An Interview

[Guest guest]

Dear Friends,

 

My Gurubhai Kalyanji sent me this mail long time back. I think it is very

enlightening and so I am posting this here.

 

The Interview

 

These are few things I picked up from an interview with Nisargadatta

Maharaj. He seems to be a mahatma. The words reflect his perfect

understanding of the shastra. The whole interview was quite interesting to

read. After a long days of search on web, I picked up a great person,

surfing the web.

 

Seeker

I was told that a realized person will never do anything unseemly. That they

will behave in an exemplary way.

Maharaj

Who sets the example? Why should a liberated one necessarily follow

conventions? The moment one becomes predictable, one cannot be free.

Ones freedom lies in being free to fulfill the need of the moment, to

obey the necessity of the situation. Freedom to do what one likes is

really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real

freedom.

Seeker

What about cause and effect?

Maharaj

Each moment contains the whole of the past and creates the whole of the

future.

Seeker

But past and future exist?

Maharaj

In the mind only. Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of

cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now

and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

Seeker

A message in print may be paper and ink only. It is the text that

matters. By analysing the world into elements and qualities we miss the most

important -- its meaning. Your reduction of everything to dream disregards

the difference between the dream of an insect and the dream of a poet. All

is dream, granted. But not all are equal.

Maharaj

The dreams are not equal, but the dreamer is one. I am the insect. I am the

poet -- in dream. But in reality I am neither. I am beyond all

dreams. I am light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both

inside and outside the dream. Just as a man having a headache knows the ache

and also knows that he is not the ache, so do I know the dream, myself

dreaming and myself not dreaming -- all at the same time. I am what I am

before, during and after the dream. But what I see in dream, I am not."

Seeker

If both dream and escape from dream are imaginings, what is the way out?

Maharaj

There is no need of a way out! Don't you see that a way out is also part of

the dream? All you have to do is to see the dream as dream.

Seeker

If I start the practice of dismissing everything as a dream, where will it

lead me?

Maharaj

Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond the

dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a

dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not

your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not

another. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that

needs be done.

 

Harihi Om,

 

Jaishankar.