u/thefinalreality

Thursday, May 3, 1979

Krishna says: ‘That which is in the heart of a human being prior to any experience, is My true nature’. The world is known through it. The knowingness has been created unknowingly, as our consciousness has come over us unexpectedly.

Witness the consciousness. It is self-luminous. It is the seed of the world – the same as Hiranya Garbha – the golden womb mentioned in the scriptures. Everything is hidden in it.

Krishna says: ‘Jiva implies consciousness. The totality of consciousness is My true nature’. Focus your attention on That by which you know ‘you are’.

Whatever is, is consciousness. It has forgotten its true identity. Therefore it believes itself to be the small body. Do not ill-treat the body but observe consciousness that is in the body. ‘That is the holy sight of Me, the supreme Self’, so says Krishna. This is His true experience.

There are many Gurus in the world. A rare one tells you to pay attention to the consciousness in the human body. Meditate on your consciousness. Do not pay attention to things known through consciousness.

Your in-built love for yourself is the highest devotion. Be devoted to the love (‘I am’) which is now listening. It will bring you contentment. The body is just a happening – a condition.

The experience of immortality means there will never thereafter be the experience of death. Worship your consciousness as God. Rituals are only for passing the time. Devotion of this kind is prescribed for steadying the consciousness. Do not entertain any idea of your gender, whether male or female. That is only an incidental condition, a temporary phase. The body may go on or come to an end, but you are the luminous consciousness.

According to the Guru-word, one who merges with his true nature is a yogi. It means that consciousness has realized itself.

Worship consciousness with consciousness. One who sees his consciousness as all-pervading, his every action is an offering to Brahman. The self-sensation ‘I am awake’ is the holy sight of God. Everything is seen through Him, but He is not seen. Who is He? He is your own pure consciousness. All the fourteen types of learning and the eight spiritual powers belong to Him. The body is the food for consciousness (God), it is not His nature.

You may be working, you may be young or old, but you never forget whether you are a woman or a man. The unbroken contemplation of one’s own nature should be like that. The devotee’s consciousness is the same as the Lord’s feet. By its virtue, the whole world moves. Krishna says: ‘I am the consciousness in the heart of each human being. My incarnations mean the incarnations of consciousness’.

(From Meditations with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Nirupana 107)

40. To be the Real Self in the Heart by winning the actual Experience of that Self, which is already won, is the real gain; all other gains are like those that are won in a dream. Does anything gained in a dream remain true on waking? Is the one that has cast off falsehood by dwelling in the Real ever again deluded by these?

41. So long as the notion 'I am the body' prevails, the meditation 'I am That' is helpful to the winning of Self-Awareness (by the Quest). (But) why should this meditation be kept up endlessly? Does any man meditate 'I am a man'? We are always that Reality!

42. Even the statement that duality is real so long as one is striving to reach the goal, but that in the goal there is non-duality, is not at all correct. What else but the tenth man was the man in the parable, both when he himself was anxiously seeking for the tenth man as one that was missing, and when he had found himself (to be that missing tenth man)?

~ Ulladu Narpadu

Q: Were you always like this from the first moment of enlightenment?

M: The three states rotate as usual -- there is waking and sleeping and waking again, but they do not happen to me. They just happen. To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rocklike, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.

Q: Yet, you are conscious!

M: Yes and no. There is peace -- deep, immense, unshakeable. Events are registered in memory, but are of no importance. I am hardly aware of them.

Q: If I understand you rightly, this state did not come by cultivation.

M: There was no coming. It was so -- always. There was discovery and it was sudden. Just as at birth you discover the world suddenly, as suddenly I discovered my real being.

Q: Was it clouded over and your sadhana dissolved the mist? When your true state became clear to you, did it remain clear, or did it get obscured again? Is your condition permanent or intermittent?

M: Absolutely steady. Whatever I may do, it stays like a rock -- motionless. Once you have awakened into reality, you stay in it. A child does not return to the womb! It is a simple state, smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest. It is self-evident and yet beyond description.

Q: Is there a way to it?

M: Everything can become a way, provided you are interested. Just puzzling over my words and trying to grasp their full meaning is a sadhana quite sufficient for breaking down the wall.

~ I Am That, chapter 42

From I Am That, Chapter 69

This is partly a response to an excerpt from Kabir that was shared here earlier. I will not quote the original or the questions posed, but here are verses from Katha Upanishad that resolve the seeming conflict:

>1.3.10 Higher than the senses are their objects and higher than the objects is the mind. Higher than the mind is the intellect and higher than the intellect is the great self (Mahat).

>1.3.11 Greater than the Mahat is the Unmanifest (avyakta). Greater than the Unmanifest is the Person (Purusha). Than the Purusha nothing is greater. That is the utmost limit, the Highest Goal.

>1.3.12 This Self hidden in every being does not shine forth. But the seers of the subtle can see it with their sharp and subtle intellect.

>1.3.13 Let the man of discrimination merge his speech in the mind, the mind in the knowing self, the knowing self in the Great and the Great in the tranquil Self.

>1.3.14 Arise, awake! Realise your truth having approached the noble. Sharp as the edge of a razor is the path, hard to cross and difficult to tread. Thus do speak the seers of truth.

>1.3.15 Soundless is It and beyond touch, visual shape It has not nor any taste. And neither has It smell. Undecaying is It and eternal, without either end or beginning. From the jaws of death will escape he who knows this ever-the-same beyond the Mahat.

See here, that there is no contradiction in the import of the Vedas and the excerpt. There are no mistakes in the time-tested authoritative streams; there are only mistaken interpretations, and those keep recurring throughout the ages.