‘I Am’ and ‘I am Aware’ are the anti chamber, the foyer to God’s castle.
The inquiry into the belief that ‘I Am’ and ‘I am Aware’ are personal, limited and dependent on the body mind reveals God’s entire domain.
Amanda is thus revealed.
Greetings to One and All!
I offer this gift for your delight.
It is a compilation of quotes from chapter 24 of I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj. It is typical of the quality of the whole book.
Perhaps some of it will speak to you as it does to me.
May Peace and Peace and Peace by everywhere.
Chapter 24 God Is the All-Doer, the Jnani a Non-doer
What Is the Path of Return?
Q: What we call the will of God is not a capricious whim of a playful deity, but the expression of an absolute necessity to grow in love and wisdom and power, to actualize the infinite potentials of life and consciousness.
M: All you say is right for the outgoing path (pravritti). For the path of return (nivritti) naughting oneself is necessary. My stand I take where nothing (paramakash) is; words do not reach there, nor thoughts. To the mind it is all darkness and silence…Free from memory and expectation, I am fresh, innocent and wholehearted. 85-6
There Is Only One Self
There is only one Self, the Supreme Reality, in which the personal and the impersonal are one. 86
What Is the Purpose of Creation?
It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfillment…The very purpose of creation is the fulfillment of desire. The desire may be noble, or ignoble, space (akash) is neutral – one can fill it with what one likes: You must be very careful as to what you desire. And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires. You can teach them to have right desires so that they may rise above them and be free of the urge to create and re-create worlds of desires, abodes of pain and pleasure. 87
The Eternal Witness of The Transient
The jnani sees no difference between God and nature. Both God and the jnani know themselves to be the immovable center of the movable, the eternal witness of the transient. The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness. 87
Is God A Person?
As long as you think yourself a person, God too is a person. When you are all, you see God as all. 88
Can I Change Facts by Changing Attitude?
The attitude is the fact. 88
The Play of Gunas
It is all the play of gunas (qualities of cosmic matter). When I identify myself with them, I am their slave. When I stand apart, I am their master. 88
How Can I Experience the Real?
Unmanifested, manifested, individuality, personality (nirguna, saguna, vyakta, vyakti); all these are mere words, points of view, mental attitudes. There is no reality in them. The real is experienced in silence. 89
What Is Good for Others?
When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous. 89-90
How Then Is One to Work?
Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work’s own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning. Make nothing a means to something else…You are using things and people for purposes alien to them, and you play havoc with the world and yourself. 90
How Can I Experience Pure Being?
When your attention is off a thing and not yet fixed on another, in the interval you are pure being. When through the practice of discrimination (viveka) and detachment (vairagya), you lose sight of sensory and mental states, pure being emerges as the natural state. 90
How Does One Bring an End to This Sense of Separateness?
By focusing the mind on ‘I am’, on the sense of being, ‘I am so-and-so’ dissolves; ‘I am witness only’ remains and that too submerges in ‘I am all’. Then the all becomes the One and the One – yourself, not to be separate from me. 90
Am I Not Separate From You?
You speak of my experience as different from your experience, because you believe we are separate. But we are not. On a deeper level my experience is your experience. Dive deep within yourself…Go in the direction of ‘I am’. 90
First it is said: ‘Things seen in dream and waking are equally unreal, because both are separate from the Self, and naught, but Self is real.’
Once this understanding is on board, the next sharing is: ‘All is the Self. There is no distinction in fact, between that which is perceived and the reality which perceives.’
What remains is to live this understanding until this understanding is living itself.
Three important questions:
1. Given the body mind appears to me, what evidence is there that I am this limited, mortal body mind which appears and disappears?
2. Based on my direct experience and not on past knowledge or belief, what is the (experiential) reality of separation?
3. Would I trade consciousness for an eternal body mind, or would I trade eternal body minds for consciousness?
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