Nothing in particular

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from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM THAT

 

 

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know

the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the

person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your

very being, you are the being. It is the source, the inexhaustible

Possibility. (65)

 

Discard all you are not and go ever deeper. Just as a man digging a well

discards what is not water, until he reaches the water-bearing strata, so

must you discard what is not your own, till nothing is left which you can

disown. You will find that what is left is nothing which the mind can hook

on to. You are not even a human being. You just are - a point of awareness,

co-extensive with time and space and beyond both, the ultimate cause, itself

uncaused. If you ask me "Who are you?", my answer would be: "Nothing in

particular. Yet, I am." (318)

 

I am not my body, nor do I need it. I am the witness only. I have no shape

of my own. You are so accustomed to think of yourself as bodies having

consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies.

Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in

consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and

that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will

be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether. (327)

 

Do realize that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams

flow before you, and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects

your real being - that is the absolute truth. (333)

 

The witness is not a person. The person comes into being when there is a

basis for it, an organism, a body. In it, the absolute is reflected as

awareness. Pure awareness becomes self-awareness. When there is a self,

self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self to witness, there is no

witnessing either. It is all very simple; it is the presence of the person

that complicates. See that there is no such thing as a permanently separate

person and all becomes clear. Awareness, mind, matter - they are one reality

in its two aspects as immovable and movable, and the three attributes of

inertia, energy and harmony. Awareness becomes consciousness when it has an

object. The object changes all the time. In consciousness there is movement;

awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now. (233)

 

from: http://www.nonduality.com/asmi2.htm