly: I
am the world., the world is me, I am at home in the world, the world is my own.
Every existence is my existence, every consciousness is my consciousness, every
sorrow is my sorrow and every joy is my joy -- this is universal life. Yet, my
real being, and yours too, is beyond the universe and, therefore, beyond the
categories of the particular and the universal. It is what it is, totally
self-contained and independent.
Q: I find it hard to understand.
M: You must give yourself time to brood over
these things. The old grooves must be erased in your brain, without forming new
ones. You must realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the
movable, the silent witness of all that happens.
Q: Does it mean that I must give up all idea of
an active life?
M: Not at all. There will be marriage, there
will be children, there will be earning money to maintain a family; all this
will happen in the natural course of events, for destiny must fulfil itself;
you will go through it without resistance, facing tasks as they come, attentive
and thorough, both in small things and big. But the general attitude will be of
affectionate detachment, enormous goodwill, without expectation of return,
constant giving without asking. In marriage you are neither the husband nor the
wife; you are the love between the two. You are the clarity and kindness that
makes everything orderly and happy. It may seem vague to you, but if you think
a little, you will find that the mystical is most practical, for it makes your
life creatively happy. Your consciousness is raised to a higher dimension, from
which you see everything much clearer and with greater intensity. You realize
that the person you became at birth and will cease to be at death is temporary
and false. You are not the sensual, emotional and intellectual person, gripped
by desires and fears. Find out your real being. What am l? is the fundamental
question of all philosophy and psychology. Go into it deeply.
