— from The
Poets of the Powers: Freedom, Magic, and Renewal, Translated by Kamil V. ZvelebilClick here to go to the next issue
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For today, a
reader's contribution and then a poem.
Hi Gloria - 'I'
love these kind of dialogues and teachings - thought you might
find this in line and interesting! Robert
Mind—Consciousness—Awareness
Dialogues
with Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj
In
“I Am That”
bottom
page 220 to top of page 224
Questioner: As I can make out,
you give distinct meanings to the words ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’,
and ‘awareness’.
Maharaj: Look at it this
way. The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when you
do not look at them. When you know what is going on in your
mind, you call it consciousness. This is your waking state—your
consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from perception
to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession.
Then comes awareness, the direct insight into the whole of
consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like a
river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify
yourself for a moment with some particular ripple and call it:
‘my thought’. All you are conscious of is your
mind; awareness is the cognizance of consciousness as a whole.
Q: Everybody is conscious, but
not everybody is aware.
M: Don’t say:
‘everybody is conscious’. Say: ‘there
is consciousness’, in which everything appears and
disappears. Our minds are just waves on the ocean of
consciousness. As waves they come and go. As ocean
they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean
of being, the womb of all existence. These are all
metaphors of course; the reality is beyond description. You
can know it only by being it.
Q: Is the search for it worth
the trouble?
M: Without it all is
trouble. If you want to live sanely, creatively and happily
and have infinite riches to share, search for what you are.
While the mind is centered in the
body and consciousness is centered in the mind, awareness is
free. The body has it urges and mind its pains and
pleasures. Awareness is unattached and unshaken. It
is lucid, silent, peaceful, alert and unafraid, without desire
and fear. Meditate on it as your true being and try to be
it in your daily life, and you shall realize it in its fullness.
Mind is interested in what happens,
while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child
is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy.
By looking tirelessly, I became
quite empty and with that emptiness all came back to me except
the mind. I find I have lost the mind irretrievably.
Q: As you talk to us just now,
are you unconscious?
M: I am neither conscious nor
unconscious, I am beyond the mind and its various states and
conditions. Distinctions are created by the mind and apply
to the mind only. I am pure Consciousness itself, un-broken
awareness of all that is. I am in a more real state than
yours. I am undistracted by the distinctions and separation
which constitute a person. As long as the body lasts, it
has its needs like any other, but my mental process has come to
an end.
Q: You behave like a person
who thinks.
M: Why not? But my
thinking, like my digestion, is unconscious and purposeful.
Q: If your thinking is
unconscious, how do you know that it is right?
M: There is no desire, nor
fear to thwart it. What can make it wrong? Once I
know myself and what I stand for, I do not need to check on
myself all the time. When you know that your watch shows
correct time, you do not hesitate each time you consult it.
Q: At this very moment who
talks, if not the mind?
M: That which hears the
question, answers it.
Q: But who is it?
M: Not who, but what. I
am not a person in your sense of the word, though I may appear a
person to you. I am that infinite ocean of consciousness in
which all happens. I am also beyond all existence and
cognition, pure bliss of being. There is nothing I feel
separate from, hence I am all. No thing is me, so I am
nothing.
The same power that makes the fire
burn and the water flow, the seeds sprout and the trees grow,
makes me answer your questions. There is nothing personal
about me, though the language and the style may appear
personal. A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts
and resulting actions; there is no such pattern in my case.
There is nothing I desire or fear—how can there be a
pattern?
Q: Surely you will die.
M: Life will escape, the body
will die, but it will not affect me in the least. Beyond
space and time I am, uncaused, uncausing, yet the very matrix of
existence.
Q: May I be permitted to ask
how did you arrive at your present condition?
M: My teacher told me to hold
on to the sense ‘I am’ tenaciously and not to swerve
from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his
advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself
the truth of his teaching. All I did was to remember his
teaching, his face, his words constantly. This brought an
end to the mind; in the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I
am—unbound.
Q: Was your realization sudden
or gradual.
M: Neither. One is what
one is timelessly. It is the mind that realizes as and when
it gets cleared of desires and fears.
Q: Even the desire for
realization?
M: The desire to put an end to
all desires is a most peculiar desire, just like the fear of
being afraid is a most peculiar fear. One stops you from
grabbing and the other from running. You may use the same
words, but the states are not the same. The man who seeks
realization is not addicted to desires; he is a seeker who goes
against desire, not with it. A general longing for
liberation is only the beginning; to find the proper means and
use them is the next step. The seeker has only one goal in
view: to find his own true being. Of all desires it
is the most ambitious, for nothing and nobody can satisfy
it; the seeker and the sought are one and the search alone
matters.
Q: The search will come to an
end. The seeker will remain.
M: No, the seeker will
dissolve, the search will remain. The search is the
ultimate and timeless reality.
Q: Search means lacking,
wanting, incompleteness and imperfection.
M: No, it means refusal and
rejection of the incomplete and the imperfect. The search
for reality is itself the movement of reality. In a way all
search is for the real bliss, or the bliss of the real. But
here we mean by search the search for oneself as the root of
being conscious, as the light beyond the mind. This search
will never end, while the restless craving for all else must end,
for real progress to take place.
One has to understand that the
search for reality, or God, or Guru, and the search for the self
are the same; when one is found, all are found. When ‘I
am’ and ‘God is’ become in your mind
indistinguishable, then something will happen and you will know
without a trace of doubt that God is because you are and you are
because God is. The two are one.
Ivan M. Granger
Silence, unmoved and rising
by Civivakkiyar
English version by Kamil V. Zvelebil
Silence, unmoved and rising,
Silence, unmoved and sheltering,
Silence, unmoved and permanent,
Silence, unmoved and brilliant,
Silence, broad and immense like the Ganga,
Silence, unmoved and increasing,
Silence, white and shining like the Moon,
Silence, the Essence of Siva.
— from The
Poets of the Powers: Freedom, Magic, and Renewal, Translated by Kamil V. Zvelebil