Liberation is from the Person

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Q: We settle for pleasure.

M: Each pleasure is wrapped in pain. You soon discover that you cannot have one without the other.

Q: There is the experiencer and there is his experience. What created the link between the two?

M: Nothing created it. It is. The two are one.

Q: I feel there is a catch somewhere, but I do not know where.

M: The catch is in your mind, which insists on seeing duality where there is none.

Q: As I listen you, my mind is all in the now and I am astonished to find myself without questions.

M: You can know reality only when you are astonished.

Q: I can make out that the cause of anxiety and fear is memory. What are the means for putting an end to memory?

M: Don't talk of means, there are no means. What you see as false, dissolves. It is the very nature of illusion to dissolve on investigation. Investigate - that is all. You cannot destroy the false, for you are creating it all the time. Withdraw from it, ignore it, go beyond, and it will cease to be.

Q: Christ also speaks of ignoring evil and being child-like.

M: Reality is common to all. Only the false is personal.

Q: As I watch the sadhakas and enquire into the theories by which they live, I find they have merely replaced material cravings by ‘spiritual’ ambitions. From what you tell us it looks as if the words: ‘spiritual’ and ‘ambition’ are incompatible. If ‘spirituality’ implies freedom from ambition, what will urge the seeker on? The Yogis speak of the desire for liberation as essential. Is it not the highest form of ambition?

M: Ambition is personal, liberation is from the personal. In liberation both the subject and the object of ambition are no longer. Earnestness is not a yearning for the fruits of one's endeavors. It is an expression of an inner shift of interest away from the false, unessential, the personal.

Q: You told us the other day that we cannot even dream of perfection before realization, for the Self is the source of all perfection and not the mind. If it is not excellence in virtue that is essential for liberation, then what is?

M: Liberation is not the result of some means skillfully applied, nor of circumstances. It is beyond the causal process. Nothing can compel it, nothing can prevent it.

Q: Then why are we not free here and now?

M: But we are free here and now. It is only the mind that imagines bondage.

Q: What will put an end to imagination?

M: Why should you want to put an end to it? Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, and remove what poisoned it - the idea of a separate and isolated person - you just leave it alone to do its work among things to which it is well suited. To keep the mind in its own place and on its own work is the liberation of the mind.