Experience, Only A Concept

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

March 16, 1981

Even in the highest Saints there is always some doubt about the clarity of I AM, and this enquiry of what I am must be gone into at any and all levels. The importance and significance of the enquiry is that no one can give you an answer to this enquiry except yourself. Each one, as "I", has to find out what this "I" is. The merest description that can be given to this consciousness is that it is as fine, as subtle, as space. In maturity your consciousness is God.

That original state, prior to the arising of consciousness, cannot be described, one can only be That. 

I keep on repeating that whatever one listens to ultimately means nothing - because whatever I am, that is exactly what you are. 

Any action that one takes depends on a certain image that one has about oneself, and that image remains only so long as consciousness is there. Is this clearly understood?

People come here with a certain set of concepts; I hold the mirror before them of what they are as phenomena and ultimately they realize they will reach their original state - which was there before the body-cum-consciousness arose. In that original state there was no experience, even now any experience that one thinks one has is only a concept.

In that state, before consciousness arose, there was no query of 'Who am I?' because there was no one who wanted to know that answer. This question arises only in consciousness; anything in consciousness is only a concept and therefore it has to be wrong.

Out of millions of people, why do only some come here? Obviously it is when consciousness has this enquiry in consciousness that it brings people here.