Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM THAT

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1. I am not this person, this body-mind, or any thing.

 

As I can't be what I perceive, I am not this body-mind or any thing that

I am conscious of.

As there must be something unchanging to register discontinuity, I am

not this body-mind, which is neither continuous nor permanent.

 

As the person is a changing stream of mental objects that I as the

subject take to be my body-mind, I cannot be a person. I am, but I can't

be this or that.

As it is my presence, which is always here and now, that gives the

quality of actual to any event, I must be beyond time and space. I was

never born, nor will ever die.

2. I am the Self, the Witness of Consciousness, pure Awareness.

 

I am only the Self , which is universal and imagines itself to be the

outer self, a person.

 

I am not an object in Consciousness but its source, its Witness, pure

shapeless Awareness.

 

Only the feeling " I am " , though in the World, is not of the World nor

can be denied.

 

3. The World exists only as a dream in my Consciousness: Part One

 

As I only know the contents of my consciousness, and as an outside world

is unprovable, all perceivables are only in my mind.

Transient things only appear and have no substance.

 

What changes has no reality. Time and space are imagined, ways of

thinking, modes of perception. Only timeless reality is, and it is here

and now.

The World exists only as a dream in my

 

Consciousness: Part Two

 

Whatever has a form is only limitations imagined in my consciousness.

The World is but a show, a make-belief.

The World I perceive is entirely private, a dream.

 

Desire and fear come from seeing the World as separate from my-Self.

While I see the dream as real, I'll suffer being its slave.

Nothing in the dream is done by me.

 

4. There is only one dreamer, the one Self, dreaming many dreams.

 

In every body there is a dream, but the dreamer is the same, the one

Self, which reflects itself in each body as " I am " .

All the dreams are of a common imaginary World and influence each other.

Love is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity.

 

5. I alone am, the One, the Supreme.

 

Not only the multiplicity of selves is false: even the duality of

I/World, Subject/Object, is a transient appearance in my Consciousness.

 

There is only my-Self, Consciousness.

I am not even Consciousness, which is dual and perceivable: I am the

unknown Reality beyond.

Though unknown and unknowable, my real being is concrete and solid like

a rock.

 

I am the light that makes Consciousness possible, pure Awareness, the

non-dualSelf, the Supreme Reality, the Absolute, the Beingness of being,

the Awareness of consciousness.

 

 

.........

Era

 

 

 

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http://www.nonduality.com/asmi.htm