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I AM THAT >>> Ron > 11/12/2023
Posted by Holger:
Sunday, November 12, 2023 3:45 pm (California Time)
We are a small group of friends;
together we read some paragraphs in
Nisargadatta‘s I AM THAT
and then talk about it.
Feel warmly welcome,
we are meeting at Zoom.GardenOfFriends.com
Greetings to One and All!
Let’s briefly review the first half of chapter 45 (to page 205) before continuing.
Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.
Peace Peace Peace
Chapter 45
What Comes and Goes Has No Being
Q: Can I live in silence?
M: First words, then silence. One must be ripe for silence…Unselfish work leads to silence…You just do what needs to be done, leaving success and failure to the unknown.
203
Q: What is wrong with asking for help?
M: Where is the need of asking?…Work on, and the universe will work with you…In reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths there is perfect peace. All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself.
203-204
Q: How have I limited myself?
M: You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.
203-204
Q: A person is naturally limited.
M: There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person…Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. 204
Q: Is there no way out of this misery?
M: Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don’t be lazy to think.
204
Q: Activity is the essence of reality. There is no virtue in not working. Along with thinking something must be done.
M: To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.
204
Q: For the person I am all this seems impossible.
M: What do you know of yourself?…You have never moved away from perfection. All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal…It is the mind, which by knowing the other, becomes the other. Yet the mind is nothing else but the Self. It is the Self that becomes the other, the not-self, and yet remains the Self…All is one – this is the ultimate solution of every conflict.
205
Q: How is it that in spite of so much instruction and assistance we make no progress?
M: As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witness only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure Awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.
205
Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small and separate person, one amongst many.
M: Your [feeling of] being a person is due to the illusion of space and time; you imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your identification with the body…In reality time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them…Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of ‘else’ is a disaster and a calamity.
205
*************************************
Q: How does personality come into being?
M: By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.
206
Q: Does not ‘I am’ remain?
M: The word ‘remain’ does not apply. ‘I am’ is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be…At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences…Self-limitation is the very essence of personality.
206
Q: How can I become universal?
M: But you are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already…What comes and goes has no being. It owes its very appearance to reality…All knowledge flows from you, as all being and all joy. Realize that you are the eternal source and accept all as your own. Such acceptance is true love.
206
But how has one to make it a way of living?
Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.
206
It is not a matter of achievement, but of understanding.
Don’t try to understand! Enough if you do not misunderstand. Don’t rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.
206
What about the world?
The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body – no world. First inquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will come later.
207
But can one step out of the world?
Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realize, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it…Who knows the Creator? He alone who was before the Creator, your own real being, the source of all the worlds with their creators. 207
Do you deny the existence of an objective world, common to all?
Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to whom it happens, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.
207-208
What about jnana [knowledge]?
All talk of jnana is ignorance. It is the mind that imagines that it does not know and then comes to know. Reality knows nothing of these contortions. Even the idea of God as the Creator is false. Do I owe my being to any other being? Because I am, all is. 208
How can it be?…The world is old and the child is new?
Everyone creates a world for oneself and lives in it, imprisoned by one’s ignorance. All we have to do is to deny reality to our prison…Don’t ask the mind to confirm what is beyond the mind. Direct experience is the only valid confirmation.
206
Feel warmly welcome,
we are meeting at Zoom.GardenOfFriends.com
One Source
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“File:’I Am That’ by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Book Cover.jpg”
by Vyacheslav Argenberg is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
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Created: November 11, 2023
Last modified: November 11, 2023
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