45.
What Comes and Goes has no Being
Questioner:
I have come to be with you, rather than to listen. Little can be
said in words, much
more
can be conveyed in silence.
Nisargadatta:
First words, then silence. One must be ripe for silence.
Questioner:
Can I live in silence?
Nisargadatta:
Unselfish work leads to silence, for when you work selflessly, you
don't need to ask for help.
Indifferent
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.
Questioner:
What is wrong with asking for help when the work is worthy?
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
A person is naturally limited.
Nisargadatta:
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 too lazy to
think.
Questioner:
Activity is the essence of reality. There is no virtue in not
working. Along with thinking
something
must be done.
Nisargadatta:
To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work
is even harder.
Questioner:
For the person I am all this seems impossible.
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
How is it that in spite of so much instruction and assistance we
make no progress?
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small and
separate person, one amongst
many.
Nisargadatta:
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?
Questioner:
Forty-eight!
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
What is the cause of personification, of self-limitation in time
and space?
Nisargadatta:
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 everything, that
everything
is as it is, because the entire universe is as it is.
Questioner:
Yet personality must have a cause.
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
Does not 'I am' remain?
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
How can I become universal?
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
All you say sounds very beautiful. But how has one to make it into
a way of living?
Nisargadatta:
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.
Questioner:
It is not a matter of achievement, but of understanding.
Nisargadatta:
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.
What
is beginningless cannot have a cause. It is not that you knew what
you are and then you have
forgotten.
Once you know, you cannot forget. Ignorance has no beginning, but
can have an end.
Enquire:
who is ignorant and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. 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 enquire whether you are the
body. The understanding of
the
world will come later.
Questioner:
What you say sounds convincing, but of what use is it to the
private person, who knows itself to
be
in the world and of the world?
Nisargadatta:
Millions eat bread, but few know all about wheat. And only those
who know can improve the
bread.
Similarly, only those who know the self, who have seen beyond the
world, can improve the
world.
Their value to private persons is immense, for they are their only
hope of salvation. What is in
the
world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world
you must step out of it.
Questioner:
But can one step out of the world?
Nisargadatta:
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 realise, beyond all trace of doubt that the world is
in you and not you in the world,
you
are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the
world, but you are not deluded
by
it. All scriptures say that before the world was, the Creator was.
Who knows the Creator? He
alone
who was before the Creator, your own real being, the source of all
the worlds with their
creators.
Questioner:
All you say is held together by your assumption that the world is
your own projection. You admit
that
you mean your personal, subjective world, the world given you
through your senses and your
mind.
In that sense each one of us lives in a world of his own
projection. These private worlds
hardly
touch each other and they arise from and merge into the 'I am' at
their centre. But surely
behind
these private worlds there must be a common objective world, of
which the private worlds
are
mere shadows. Do you deny the existence of such an objective
world, common to all?
Nisargadatta:
Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor
matter, neither time nor space.
These
divisions need somebody to whom to happen, a conscious separate
centre. 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 your
self in it. When you deny
reality
to anything, you come to a residue which cannot be denied .
All
talk of jnana is a sign of 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.
Questioner:
How can it be? A child is born into the world, not the world into
the child. The world is old and
the
child is new.
Nisargadatta:
The child is born into your world. Now, were you born into your
world, or did your world appear
to
you? To be born means to create a world round yourself as the
centre. But do you ever create
yourself?
Or did anyone create you? Everyone creates a world for himself and
lives in it, imprisoned
by
one's ignorance. All we have to do is to deny reality to our
prison.
Questioner:
Just as the waking state exists in seed form during sleep, so does
the world the child creates
on
being born exist before its birth. With whom does the seed lie?
Nisargadatta:
With him who is the witness of birth and death, but is neither
born nor dies. He alone is the seed
of
creation as well as its residue. Don't ask the mind to confirm
what is beyond the mind. Direct
experience
is the only valid confirmation.