21.
Who am I?
Questioner:
We are advised to worship reality personified as God, or as
the Perfect Man. We are
told
not to attempt the worship of the Absolute, as it is much
too difficult for a brain-centred
consciousness.
Nisargadatta:
Truth is simple and open to all. Why do you complicate?
Truth is loving and lovable. It
includes
all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is
difficult and a source of trouble. It always
wants,
expects, demands. Being false, it is empty, always in search
of confirmation and
reassurance.
It is afraid of and avoids enquiry. It identifies itself
with any support, however weak
and
momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses and asks for more.
Therefore put no faith in the
conscious.
Nothing you can see, feel, or think is so. Even sin and
virtue, merit and demerit are not
what
they appear. Usually the bad and the good are a matter of
convention and custom and are
shunned
or welcomed, according to how the words are used.
Questioner:
Are there not good desires and bad, high desires and low?
Nisargadatta:
All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue
any desire, it will always give you
trouble.
Questioner:
Even the desire to be free of desire?
Nisargadatta:
Why desire at all? Desiring a state of freedom from desire
will not set you free. Nothing can set
you
free, because you are free. See yourself with desireless
clarity, that is all.
Questioner:
It takes time to know oneself.
Nisargadatta:
How can time help you? Time is a succession of moments; each
moment appears out of
nothing
and disappears into nothing, never to reappear. How can you
build on something so
fleeting?
Questioner:
What is permanent?
Nisargadatta:
Look to yourself for the permanent. Dive deep within and
find what is real in you.
Questioner:
How to look for myself?
Nisargadatta:
Whatever happens, it happens to you. What you do, the doer
is in you. Find the subject of all
that
you are as a person.
Questioner:
What else can I be?
Nisargadatta:
Find out. Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the
silent watcher, it will mean nothing to
you,
unless you find the way to your own being.
Questioner:
My question is: How to find the way to one's own being?
Nisargadatta:
Give up all questions except one: 'Who am l'? After all, the
only fact you are sure of is that you
are.
The 'I am' is certain. The 'I am this' is not. Struggle to
find out what you are in reality.
Questioner:
I am doing nothing else for the last 60 years.
Nisargadatta:
What is wrong with striving? Why look for results? Striving
itself is your real nature.
Questioner:
Striving is painful.
Nisargadatta:
You make it so by seeking results. Strive without seeking,
struggle without greed.
Questioner:
Why has God made me as I am?
Nisargadatta:
Which God are you talking about? What is God? Is he not the
very light by which you ask the
question?
'I am' itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking
you discover that you are neither
the
body nor mind, and the love of the self in you is for the
self in all. The two are one. The
consciousness
in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really
one, seek unity and that
is
love.
Questioner:
How am I to find that love?
Nisargadatta:
What do you love now? The 'I am'. Give your heart and mind
to it, think of nothing else. This,
when
effortless and natural, is the highest state. In it love
itself is the lover and the beloved.
Questioner:
Everybody wants to live, to exist. Is it not self-love?
Nisargadatta:
All desire has its source in the self. It is all a matter of
choosing the right desire.
Questioner:
What is right and what is wrong varies with habit and
custom. Standards vary with societies.
Nisargadatta:
Discard all traditional standards. Leave them to the
hypocrites. Only what liberates you from
desire
and fear and wrong ideas is good. As long as you worry about
sin and virtue you will have no
peace.
Questioner:
I grant that sin and virtue are social norms. But there may
be also spiritual sins and virtues. I
mean
by spiritual the absolute. Is there such a thing as absolute
sin or absolute virtue?
Nisargadatta:
Sin and virtue refer to a person only. Without a sinful or
virtuous person what is sin or virtue? At
the
level of the absolute there are no persons; the ocean of
pure awareness is neither virtuous nor
sinful.
Sin and virtue are invariably relative.
Questioner:
Can I do away with such unnecessary notions?
Nisargadatta:
Not as long as you think yourself to be a person.
Questioner:
By what sign shall l know that I am beyond sin and virtue?
Nisargadatta:
By being free from all desire and fear, from the very idea
of being a person. To nourish the
ideas:
'I am a sinner' 'I am not a sinner', is sin. To identify
oneself with the particular is all the sin
there
is. The impersonal is real, the personal appears and
disappears. 'I am' is the impersonal
Being.
'I am this' is the person. The person is relative and the
pure Being -- fundamental.
Questioner:
Surely pure Being is not unconscious, nor is it devoid of
discrimination. How can it be beyond
sin
and virtue? Just tell us, please, has it intelligence or
not?
Nisargadatta:
All these questions arise from your believing yourself to be
a person. Go beyond the personal
and
see.
Questioner:
What exactly do you mean when you ask me to stop being a
person?
Nisargadatta:
I do not ask you to stop being -- that you cannot. I ask you
only to stop imagining that you were
born,
have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make
a beginning -- it is not as hard as
you
think.
Questioner:
To think oneself as the personal is the sin of the
impersonal.
Nisargadatta:
Again the personal point of view! Why do you insist on
polluting the impersonal with your ideas
of
sin and virtue? It just does not apply. The impersonal
cannot be described in terms of good and
bad.
It is Being -- Wisdom -- Love -- all absolute. Where is the
scope for sin there? And virtue is
only
the opposite of sin.
Questioner:
We talk of divine virtue.
Nisargadatta:
True virtue is divine nature (swarupa). What you are really
is your virtue. But the opposite of sin
which
you call virtue is only obedience born out of fear.
Questioner:
Then why all effort at being good?
Nisargadatta:
It keeps you on the move. You go on and on till you find
God. Then God takes you into Himself
--
and makes you as He is.
Questioner:
The same action is considered natural at one point and a sin
at another. What makes it sinful?
Nisargadatta:
Whatever you do against your better knowledge is sin.
Questioner:
Knowledge depends on memory.
Nisargadatta:
Remembering your self is virtue, forgetting your self is
sin. It all boils down to the mental or
psychological
link between the spirit and matter. We may call the link
psyche (antahkarana). When
the
psyche is raw, undeveloped, quite primitive, it is subject
to gross illusions. As it grows in breadth
and
sensitivity, it becomes a perfect link between pure matter
and pure spirit and gives meaning to
matter
and expression to spirit.
There
is the material world (mahadakash) and the spiritual
(paramakash). Between lies the
universal
mind (chidakash) which is also the universal heart
(premakash). It is wise love that makes
the
two one.
Questioner:
Some people are stupid, some are intelligent. The difference
is in their psyche. The ripe ones
had
more experience behind them. Just like a child grows by
eating and drinking, sleeping and
playing,
so is man's psyche shaped by all he thinks and feels and
does, until it is perfect enough to
serve
as a bridge between the spirit and the body. As a bridge
permits the traffic; between the
banks,
so does the psyche bring together the source and its
expression.
Nisargadatta:
Call it love. The bridge is love.
Questioner:
Ultimately all is experience. Whatever we think, feel, do is
experience. Behind it is the
experiencer.
So all we know consists of these two, the experiencer and
the experience. But the two
are
really one -- the experiencer alone is the experience.
Still, the experiencer takes the experience
to
be outside. In the same way the spirit and the body are one;
they only appear as two.
Nisargadatta:
To the Spirit there is no second.
Questioner:
To whom then does the second appear? It seems to me that
duality is an illusion induced by
the
imperfection of the psyche. When the psyche is perfect,
duality is no longer seen.
Nisargadatta:
You have said it.
Questioner:
Still I have to repeat my very simple question: who makes
the distinction between sin and
virtue?
Nisargadatta:
He who has a body, sins with the body, he who has a mind,
sins with the mind.
Questioner:
Surely, the mere possession of mind and body does not compel
to sin. There must be a third
factor
at the root of it. I come back again and again to this
question of sin and virtue, because now-
a-days
young people keep on saying that there is no such thing as
sin, that one need not be
squermish
and should follow the moment's desire readily. They will
accept neither tradition nor
authority
and can be influenced only by solid and honest thought. If
they refrain from certain actions,
it
is through fear of police rather than by conviction.
Undoubtedly there is something in what they
say,
for we can see how our values change from place to place and
time to time. For instance --
killing
in war is great virtue today and may be considered a
horrible crime next century.
Nisargadatta:
A man who moves with the earth will necessarily experience
days and nights. He who stays
with
the sun will know no darkness. My world is not yours. As I
see it, you all are on a stage
performing.
There is no reality about your comings and goings. And your
problems are so unreal!
Questioner:
We may be sleep-walkers, or subject to nightmares. Is there
nothing you can do?
Nisargadatta:
I am doing: I did enter your dreamlike state to tell you --
"Stop hurting yourself and others, stop
suffering,
wake up".
Questioner:
Why then don't we wake up?
Nisargadatta:
You will. I shall not be thwarted. It may take some time.
When you shall begin to question your
dream,
awakening will be not far away.