When the student is ready, the teacher will come they say. I have found this to be true. All you have to do to begin to explore your inner being is to turn the eyes you have focused outside, inside.
That’s it.
I want to present some things I have been learning from many sources about my Self in the hope you will rise to meet your Self and find your own answers. I feel that I found a new life mid way through this one. It’s the strangest thing. My bio is not needed. I am you. What you struggle with is the same for myself.
I found a way to face life wholly from the inside out, which will lead you into a conversation with the Universe and your Self. Truth be told, you need no religion. Devotion is a fine way to know yourself though, but the big heavy Truth I have found is not a Truth at all. We are the Truth. Convenient, huh?! There is no path and there is even no one here needing it. Simply, we are the thing we seek. This seems counterintuitive possibly to you.
I AM THAT
You are beyond time and space. I have come to know and accept that the world around us is not as it appears and it cannot be True reality. It is an illusion, as is the sense you are a unique individual. So there are those two big things to get past, last thing, there is also only one Being in our Universe and we are part of THAT. Now this is hump we have to get everyone else over. I don’t know how, maybe 10-20 people will read this, but the volume is rising. I like our odds, myself and many have awoken to this reality and are exploring.
Q: Why would one seek answers inside themselves?
A: Curiosity. Boredom. Guilt. Fear. Perhaps your mind is unsettled. Perhaps you are suffering or feeling pain. You might be the source of pain for someone else. Or if you are like me, all of the above was true. I also had a feeling something was calling me, singing to me actually.
From I Am That – Nisargadatta Maharaj – Chapter 33
“When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected.” – Nisargadatta Maharaj
You Are Beyond Space and Time
NM: I am not bound by your dreamlike world. In my world the seeds of suffering, desire and fear are not sown and suffering does not grow. My world is free from opposites, of mutually distinctive discrepancies; harmony pervades; its peace is rocklike; this peace and silence are my body.
NM: Just see the person you imagine yourself to be as a part of the world you
perceive within your mind and look at the mind from the outside, for you are not the mind. After all, your only problem is the eager self-identification with whatever you perceive. Give up this habit, remember that you are not what you perceive, use your power of alert aloofness. See yourself in all that lives and your behavior will express your vision. Once you realise that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved. As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase.
But when you know yourself as beyond space and time — in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable — you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are — against fear there is no other remedy. You have to learn to think and feel on these lines, or you will remain indefinitely on the personal level of desire and fear, gaining and losing, growing and decaying. A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level. The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow.
The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone. A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness. But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness. It cannot be otherwise. We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal. Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it. But rarely we know where to seek it. Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions. Only what is compatible with your real being can make you happy and the world, as you perceive it, is its outright denial.
Q: How can one remain happy among so much suffering?
NM: One cannot help it — the inner happiness is overwhelmingly real. Like
the sun in the sky, its expressions may be clouded, but it is never absent.
Q: If happiness is independent, why are we not always happy?
NM: As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall
also believe that in their absence we must be miserable. Mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs. Hence the importance of convincing oneself that one need not be prodded into happiness; that, on the contrary, pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite. But why talk of happiness at all? You do not think of happiness except when you are unhappy. A man who says: ‘Now I am happy’, is between two sorrows — past and future. This happiness is mere excitement caused by relief from pain. Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as: ‘there is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about’. After all, the ultimate purpose of all sadhana is to reach a point when this conviction, instead of being only verbal, is based on the actual and ever-present experience.
Q: Emptiness and nothingness — how dreadful.
NM: You face it most cheerfully, when you go to sleep! Find out for yourself
the state of wakeful sleep and you will find it quite in harmony with your real nature. Words can only give you the idea and the idea is not the experience. All I can say is that true happiness has no cause and what has no cause is immovable. Which does not mean it is perceivable, as pleasure. What is perceivable is pain and pleasure; the state of freedom from sorrow can be described only negatively. To know it directly you must go beyond the mind addicted to causality and the tyranny of time.
Q: What about witnessing?
NM: Witnessing is of the mind. The witness goes with the witnessed. In the state of non-duality all separation ceases.
Q: What about you? Do you continue in awareness?
M: The person, the ‘I am this body, this mind, this chain of memories, this
bundle of desires and fears’ disappears, but something you may call identity,
remains. It enables me to become a person when required. Love creates its own
necessities, even of becoming a person.
Q: What is the relation between reality and its expressions?
NM: No relation. In reality all is real and identical. As we put it, saguna and nirguna are one in Parabrahman. There is only the Supreme. In movement, it is saguna. Motionless, it is nirguna. But it is only the mind that moves or does not move. The real is beyond. You are beyond. Once you have understood that nothing perceivable, or conceivable can be yourself, you are free of your imaginations. To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realisation. We miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination. You have to give your heart and mind to these things and brood over them repeatedly. It is like cooking food. You must keep it on the fire for some time before it is ready.
Q: Am I not under the sway of destiny, of my karma? What can I do
against it? What I am and what I do is pre-determined. Even my so-called free
choice is predetermined; only I am not aware of it and imagine myself to be free.
M: Again, it all depends how you look at it. Ignorance is like a fever — it makes you see things which are not there. Karma is the divinely prescribed treatment. Welcome it and follow the instructions faithfully and you will get well. A patient will leave the hospital after he recovers. To insist on immediate freedom of choice and action will merely postpone recovery. Accept your destiny and fulfill it — this is the shortest way to freedom from destiny, though not from love and its compulsions. To act from desire and fear is bondage;
…to act from love is freedom.
Quantum Heart 