"I Am That" -- Ch. 45 Excerpts

[Guest guest]

>From "I Am That," Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Chapter 45 - "What Comes and Goes has no Being"

 

 

Questioner: A person is naturally limited.

 

Maharaj: 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: 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

realize that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and

matter and beyond both.