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Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3931, Wednesday, June 23, 2010, Editor: Mark
Haunting phantoms disappear before the very eyes of whoever
approaches them with the intention to understand their nature.
- Vernon Howard, from The Power of Esoterics, posted to
adyashantigroup
Assumptions and Expectations
The only reason we do not recognize This
as That which we are seeking
is that we operate with
a set of limiting assumptions
about how Reality will manifest
in the present moment.
When we let go of
these assumptions and expectations,
we will instantly recognize:
That can be nothing other than This.
- Metta Zetty
Q: Can I live in silence?
M: Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly,
you don't need to ask for help. lndifferent to results you are
willing to work with the most inadequate means. You do not care
to be much gifted and well equipped. Nor do you ask for
recognition, and assistance. You just do what needs be done,
leaving success and failure to the unknown For everything is
caused by innumerable factors, of which your personal endeavour
is but one. Yet such is the magic of man's mind and heart that
the most improbable happens when human will and love pull
together.
Q: What is wrong with asking for help when the work is worthy?
M: Where is the need of asking? It merely shows weakness and
anxiety. Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all
the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the
unknown Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go
through the necessary movements. You are merely one of the links
in the long chain of causation. Fundamentally, all happens in the
mind only. When you work for something whole-heartedly and
steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make
things happen. 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. When you do not think yourself to
be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something
about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by
desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. 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.
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. You think you know yourself when you know what you are.
But you never know who you are: The person merely appears to be,
like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and
volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you
believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your
disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable.
You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or
that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created
for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation.
Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation.
Don't be lazy to think.
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.
Q: For the person I am all this seems impossible.
M: What do you know about yourself? You can only be what you are
in reality; you can only appear what you are not. You have never
moved away from perfection. All idea of self-improvement is
conventional and verbal. As the sun knows not darkness, so does
the self know not the, non-self. 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 else is an assumption: Just as a
cloud obscures the sun without in any way affecting it, so does
assumption obscure reality without destroying it. The very idea
of destruction of reality is ridiculous; the destroyer is always
more real than the destroyed. Reality is the ultimate destroyer.
All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is
false. All is one - this is the ultimate solution of every
conflict.
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 witnesses
only; dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then
realise that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind
and matter and beyond both.
Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small
and separate person, one amongst many.
M: Your 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 self-identification with
the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession, they
have their span, in time and make you imagine yourself, because
of memory, as having duration. In reality time and space exist in
you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but
they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written
on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. How
old are you?
Q: Forty-eight!
M: What makes you say forty-eight? What makes you say: I am here?
Verbal habits born from assumptions. The mind creates time and
space and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and
now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There
is nothing else. The very idea of 'else' is a disaster and a
calamity.
Q: What is the cause of personification, of self-limitation in
time and space?
M: That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no
such thing as a separate person. Even taking the empirical point
of view, it is obvious that everything is the cause of every
thing, that everything is as it is, because the entire universe
is as it is.
Q: Yet personality must have a cause.
M: How does personality come into being? 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.
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. As a matter of fact,
before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of
being, At present, your being is mixed up with experiencing. All
you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once
you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will
discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by
names and forms.
Self-limitation is the very essence of personality.
Q: How can I become universal?
M: But you are universal You need not and you cannot become what
you are already. Only cease imagining yourself to be the
particular. What comes and, goes has no being. It owes its very
appearance to reality. You know that there is a world, but does
the world know you? All knowledge flows from you, as all being
and all joy. Realise that you are the eternal source and accept
all as your own. Such acceptance is true love.
Q: All you say sounds very beautiful. But how has one to make it
into a way of living?
M: 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.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, from I Am That