Break the Shell

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: If I am eliminated, what will remain?

M: Nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being- awareness-love will shine in full splendor. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.

Q: And no trace remains of the person?

M: A vague memory remains, like the memory of a dream, or early childhood. After all, what is there to remember? A flow of events, mostly accidental and meaningless. A sequence of desires and fears and inane blunders. Is there anything worth remembering? A person is but a shell imprisoning you. Break the shell.

Q: Who are you asking to break the shell? Who is to break the shell?

M: Break the bonds of memory and self-identification and the shell will break by itself. There is a centre that imparts reality to whatever it perceives. All you need is to understand that you are the source of reality, that you give reality instead of getting it, that you need no support and no confirmation. Things are as they are, because you accept them as they are. Stop accepting them and they will dissolve. Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. Look at it without desire or fear and it does lose substance. Pleasure and pain are momentary. It is simpler and easier to disregard them than to act on them.

Q: If all things come to an end, why did they appear at all?

Creation is in the very nature of consciousness. Consciousness causes appearances. Reality is beyond consciousness.

Q: While we are conscious of appearances, how it is that we are not conscious that these are mere appearances?

M :The mind covers up the reality without knowing it. To know the nature of the mind, you need intelligence, the capacity to look at the mind in silent and dispassionate awareness.

Q: If I am of the nature of all-pervading consciousness, how could ignorance and illusion happen to me?

M: Neither ignorance nor illusion ever happened to you. Find the self to which you ascribe ignorance and illusion and your question will be answered. You talk as if you know the self and see it to be under the sway of ignorance and illusion. But, in fact, you do not know the self, nor are you aware of ignorance. By all means become aware - this will bring you to the self and you will realize that there is neither ignorance nor delusion in it. It is like saying: if there is sun, how can darkness be? As under a stone there will be darkness, however strong the sunlight, so in the shadow of the I-am-the-body consciousness there must be ignorance and illusion.

Q: But why did the body consciousness come into being?

M: Don't ask why, ask how. It is in the nature of creative imagination to identify itself with its creations. You can stop it any moment by switching off attention. Or through investigation.