Nonduality Presents
ASMI
Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM THAT
compiled and edited by Miguel-Angel Carrasco
Numbers after quotations refer to pages of the edition by Chetana (P) Ltd, Bombay, 1992.
The way to Realization: Part Two
Not through knowledge of things, or through experiences, but through self-knowledge.
Not through knowledge of things
A general longing for liberation is only the beginning; to find
the proper means and use them is the next step. The seeker has
only one goal in view: to find his own true being. Of all desires
it is the most ambitious, for nothing and nobody can satisfy it;
the seeker and the sought are one, and the search alone matters.
(223)
Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. The
pandits and yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere
knowledge when the self is not known? It will be certainly
misused. Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no
peace. (301)
Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean,
so does every moment carry the taste of eternity. Definitions and
descriptions have their place as useful incentives for further
search, but you must go beyond them into what is undefinable and
indescribable, except in negative terms. (413)
You may know all the right words, quote the scriptures, be
brilliant in your discussions and yet remain a bag of bones. Or
you may be inconspicuous and humble, an insignificant person
altogether, yet glowing with loving kindness and deep wisdom.
(515)
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. (317)
Relatively, yes [there can be true knowledge of things].
Absolutely, there are no things. To know that nothing is is true
knowledge. (359)
As long as you are engrossed in the world, you are unable to know
yourself: to know yourself, turn away your attention from the
world and turn it within. (479)
You can not know perfection, you can know only imperfection. For
knowledge to be, there must be separation and disharmony. You can
know what you are not, but you can not know your real being. You
can be only what you are. The entire approach is through
understanding, which is in the seeing of the false as false. But
to understand, you must observe from outside. (336)
The discovery of truth is in the discernment of the false. You
can know what is not. What is - you can only be. Knowledge is
relative to the known. In a way, it is the counterpart of
ignorance. Where ignorance is not, where is the need of
knowledge? By themselves, neither ignorance nor knowledge have
being. They are only states of mind, which again is but an
appearance of movement in consciousness. (370)
There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what?
You can only be the real, which you are, anyhow. The problem is
not mental. Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of
true ideas. There aren't any. (359-60)
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires
and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships
between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth
makes happy, truth liberates. (253)
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. (314)
You must unlearn everything. God is the end of all desire and
knowledge. (336)
Now I know nothing, for all knowledge is in dream only and not
valid. I know myself and I find no life nor death in me, only
pure being, not being this or that, but just being. (261)
Not through experiences
Most of your experiences are unconscious. The conscious ones are
very few. You are unaware of the fact because to you only the
conscious ones count. Become aware of the unconscious. Desire and
fear are the obscuring and distorting factors. When mind is free
of them the unconscious becomes accessible. (406)
An event becomes an experience only when I am emotionally
interested. I am in a state which is complete, which seeks not to
improve on itself. Of what use is experience to me? (317)
All experience is necessarily transient. But the ground of all
experience is immovable. Nothing that may be called an event will
last. But some events purify the mind and some stain it. Moments
of deep insight and all-embracing love purify the mind, while
desires and fears, envies and anger, blind beliefs and
intellectual arrogance pollute and dull the psyche. (331)
Above all, we want to remain conscious. We shall bear every
suffering and humiliation, but we shall rather remain conscious.
Unless we revolt against this craving for experience and let go
the manifested altogether, there can be no relief. We shall
remain trapped. (328)
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. (206)
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. (317)
Most of the people vegetate, but do not live. They merely gather
experiences 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 them
both. (318)
All experience is born of imagination. (262)
There is no such thing as the experience of the real. The real is
beyond experience. All experience is in the mind. You know the
real by being the real. (438)
All experience is illusory, limited and temporal. Expect nothing
from experience. Realization by itself is not an experience,
though it may lead to a new dimension of experiences. Yet the new
experiences, however interesting, are not more real than the old.
Definitely realization is not a new experience. It is the
discovery of the timeless factor in every experience. It is
awareness, which makes experience possible. Just like in all the
colours light is the colourless factor, so in every experience
awareness is present, yet it is not an experience. (403)
Experience, however sublime, is not the real thing. By its very
nature it comes and goes. Self-realization is not an acquisition.
It is more of the nature of understanding. Once arrived at, it
cannot be lost. On the other hand, consciousness is changeful,
flowing, undergoing transformation from moment to moment. Do not
hold on to consciousness and its contents. Consciousness held,
ceases. To try to perpetuate a flash of insight, or a burst of
happiness is destructive of what it wants to preserve. What comes
must go. The permanent is beyond all comings and goings. Go to
the root of all experience, to the sense of being. Beyond being
and not-being lies the immensity of the real. Try and try again.
(323)
Be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with
yourself, love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in
self-knowledge. The main thing is eartnestness. Be honest with
yourself and nothing will betray you. (217)
But through self-knowledge
You do not know what you are and therefore you imagine yourself
to be what you are not. Hence desires and fear and overwhelming
activity in order to escape. (224-5)
If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily, and have
infinite riches to share, search for what you are. (221)
Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the
blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to
you most naturally and effortlessly. (261)
Unless you know yourself well, how can you know another? And when
you know yourself, you are the other. (429)
The limited only is perfectible. The unlimited is already
perfect. You are perfect, only you don't know it. Learn to know
yourself and you will discover wonders. (413)
You are what you are, timelessly, but of what use is it to you
unless you know it and act on it? Your begging bowl may be of
pure gold, but as long as you do not know it you are a pauper.
You must know your inner worth and trust it and express it in the
daily sacrifice of desire and fear. (508)
Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it. You are the
way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself.
All you need is to understand, and understanding is the flowering
of the mind. The tree is perennial, but the flowering and the
fruit-bearing come in season. The seasons change, but not the
tree. You are the tree. You have grown numberless branches and
leaves in the past, and you may grow them also in the future -
yet you remain. Not what was, or shall be, must you know, but
what is. Yours is the desire that creates the universe. Know the
world as your own creation and be free. (380)
There is nothing in the world that you cannot know, when you know
yourself. Thinking yourself to be the body, you know the world as
a collection of material things. When you know yourself as a
centre of consciousness, the world appears as the ocean of the
mind. When you know yourself as you are in reality, you know the
world as yourself. (380)
Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove
this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only
self-knowledge can help you. By self-knowledge I mean full
knowledge of what you are not. Such knowledge is attainable and
final; but to the discovery of what you are there can be no end.
The more you discover, the more there remains to discover. (480)
The reward of self-knowledge is freedom from the personal self.
You cannot know the knower, for you are the knower. The fact of
knowing proves the knower. You need no other proof. The knower of
the known is not knowable. Just like the light is known in
colours only, so is the knower known in knowledge. (360)
Begin from the beginning: give attention to the fact that you
are. At no time can you say " I was not". All you can
say is "I don't remember". You know how unreliable is
memory. Accept that, engrossed in petty personal affairs, you
have forgotten what you are; try to bring back the lost memory
through the elimination of the known. You cannot be told what
will happen, nor is it desirable; anticipation will create
illusions. In the inner search, the unexpected is inevitable; the
discovery is invariably beyond all imagination. Just as an unborn
child cannot know life after birth, for it has nothing in its
mind with which to form a valid picture, so is the mind unable
to think of the real in terms of the unreal, except by negation:
"Not this, not that". The acceptance of the unreal as
real is the obstacle; to see the false as false and abandon the
false brings reality into being. (513)
First realize your own being. This is easy because the sense
"I am" is always with you. Then meet yourself as the
knower, apart from the known. Once you know yourself as pure
being, the ecstasy of freedom is your own. (520)
I am only interested in ignorance and the freedom from ignorance.
(505)
Intelligence is the door to freedom, and alert attention is the
mother of intelligence. (278)
Don't talk of means, there are no means. What you see as false,
dissolves. It is the very nature of illusion to dissolve on
investigation. Investigate - that is all. You cannot destroy the
false, for you are creating it all the time. Withdraw from it,
ignore it, go beyond, and it will cease to be. (455)
Do not try to know the truth, for knowledge by the mind is not
true knowledge. But you can know what is not true, which is
enough to liberate you from the false. The idea that you know
what is true is dangerous, for it keeps you imprisoned in the
mind. It is when you do not know that you are free to
investigate. And there can be no salvation without investigation,
because non-investigation is the main cause of bondage. (457-8)
Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind.
Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its
turn. Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge,
only being, in which being itself is knowledge. To know by being
is direct knowledge. It is based on the identity of the seer and
the seen. Indirect knowledge is based on sensation and memory, on
proximity of the perceiver and his percept, confined with the
contrast between the two. (486)
There is nothing to practise. To know yourself, be yourself. To
be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be.
Let your nature emerge. Don't distub your mind with seeking. You
have only to look and see. Look at your self, at your own being.
You know that you are and you like it. Abandon all imagining,
that is all. (259)
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. (312)
How do you know that you do not know your self? Your direct
insight tells you that yourself you know first, for nothing
exists without your being there to experience its existence. You
imagine you do not know your self, because you cannot describe
your self. You can only say: "I know that I am" and you
will refuse as untrue the statement "I am not". But
whatever can be described cannot be your self, and what you are
cannot be described. You can only know your being by being
yourself without any attempt at self-definition and
self-description. Once you have understood that you are nothing
perceivable or conceivable, that whatever appears in the field of
consciousness cannot be your self, you will apply yourself to the
eradication of all self-identification, as the only way that can
take
you to a deeper realization of your self. (517-8)
To know that you are neither in the body nor in the mind, though
aware of both, is already self-knowledge. (518)
So many words you have learnt, so many you have spoken. You know
everything, but you do not know yourself. For the self is not
known through words, only direct insight will reveal it. Look
within, search within. (514)
Learning words is not enough. You may know the theory, but
without the actual experience of yourself as the impersonal and
unqualified centre of being, love and bliss, mere verbal
knowledge is sterile. (509)