Mere Listening Won't Do

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

December 3, 1981

The knowledge that I am expounding will dissolve your identity as a personality and will transform you into manifest knowledge. The manifest knowledge, the consciousness, is free and unconditioned. It is not possible to either catch hold of or give up that knowledge because you are that knowledge, subtler than space.

This knowledge that you are manifest must be opened through meditation; you do not get it by listening to words.

Is not this consciousness prior to any other experience and is there not something on which consciousness has come about? That waking state, deep sleep and the sense of presence, who has these experiences other than That which was prior to these experiences?

That which is talking to you is that state which is time-bound, which has come temporarily upon my original state. Therefore you and I can have no sense of fear; it is only this changing state which has identified with the body which has fear.

The fear of death is the fine for accepting the identity of the body as a separate entity in the total functioning. It is only birth which fears death. Presence and absence are interrelated dualities, this was understood only after the sense of presence arose, earlier there was no sense of either absence or presence.