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#3130 - Tuesday, April
8, 2008 - Editor: Jerry Katz
Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Someone posed the following question. How would you respond? Send
your response to the senders of
this email or to the Nonduality Salon list. We may publish your
letter in the Highlights.
QUESTION (sender is anonymous):
I am having difficulty with something that Nisargadatta Maharaj
is quoted as saying:
"Once you know that the body alone dies and not the
continuity of memory and the sense of I am
reflected in it, you are afraid no longer."
Surely when the body dies there can be no memory as there is no
instrument to cognize with. The
brain holds the memory which is made up of mindstuff, and when
that dies surely there can be no
persistence of memory?
Maybe the quote is a translation mistake?
I know that we are the one beingness and always will be that, but
in my experience it is a state of
no thing,and no knowing.
Are you able to enlighten me on this point?
RESPONSE (by Jerry):
Nisargadatta does not say that memory or the sense of I Am
reflected in it continue to live after
death of the body. That only seems to be implied. But let's say
he meant that memory lives on
somehow.
I looked up the context in which the statement was made. As you
can see below, Nisargadatta was
addressing a man who feared death and who could not
psychologically handle the break-up of a love
affair. He'd rather commit suicide than experience another
unhappy love affair. This man did not
have a stable or developed sense of his nature, and that was the
level at which he was addressed.
It could be that Maharaj was trying to keep this man from killing
himself, by bringing him to a
mood of greater reality than the one in which he was immersed.
In other words, once this man understands that he is not the body
and the emotions, he can live in
the world from the place of I AM and have no fear. Maharaj's
statements were intended for that man
in that situation.
The passage is from I Am That. The text of the entire book is
online. The following portion, which
includes the passage cited above, is from http://www.celextel.org/otherbooks/iamthat.html?page=15
Maharaj: What made you go to the Ashram?
Q: I had an unhappy love affair and suffered hell. Neither drink
nor drugs could help me. I was
groping and came across some books on Yoga. From book to book,
from clue to clue -- I came to
Ramanashram.
M: Were the same tragedy to happen to you again, would you suffer
as much, considering your present
state of mind?
Q: Oh no, I would not let myself suffer again. I would kill
myself.
M: So you are not afraid to die!
Q: I am afraid of dying, not of death itself. I imagine the dying
process to be painful and ugly.
M: How do you know? It need not be so. It may be beautiful and
peaceful. Once you know that death
happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body
falling off like a discarded garment.
Q: I am fully aware that my fear of death is due to apprehension
and not knowledge.
M: Human beings die every second, the fear and the agony of dying
hangs over the world like a
cloud. No wonder you too are afraid. But once you know that the
body alone dies and not the
continuity of memory and the sense of ‘I am’ reflected
in it, you are afraid no longer.
Q: Well, let us die and see.
M: Give attention and you will find that birth and death are one,
that life pulsates between being
and non-being, and that each needs the other for completeness.
You are born to die and you die to
be reborn.
Q: Does not detachment stop the process?
M: With detachment the fear goes, but not the fact.
Nisaragadatta moves the discussion from death of the physical
body, in which he implies that memory
continues somehow, to detachment from the events of birth, life,
and death, in which the facts of
his love affair remain intact. In either case, the questioner
cannot avoid what happened in his
relationship. Nisargadatta isn't letting him off the hook either
way, but he is offering a new view
which will allow him to understand what happened (what's always
happening) rather than find a
way to end his pain.
What do you think?