Cease To Imagine

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: What is the cause of personification, of self-limitation in time and space?

M: That which does not exist cannot have a cause. There is no such thing as a separate person. Even taking the empirical point of view, it is obvious that everything is the cause of everything, that everything is as it is, because the entire universe is as it is.

Q: Yet personality must have a cause.

M: How does personality come into being? By memory. By identifying the present with the past and projecting it into the future. Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future and your personality dissolves.

Q: Does not I AM remain?

M: The word 'remain' does not apply. I AM is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be. As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms. Self-limitation is the essence of personality.

Q: All you say sounds very beautiful. But how has one to make it into a way of living?

M: Having never left the house you are asking for the way home. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all. Collecting right ideas also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining.

Q: It is not a matter of achievement, but of understanding.

M: Don't try to understand! Enough if you don't misunderstand. Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether. What is beginningless cannot have a cause. It is not that you knew what you are and then you have forgotten. Once you know, you cannot forget. Ignorance has no beginning, but can have an end. Enquire: who is ignorant and ignorance will dissolve like a dream. The world is full of contradictions, hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within. The world comes into being only when you are born in a body. No body - no world. First enquire whether you are the body. The understanding of the world will come later.