Identity: A Continuity In Memory

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Which is the projecting power?

It is imagination prompted by desire.

I know all this but I have no power over it.

This is another illusion of yours born from craving for results.

What is wrong with purposeful action?

It does not apply. In these matters there is no question of purpose, nor of action. All you need is to listen, remember, ponder. It is like taking food. All you can do is to bite off, chew and swallow. All else is unconscious and automatic. Listen, remember and understand - the mind is both the actor and the stage. All is of the mind and you are not the mind. The mind is born and reborn not you. The mind creates the world and all the wonderful variety of it. Just like in a good play you have all sorts of characters and situations, so you need a little of everything to make a world.

Nobody suffers in a play.

Unless one identifies himself with it. Don't identify yourself with the world and you will not suffer.

Others will.

Then make your world perfect, by all means. If you believe in God, work with Him. If you do not, become one. Either see the world as a play or work at it with all your might. Or both.

What about the identity of the dying man? What happens to it when he is dead? Do you agree that it continues in another body.

It continues and yet it does not. All depends on how you look at it. What is identity after all? Continuity in memory? Can you talk of identity without memory?

Yes I can. The child may not know its parents, yet the hereditary characteristics will be there.

Who identifies them? Somebody with a memory to register and compare. Don't you see that memory is the warp of your mental life? And identity is merely a pattern of events in time and space. Change the pattern and you have changed the man.

The pattern is significant and important. It has its own value. By saying that a woven design is merely colored threads you miss the most important - the beauty of it. Or by describing a book as paper with ink stains on it, you miss the meaning. Identity is valuable because it is the basis of individuality; that which makes us unique and irreplaceable. 'I am', is the intuition of uniqueness.

Yes and no. Identity, individuality, uniqueness - they are the most valuable aspects of the mind, yet of the mind only. 'I am all there is' too is an experience equally valid. The particular and the universal are inseparable. They are the two aspects of the nameless, as seen from without and from within. Unfortunately words only mention but don't convey. Try to go beyond the words.

What dies with death?

The idea 'I am this body' dies; the witness does not.

The Jains believe in a multiplicity of witnesses, forever separate.

That is their tradition based on the experience of some great people. The one witness reflects itself in the countless bodies as I AM. As long as the bodies, however subtle, last, the I AM appears as many. Beyond the body there is only the One.

God?

The Creator is a person whose body is the world. The Nameless one is beyond all god.

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* Maya has got two forms, Vikshepa (projecting) and Avarana (veiling). By the former, Vikshepa, Maya creates the whole world from Mahatattwa down to Brahma as also the gross and subtle bodies. By the other form, Avarana, Maya covers the knowledge of the Atman.

On account of false imagination, just as a rope is mistaken for a snake, so also the Supreme Self is mistaken for this universe by the power of Maya. If we think deeply, the universe disappears and Brahman alone remains. ... From "Thus Spake Sri Rama"