49.
Mind Causes Insecurity
Questioner:
People come to you for advice. How do you know what to answer?
Nisargadatta:
As I hear the question, so do I hear the answer.
Questioner:
And how do you know that your answer is right?
Nisargadatta:
Once I know the true source of the answers, I need not doubt them.
From a pure source only
pure
water will flow. I am not concerned with people's desires and
fears. I am in tune with facts, not
with
opinions. Man takes his name and shape to be himself, while I take
nothing to be myself. Were
I
to think myself to be a body known by its name, I would not have
been able to answer your
questions.
Were I to take you to be a mere body, there would be no benefit to
you from my
answers.
No true teacher indulges in opinions. He sees things as they are
and shows them as they
are.
If you take people to be what they think themselves to be, you
will only hurt them, as they hurt
themselves
so grievously all the time. But if you see them as they are in
reality, it will do them
enormous
good. If they ask you what to do, what practices to adopt, which
way of life to follow,
answer:
'Do nothing, just be. In being all happens naturally.'
Questioner:
It seems to me that in your talks you use the words 'naturally'
and 'accidentally' indiscriminately.
I
feel there is a deep difference in the meaning of the two words.
The natural is orderly, subject to
law;
one can trust nature; the accidental is chaotic, unexpected,
unpredictable. One could plead that
everything
is natural, subject to nature's laws; to maintain that everything
is accidental, without any
cause,
is surely an exaggeration.
Nisargadatta:
Would you like it better if I use the word 'spontaneous' instead
of 'accidental'?
Questioner:
You may use the word 'spontaneous' or 'natural' as opposed to
'accidental'. In the accidental
there
is the element of disorder, of chaos. An accident is always a
breach of rules, an exception, a
surprise.
Nisargadatta:
Is not life itself a stream of surprises?
Questioner:
There is harmony in nature. The accidental is a disturbance.
Nisargadatta:
You speak as a person, limited in time and space, reduced to the
contents of a body and a
mind.
What you like, you call 'natural' and what you dislike, you call
'accidental'.
Questioner:
I like the natural, and the law-abiding, the expected and I fear
the law-breaking, the disorderly,
the
unexpected, the meaningless. The accidental is always monstrous.
There may be so-called
'lucky
accidents', but they only prove the rule that in an accident-prone
universe life would be
impossible.
Nisargadatta:
I feel there is a misunderstanding. By 'accidental' I mean
something to which no known law
applies.
When I say everything is accidental, uncaused, I only mean that
the causes and the laws
according
to which they operate are beyond our knowing, or even imagining.
If you call what you
take
to be orderly, harmonious, predictable, to be natural, then what
obeys higher laws and is
moved
by higher powers may be called spontaneous. Thus, we shall have
two natural orders: the
personal
and predictable and the impersonal, or super-personal, and
unpredictable. Call it lower
nature
and higher nature and drop the word accidental. As you grow in
knowledge and insight, the
borderline
between lower and higher nature keeps on receding, but the two
remain until they are
seen
as one. For, in fact, everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!
Questioner:
Science explains a lot.
Nisargadatta:
Science deals with names and shapes, quantities and qualities,
patterns and laws; it is all right
in
its own place. But life is to be lived; there is no time for
analysis. The response must be
instantaneous
-- hence the importance of the spontaneous, the timeless. It is in
the unknown that
we
live and move. the known is the past.
Questioner:
I can take my stand on what I feel I am. I am an individual, a
person among persons. Some
people
are integrated and harmonised, and some are not. Some live
effortlessly, respond
spontaneously
to every situation correctly, doing full justice to the need of
the moment, while others
fumble,
err and generally make a nuisance of themselves. The harmonised
people may be called
natural,
ruled by law, while the disintegrated are chaotic and subject to
accidents.
Nisargadatta:
The very idea of chaos presupposes the sense of the orderly, the
organic, the inter-related.
Chaos
and cosmos: are they not two aspects of the same state?
Questioner:
But you seem to say that all is chaos, accidental, unpredictable.
Nisargadatta:
Yes, in the sense that not all the laws of being are known and not
all events are predictable.
The
more you are able to understand, the more the universe becomes
satisfactory, emotionally and
mentally.
Reality is good and beautiful; we create the chaos.
Questioner:
If you mean to say that it is the free will of man that causes
accidents, I would agree. But we
have
not yet discussed free will.
Nisargadatta:
Your order is what gives you pleasure and disorder is what gives
you pain.
Questioner:
You may put it that way, but do not tell me that the two are one.
Talk to me in my own language
--
the language of an individual in search of happiness. I do not
want to be misled by non-dualistic
talks.
Nisargadatta:
What makes you believe that you are a separate individual?
Questioner:
I behave as an individual. I function on my own. I consider myself
primarily, and others only in
relation
to myself. In short, I am busy with myself.
Nisargadatta:
Well, go on being busy with yourself. On what business have you
come here?
Questioner:
On my old business of making myself safe and happy. I confess I
have not been too
successful.
I am neither safe nor happy. Therefore, you find me here. This
place is new to me, but
my
reason for coming here is old: the search for safe happiness,
happy safety. So far I did not find
it.
Can you help me?
Nisargadatta:
What was never lost can never be found. Your very search for
safety and joy keeps you away
from
them. Stop searching, cease losing. The disease is simple and the
remedy equally simple. It is
your
mind only that makes you insecure and unhappy. Anticipation makes
you insecure, memory --
unhappy.
Stop misusing your mind and all will be well with you. You need
not set it right -- it will set
itself
right, as soon as you give up all concern with the past and the
future and live entirely in the
now.
Questioner:
But the now has no dimension. I shall become a nobody, a nothing !
Nisargadatta:
Exactly. As nothing and nobody you are safe and happy. You can
have the experience for the
asking.
Just try.
But
let us go back to what is accidental and what is spontaneous, or
natural. You said nature is
orderly
while accident is a sign of chaos. I denied the difference and
said that we call an event
accidental
when its causes are untraceable. There is no place for chaos in
nature. Only in the mind
of
man there is chaos. The mind does not grasp the whole -- its focus
is very narrow. It sees
fragments
only and fails to perceive the picture. Just as a man who hears
sounds, but does not
understand
the language, may accuse the speaker of meaningless jabbering, and
be altogether
wrong.
What to one is a chaotic stream of sounds is a beautiful poem to
another.
King
Janaka once dreamt that he was a beggar. On waking up he asked his
Guru -- Vasishta: Am I
a
king dreaming of being a beggar, or a beggar dreaming of being a
king? The Guru answered: You
are
neither, you are both. You are, and yet you are not what you think
yourself to be. You are
because
you behave accordingly; you are not because it does not last. Can
you be a king or a
beggar
for ever? All must change. You are what does not change. What are
you? Janaka said: Yes,
I
am neither king nor beggar, I am the dispassionate witness. The
Guru said. This is your last
illusion
that you are a jnani, that you are different from, and superior
to, the common man. Again
you
identify yourself with your mind, in this case a well-behaved and
in every way an exemplary
mind.
As long as you see the least difference, you are a stranger to
reality. You are on the level of
the
mind. When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes. When the
'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes.
When
even 'I am' goes, reality alone is and in it every 'I am' is
preserved and glorified. Diversity
without
separateness is the Ultimate that the mind can touch. Beyond that
all activity ceases,
because
in it all goals are reached and all purposes fulfilled.
Questioner:
Once the Supreme State is reached, can it be shared with others?
Nisargadatta:
The Supreme State is universal, here and now; everybody already
shares in it. It is the state of
being
-- knowing and liking. Who does not like to be, or does not know
his own existence? But we
take
no advantage of this joy of being conscious, we do not go into it
and purify it of all that is
foreign
to it. This work of mental self-purification, the cleansing of the
psyche, is essential. Just as a
speck
in the eye, by causing inflammation, may wipe out the world, so
the mistaken idea: 'I am the
body-mind'
causes the self-concern, which obscures the universe. It is
useless to fight the sense of
being
a limited and separate person unless the roots of it are laid
bare. Selfishness is rooted in the
mistaken
ideas of oneself. Clarification of the mind is Yoga.