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Q: What is permanent?
M: Look to yourself for the permanent. Dive deep within and find what is real in you.
Q: How to look for myself?
M: Whatever happens, it happens to you. What you do, the doer is in you. Find the subject of all that you are as a person.
Q: What else can I be?
M: Find out. Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being.
Q: My question is: How to find the way to one’s own being?
M: Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I’? After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ‘I am’ is certain. The
‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
Q: I am doing nothing else for the last years.
M: What is wrong with striving? Why look for results? Striving itself is your real nature.
Q: Striving is painful.
M: You make it so by seeking results. Strive without seeking, struggle without greed.
Q: Why has God made me as I am?
M: Which God are you talking about? What is God? Is he not the very light by which you ask the question? ‘I am’ itself is God.
The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor mind, and the love of the self in you is for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.
Q: How am I to find that love?
M: What do you love now? The ‘I am’. Give your heart and mind to it, think of nothing else. This, when effortless and natural, is the highest state. In it love itself is the lover and the beloved.
Q: Everybody wants to live, to exist. Is it not self-love?
M: All desire has its source in the self. lt is all a matter of choosing the right desire.
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Q: What is right and what is wrong varies with habit and custom. Standards vary with societies.
M: Discard all traditional standards. Leave them to the hypo-crites. Only what liberates you from desire and fear and wrong ideas is good. As long as you worry about sin and virtue you will have no peace.
Q: I grant that sin and virtue are social norms. But there may be also spiritual sins and virtues. I mean by spiritual the absolute. Is there such a thing as absolute sin or absolute virtue?
M: Sin and virtue refer to a person only. Without a sinful or virtu-ous person what is sin or virtue? At the level of the absolute there are no persons; the ocean of pure awareness is neither virtuous nor sinful. Sin and virtue are invariably relative.
Q: Can I do away with such unnecessary notions?
M: Not as long as you think yourself to be a person.
Q: By what sign shall I know that I am beyond sin and virtue?
M: By being free from all desire and fear, from the very idea of being a person. To nourish the ideas: ‘I am a sinner’. ‘I am not a sinner’, is sin. To identify oneself with the particular is all the sin there is. The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears. ‘I am’ is the impersonal Being. I am this is the person.
The person is relative and the pure Being — fundamental.
Q: Surely pure Being is not unconscious, nor is it devoid of discrimination. How can it be beyond sin and virtue? Just tell us, please, has it intelligence or not?
M: All these questions arise from your believing yourself to be a person. Go beyond the personal and see.
Q: What exactly do you mean when you ask me to stop being a person?
M: I do not ask you to stop being — that you cannot. I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning — it is not as hard as you think.
Q: To think oneself as the personal is the sin of the impersonal.
M: Again the personal point of view! Why do you insist on polluting the impersonal with your ideas of sin and virtue? It just does 72
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not apply. The impersonal cannot be described in terms of good and bad. It is Being — Wisdom — Love — all absolute.
Where is the scope for sin there? And virtue is only the opposite of sin.
Q: We talk of divine virtue.
M: True virtue is divine nature (swarupa). What you are really is your virtue. But the opposite of sin which you call virtue is only obedience born out of fear.
Q: Then why all effort at being good?
M: It keeps you on the move. You go on and on till you find God.
Then God takes you into Himself — and makes you as He is.
Q: The same action is considered natural at one point and a sin at another. What makes it sinful?
M: Whatever you do against your better knowledge is sin.
Q: Knowledge depends on memory.
M: Remembering your self is virtue, forgetting your self is sin. It all boils down to the mental or psychological link between the spirit and matter. We may call the link psyche (antahkarana).
When the psyche is raw, undeveloped, quite primitive, it is subject to gross illusions. As it grows in breadth and sensitivity, it becomes a perfect link between pure matter and pure spirit and gives meaning to matter and expression to spirit.
There is the material world (mahadakash) and the spiritual (paramakash). Between lies the universal mind (chidakash), which is also the universal heart (premakash). It is wise love that makes the two one.
Q: Some people are stupid, some are intelligent. The difference is in their psyche. The ripe ones had more experience behind them. Just like a child grows by eating and drinking, sleeping and playing, so is man’s psyche shaped by all he thinks and feels and does, until it is perfect enough to serve as a bridge between the spirit and the body. As a bridge permits the traffic between the banks, so does the psyche bring together the source and its expression.
M: Call it love. The bridge is love.
Q: Ultimately all is experience. Whatever we think, feel, do, is WHO AM I?
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experience. Behind it is the experiencer. So all we know consists of these two, the experiencer and the experience. But the two are really one — the experiencer alone is the experience.
Still, the experiencer takes the experience to be outside. In the same way the spirit and the body are one; they only appear as two.
M: To the Spirit there is no second.
Q: To whom then does the second appear? It seems to me that duality is an illusion induced by the imperfection of the psyche.
When the psyche is perfect, duality is no longer seen.
M: You have said it.
Q: Still I have to repeat my very simple question: who makes the distinction between sin and virtue?
M: He who has a body, sins with the body, he who has a mind, sins with the mind.
Q: Surely, the mere possession of mind and body does not compel to sin. There must. be a third factor at the root of it. I come back again and again to this question of sin and virtue, because now-a-days young people keep on saying that there is no such thing as sin, that one need not be squeamish and should follow the moment’s desire readily. They will accept neither tradition nor authority and can be influenced only by solid and honest thought.
If they refrain from certain actions, it is through fear of police rather than by conviction. Undoubtedly there is something in what they say, for we can see how our values change from place to place and time to time. For instance — killing in war is great virtue today and may be considered a horrible crime next century.
M: A man who moves with the earth will necessarily experience days and nights. He who stays with the sun will know no darkness. My world is not yours. As I see it, you all are on a stage performing. There is no reality about your comings and goings.
And your problems are so unreal!
Q: We may be sleep-walkers, or subject to nightmares. Is there nothing you can do?
M: I am doing: I did enter your dreamlike state to tell you —
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“Stop hurting yourself and others, stop suffering, wake up”.
Q: Why then don’t we wake up?
M: You will. I shall not be thwarted. It may take some time.
When you shall begin to question your dream, awakening will be not far away.
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Life is Love and Love is Life
Questioner: Is the practice of Yoga always conscious? Or, can it be quite unconscious, below the threshold of awareness?
Maharaj: In the case of a beginner the practice of Yoga is often deliberate and requires great determination. But those who are practising sincerely for many years, are intent on self-realization all the time, whether conscious of it or not. Unconscious sadhana is most effective, because it is spontaneous and steady.
Q: What is the position of the man who was a sincere student of Yoga for some time and then got discouraged and abandoned all efforts?
M: What a man appears to do, or not to do, is often deceptive.
His apparent lethargy may be just a gathering of strength. The causes of our behaviour are very subtle. One must not be quick to condemn, not even to praise. Remember that Yoga is the work of the inner self (vyakta) on the outer self (vyakti). All that the outer does is merely in response to the inner.
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Q: Still the outer helps.
M: How much can it help and in what way? It has some control over the body and can improve its posture and breathing. Over the mind’s thoughts and feelings it has little mastery, for it is itself the mind. It is the inner that can control the outer. The outer will be wise to obey.
Q: If it is the inner that is ultimately responsible for man’s spiritual development, why is the outer so much exhorted and encouraged?
M: The outer can help by keeping quiet and free from desire and fear. You would have noticed that all advice to the outer is in the form of negations: don’t, stop, refrain, forego, give up, sacrifice, surrender, see the false as false. Even the little description of reality that is given is through denials — ‘not this, not this’, (neti, neti). All positives belong to the inner self, as all absolutes
— to Reality.
Q: How are we to distinguish the inner from the outer in actual experience?
M: The inner is the source of inspiration, the outer is moved by memory. The source is untraceable, while all memory begins somewhere. Thus the outer is always determined, while the inner cannot be held in words. The mistake of students consists in their imagining the inner to be something to get hold of, and forgetting that all perceivables are transient and, therefore, unreal. Only that which makes perception possible, call it Life or Brahma n, or what you like, is real.
Q: Must Life have a body for its self-expression?
M: The body seeks to live. It is not life that needs the body; it is the body that needs life.
Q: Does life do it deliberately?
M: Does love act deliberately? Yes and no. Life is love and love is life. What keeps the body together but love? What is desire, but love of the self? What is fear but the urge to protect? And what is knowledge but the love of truth? The means and forms may be wrong, but the motive behind is always love — love of the me and the mine. The me and the mine may be small, or may explode and embrace the universe, but love remains.
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Q: The repetition of the name of God is very common in India. Is there any virtue in it?
M: When you know the name of a thing, or a person, you can find it easily. By calling God by His name you make Him come to you.
Q: In what shape does He come?
M: According to your expectations. If you happen to be unlucky and some saintly soul gives you a mantra for good luck and you repeat it with faith and devotion, your bad luck is bound to turn.
Steady faith is stronger than destiny. Destiny is the result of causes, mostly accidental, and is therefore loosely woven. Confidence and good hope will overcome it easily.
Q: When a mantra is chanted, what exactly happens?
M: The sound of mantra creates the shape which will embody the Self. The Self can embody any shape — and operate through it. After all, the Self is expressing itself in action — and a mantra is primarily energy in action. It acts on you, it acts on your surroundings.
Q: The mantra is traditional. Must it be so?
M: Since times immemorial a link was created between certain words and corresponding energies and reinforced by numberless repetitions. It is just like a road to walk on. It is an easy way
— only faith is needed. You trust the road to take you to your destination.
Q: In Europe there is no tradition of a mantra, except in some contemplative orders. Of what use is it to a modern young Westerner?
M: None, unless he is very much attracted. For him the right procedure is to adhere to the thought that he is the ground of all knowledge, the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and the mind. If he keeps it in mind all the time, aware and alert, he is bound to break the bounds of non-awareness and emerge into pure life, light and love. The idea — ‘I am the witness only’ will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water, and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disap-LIFE IS LOVE AND LOVE IS LIFE
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pears in space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness (chidakash), then into pure being (paramakash), which is beyond all existence and non-existence.
Q: The realized man eats, drinks and sleeps. What makes him do so?
M: The same power that moves the universe, moves him too.
Q: All are moved by the same power: what is the difference?
M: This only: The realized man knows what others merely hear, but don’t experience. Intellectually they may seem convinced, but in action they betray their bondage, while the realized man is always right.
Q: Everybody says ‘I am’. The realized man too says ‘I am’.
Where is the difference?
M: The difference is in the meaning attached to the words ‘I am’. With the realized man the experience: ‘I am the world, the world is mine’ is supremely valid — he thinks, feels and acts integrally and in unity with all that lives. He may not even know the theory and practice of self-realization, and be born and bred free of religious and metaphysical notions. But there will not be the least flaw in his understanding and compassion.
Q: I may come across a beggar, naked and hungry and ask him: ‘Who are you?’ He may answer: ‘I am the Supreme Self’.
‘Well’, I say, ‘since you are the Supreme, change your present state’. What will he do?
M: He will ask you: ‘Which state? What is there that needs changing? What is wrong with me?’
Q: Why should he answer so?
M: Because he is no longer bound by appearances, he does not identify himself with the name and shape. He uses memory, but memory cannot use him.
Q: Is not all knowledge based on memory?
M: Lower knowledge — yes. Higher knowledge, knowledge of Reality, is inherent in man’s true nature.
Q: Can I say that I am not what I am conscious of, nor am I consciousness itself?
M: As long as you are a seeker, better cling to the idea that you 78
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are pure consciousness, free from all content. To go beyond consciousness is the supreme state.
Q: The desire for realization, does it originate in consciousness, or beyond?
M: In consciousness, of course. All desire is born from memory and is within the realm of consciousness. What is beyond is clear of all striving. The very desire to go beyond consciousness is still in consciousness.
Q: Is there any trace, or imprint, of the beyond on consciousness?
M: No, there cannot be.
Q: Then, what is the link between the two? How can a passage be found between two states which have nothing in common? Is not pure awareness the link between the two?
M: Even pure awareness is a form of consciousness.
Q: Then what is beyond? Emptiness?
M: Emptiness again refers only to consciousness. Fullness and emptiness are relative terms. The Real is really beyond —
beyond not in relation to consciousness, but beyond all relations of whatever kind. The difficulty comes with the word ‘state’.
The Real is not a state of something else — it is not a state of mind or consciousness or psyche — nor is it something that has a beginning and an end, being and not being. All opposites are contained in it — but it is not in the play of opposites. You must not take it to be the end of a transition. It is itself, after the consciousness as such is no more. Then words ‘I am man’, or ‘I am God’ have no meaning. Only in silence and in darkness can it be heard and seen.
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Discrimination leads to
Detachment
Maharaj: You are all drenched for it is raining hard. In my world it is always fine weather. There is no night or day, no heat or cold. No worries beset me there, nor regrets. My mind is free of thoughts, for there are no desires to slave for.
Questioner: Are there two worlds?
M: Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless. You can tell me what you like about your world — I shall listen carefully, even with interest, yet not for a moment shall I forget that your world is not, that you are dreaming.
Q: What distinguishes your world from mine?
M: My world has no characteristics by which it can be identified. You can say nothing about it. I am my world. My world is myself. It is complete and perfect. Every impression is erased, every experience — rejected. I need nothing, not even myself, for myself I cannot lose.
Q: Not even God?
M: All these ideas and distinctions exist in your world; in mine there is nothing of the kind. My world is single and very simple.
Q: Nothing happens there?
M: Whatever happens in your world, only there it has validity and evokes response. In my world nothing happens.
Q: The very fact of your experiencing your own world implies duality inherent in all experience.
M: Verbally — yes. But your words do not reach me. Mine is a non-verbal world. In your world the unspoken has no existence.
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In mine — the words and their contents have no being. In your world nothing stays, in mine — nothing changes. My world is real, while yours is made of dreams.
Q: Yet we are talking.
M: The talk is in your world. In mine — there is eternal silence.
My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there.
Q: It seems as if you alone are in your world.
M: How can you say alone or not alone, when words do not apply? Of course, I am alone for I am all.
Q: Are you ever coming into our world?
M: What is coming and going to me? These again are words.
am. Whence am I to come from and where to go?
Q: Of what use is your world to me?
M: You should consider more closely your own world, examine it critically and, suddenly, one day you will find yourself in mine.
Q: What do we gain by it?
M: You gain nothing. You leave behind what is not your own and find what you have never lost — your own being.
Q: Who is the ruler of your world?
M: There are no ruler and ruled here. There is no duality whatsoever. You are merely projecting your own ideas. Your scriptures and your gods have no meaning here.
Q: Still you have a name and shape, display consciousness and activity.
M: In your world I appear so. In mine I have being only. Nothing else. You people are rich with your ideas of possession, of quantity and quality. I am completely without ideas.
Q: In my world there is disturbance, distress and despair. You seem to be living on some hidden income, while I must slave for a living.
M: Do as you please. You are free to leave your world for mine.
Q: How is the crossing done?
M: See your world as it is, not as you imagine it to be. Discrimination will lead to detachment; detachment will ensure right ac-DISCRIMINATION LEADS TO DETACHMENT
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tion; right action will build the inner bridge to your real being.
Action is a proof of earnestness. Do what you are told diligently and faithfully and all obstacles will dissolve.
Q: Are you happy?
M: In your world I would be most miserable. To wake up, to eat, to talk, to sleep again — what a bother!
Q: So you do not want to live even?
M: To live, to die — what meaningless words are these! When you see me alive, I am dead. When you think me dead, I am alive. How muddled up you are!
Q: How indifferent you are? All the sorrows of our world are as nothing to you.
M: I am quite conscious of your troubles.
Q: Then what are you doing about them?
M: There is nothing I need doing. They come and go.
Q: Do they go by the very act of your giving them attention?
M: Yes. The difficulty may be physical, emotional or mental; but it is always individual. Large scale calamities are the sum of numberless individual destinies and take time to settle. But death is never a calamity?
Q: Even where a man is killed?
M: The calamity is of the killer.
Q: Still, it seems there are two worlds, mine and yours.
M: Mine is real, yours is of the mind.
Q: Imagine a rock and a hole in the rock and a frog in the hole.
The frog may spend its life in perfect bliss, undistracted, undisturbed. Outside the rock the world goes on. If the frog in the hole were told about the outside world, he would say: ‘There is no such thing. My world is of peace and bliss. Your world is a word structure only, it has no existence’. It is the same with you. When you tell us that our world simply does not exist, there is no common ground for discussion. Or, take another example. I go to a doctor and complain of stomach ache. He examines me and says: ‘You are all right’. ‘But it pains’ I say. ‘Your pain is mental’
he asserts. I say ‘It does not help me to know that my pain is 82
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mental. You are a doctor, cure me of my pain. If you cannot cure me, you are not my doctor.’
M: Quite right.
Q: You have built the railroad, but for lack of a bridge no train can pass. Build the bridge.
M: There is no need of a bridge.
Q: There must be some link between your world and mine.
M: There is no need of a link between a real world and an imaginary world, for there cannot be any.
Q: So what are we to do?
M: Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically, scrutinize every idea about it; that will do.
Q: The world is too big for investigation. All I know is that I am, the world is, the world troubles me and I trouble the world.
M: My experience is that everything is bliss. But the desire for bliss creates pain. Thus bliss becomes the seed of pain. The entire universe of pain is born of desire. Give up the desire for pleasure and you will not even know what is pain.
Q: Why should pleasure be the seed of pain?
M: Because for the sake of pleasure you are committing many sins. And the fruits of sin are suffering and death.
Q: You say the world is of no use to us — only a tribulation. I feel it cannot be so. God is not such a fool. The world seems to me a big enterprise for bringing the potential into actual, matter into life, the unconscious into full awareness. To realize the supreme we need the experience of the opposites. Just as for building a temple we need stone and mortar, wood and iron, glass and tiles, so for making a man into a divine sage, a master of life and death, one needs the material of every experience. As a woman goes to the market, buys provisions of every sort, comes home, cooks, bakes and feeds her lord, so we bake ourselves nicely in the fire of life and feed our God.
M: Well, if you think so, act on it. Feed your God, by all means.
Q: A child goes to school and learns many things, which will be of no use to it later. But in the course of learning it grows. So do we pass through experiences without number and forget them DISCRIMINATION LEADS TO DETACHMENT
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all, but in the meantime we grow all the time. And what is a gnani but a man with a genius for reality! This world of mine cannot be an accident. It makes sense, there must be a plan behind it. My God has a plan.
M: If the world is false, then the plan and its creator are also false.
Q: Again, you deny the world. There is no bridge between us.
M: There is no need of a bridge. Your mistake lies in your belief that you are born. You were never born nor will you ever die, but you believe that you were born at a certain date and place and that a particular body is your own.
Q: The world is, I am. These are facts.
M: Why do you worry about the world before taking care of yourself? You want to save the world, don’t you? Can you save the world before saving yourself? And what means being saved? Saved from what? From illusion. Salvation is to see things as they are. I really do not see myself related to anybody and anything. Not even to a self, whatever that self may be. I remain forever — undefined. I am within and beyond — intimate and unapproachable.
Q: How did you come to it?
M: By my trust in my Guru. He told me: ‘You alone are’ and I did not doubt him. I was merely puzzling over it, until I realized that it is absolutely true.
Q: Conviction by repetition?
M: By self-realization. I found that I am conscious and happy absolutely and only by mistake I thought I owed being-consciousness-bliss to the body and t