Why Search For It When It Is Already With You?

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: Surely, objective knowledge and ideas of things and self knowledge are not one and the same thing. One needs a brain, the other does not.

M: For the purpose of discussion you can arrange words and give them meaning, but the fact remains that all knowledge is a form of ignorance. The most accurate map is yet only paper. All knowledge is in memory; it is only recognition, while reality is beyond the duality of the knower and the known.

Q: Then by what is reality known?

M: How misleading is your language! You assume, unconsciously, that reality also is approachable through knowledge. And then you will bring in a knower of reality beyond reality! Do understand that to be, reality need not be known. Ignorance and knowledge are in the mind, not in the real.

Q: If there is no such thing as the knowledge of the real, then how do I reach it?

M: You need not reach out for what is already with you. Your very reaching out makes you miss it. Give up the idea that you have not found it and just let it come into the focus of direct perception, here and now, by removing all that is of the mind.

Q: When all that can go, goes, what remains?

M: Emptiness remains, awareness remains, pure light of conscious being remains. It is like asking what remains of a room when all the furniture is removed? A most serviceable room remains. And when even the walls are pulled down, space remains. Beyond space and time is the here and the now of reality.

Q: Does the witness remain?

M: As long as there is consciousness, its witness is also there. The two appear and disappear together.

Q: If the witness too is transient, why is he given so much importance?

M: Just to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable is real.

Q: Perception is primary, the witness - secondary.

M: This is the heart of the matter. As long as you believe that only the outer world is real, you remain its slave. To become free, your attention must be drawn to the I AM, the witness. Of course, the knower and the known are one not two, but to break the spell of the known the knower must be brought to the forefront. Neither is primary, both are reflections in memory of the ineffable experience, ever new and ever now, untranslatable, quicker than the mind.