Time, Space: Mental Creations

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: Activity is the essence of reality. There is no virtue in not working. Along with thinking something must be done.

M: To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

Q: For the person I am all this seems impossible.

M: What do you know about yourself? You can only be what you are in reality; you can only appear what you are not. You have never moved away from perfection. All idea of self-improvement is conventional and verbal. As the Sun knows not darkness, so does the Self know not the non-Self. It is the mind, which by knowing the other, becomes the other. Yet the mind is nothing else but the Self. It is the Self that becomes the other, the non-Self, and yet remains the Self. All else is an assumption. Just as a cloud obscured the Sun without in any way affecting it, so does assumption obscure reality without destroying it. The very idea of destruction of reality is ridiculous. The destroyer is always more real than the destroyed. Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one - this is the ultimate solution of every conflict.

Q: How is that in spite of so much instruction and assistance we make no progress?

M: As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

Q: Whatever I may be in reality, yet I feel myself to be a small and separate person, one amongst many.

M: Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time; you imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume; your personality is due to your self-identification with the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession, they have their span in time and make you imagine yourself, because of memory, as having duration. In reality, time and space exist in you; you do not exist in them. They are modes of perception, but they are not the only ones. Time and space are like words written on paper; the paper is real, the words merely a convention. How old are you?

Q: 48

M: What makes you say 48? What makes you say: I am here? Verbal habits born from assumptions. The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. All is here and now, but we do not see it. Truly, all is in me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of 'else' is a disaster and a calamity.