Emotional Link Perpetuates Bondage

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: It all looks very simple and easy, but it is just not so. Sometimes the wonderful state of joyful peace dawns on me and I look and wonder: how easily it comes and how intimate it seems, how totally my own. Where was the need to strive so hard for a state so near at hand? This time, surely, it has come to stay. Yet how soon it all dissolves and leaves me wondering -- was it a taste of reality or another aberration. If it was reality, why did it go? Maybe some unique experience is needed to fix me for good in the new state and until the crucial experience comes, this game of hide and seek must continue.

M: Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your self-realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as being-knowing-feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world yo be objective while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right.  You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.

Q: How am I to think myself out when my thoughts come and go as they life. Their endless chatter distracts and exhausts me.

M: Watch your thoughts as you watch the street traffic. People come and go; you register without response. It may not be easy in the beginning, but with some practice you will find that your mind can function on many levels at the same time and you can be aware of them all. It is only when you have vested interest in any particular level, that your attention gets caught in it and you black out on other levels. Even then the work on the blacked out levels goes on, outside the field of consciousness. Do not struggle with your memories and thoughts; try only to include in your field of attention the other, more important questions like 'Who am I?, How did I happen to be born? Whence this universe around me? What is real and what is momentary?' No memory will persist, if you lose interest in it, it is the emotional link that perpetuates bondage. 

You are always seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, always after happiness and peace. Don't you see that it is your very search for happiness that makes you feel miserable? Try the other way: indifferent to pain and pleasure, neither asking, nor refusing, give all your attention to the level on which I AM is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs. Avoid the disturbance, that is all. To seek there is no need; you would not seek what you already have. You yourself are God, the Supreme Reality. 

To begin with, trust me, trust the teacher. It enables you to make the first step - and then your trust is justified by your own experience. In every walk of life initial trust is essential; without it little can be done. every undertaking is an act of faith. Even your daily bread you eat on trust! By remembering what I told you, you will achieve everything. I am telling you again: You are the all-pervading, all transcending reality. Behave accordingly: think, feel and act in harmony with the whole and the actual experience of what I say will dawn upon you in no time. No effort is needed. Have faith and act on it. Please see that I want nothing from you. It is in your own interest that I speak, because above all you love yourself, you want yourself secure and happy. Don't be ashamed of it, don't deny it. 

It is natural and good to love oneself. Only you should know what exactly do you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life - perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. 

Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on 'I AM, 'I know', 'I love' - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.