Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
M: You do it by habit only. Change your ways of feeling and thinking, take stock of them and examine them closely. You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates. You are taking so many things for granted. Begin to question. The most obvious things are the most doubtful. As yourself such questions as : 'Was I really born? Am I really so and so? How do I know that I exist?Who are my parents? Have they created me, or have I created them? Must I believe all that I am told about myself? Who am I, anyhow?' You have to put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much time demolishing it. In fact, demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered. All hangs on the idea I AM. Examine it very thoroughly. It lies at the root of every trouble. It is a sort of skin that separates you from the reality. The real is both within and without the skin, but the skin itself is not real. This I AM idea was not born with you. You could have lived very well without it. It came later due to your self-identification with the body. It created an illusion of separation where there was none. It made you a stranger in your own world and made the world alien and inimical. Without the sense of I AM life goes on. There are moments when we are without the sense I AM - at peace and happy. With the return of the I AM trouble starts.
Q: How is one to be free from the I-sense?
M: You must deal with the I-sense if you want to be free of it. Watch it in operation and at peace, how it starts and when it ceases, what it wants and how it gets it, till you see clearly and understand fully. After all, all the yogas, whatever their source and character, have only one aim: to save you form the calamity of separate existence, of being a meaningless dot in a vast and beautiful picture.
You suffer because you have alienated yourself from reality and now you seek an escape from this alienation. You cannot escape from your own obsessions. You can only cease nursing them.
It is because the I AM is false that it wants to continue. Reality need not continue - knowing itself indestructible, it is indifferent to the destruction of forms and expressions. To strengthen, and stabilize the I AM we do all sorts of things - all in vain, for the I AM is being rebuilt from moment to moment. It is unceasing work and the only radical solution is to dissolve the separative sense of I-am-such-and-such-person once and for good. Being remains, but not self-being.
Q: I have definite spiritual ambitions. Must I not work for their fulfillment?
M: No ambition is spiritual. All ambitions are for the sake of the I AM. If you want to make real progress you must give up all idea of personal attainment. The ambitions of the so-called yogis are preposterous. A man's desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal.
Q:People come to you very often with their worldly troubles and ask for help. How do you know what to tell them?
M: I just tell them what comes to my mind at the moment. I have no standardized procedure in dealing with people.
Q:You are sure of yourself. But when people come to me for advice, how am I to be sure that my advice is right?
M: Watch in what state you are, from what level you talk. If you talk from the mind, you may be wrong. If you talk from full insight into the situation, with your own mental habits in abeyance your advice may be a true response. The main point is to be fully aware that neither you nor the man in front of you are mere bodies; if your awareness is clear and full, a mistake is less probable.
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