Sometimes words can hit you like a hammer
When you read the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj with earnest and close attention it can turn your whole world upside down. The words have the ability to shatter everything that you'd always believed in. The mode of thinking is so strange, so novel and so weird (especially for us Westerners) that you can scarcely believe it is ever written down by a humanbeing. And yet you have the feeling that words were never more true than what you have read just now. Just reading one simple sentence from Nisargadatta Maharaj can change your life. It literally is a life shattering experience.
I will call this man 'the mystic with the hammer'. Far more than Friedrich Nietzche will he be remembered as having changed our way of perceiving and thinking about the world. This simple man who had no formal eduction whatsoever, this simple cigarette salesman from Mumbai, will one day be considered to be one of the greatest philosophers ever to have walked the earth.
you are not what you think
Nisargadatta Maharaj had the ability to always take a step further back in consciousness. He was a genius in taking the absolute position. From that absolute position there was no 'Nisargadatta' anymore, but, so to speak, only absolute Consciousness talking to relative consciousness. Everything personal was closely scrutinized and put aside as untrue. Only a universal stance was worth considering, because only universality could make a claim to truth. He always said that identification with the object was the source of all falsehood in the psyche and therefore of all misery. What did he mean by this 'identification with the object'?
Who are you? I'm a conscious person in a particular body, you say? But can that body that you call 'yours' live for one second without consciousness? Doesn't consciousness come first? Is it not a 'conditio sine qua non' for your body to exist? It seems that consciousness is your true identity and not your body. Your consciousness seems to be the vital cause for your body to exist. You cannot think or act without being conscious. Your body cannot perform its vital functions without your underlying consciousness to tell it how to perspire or how to digest. Take your consciousness away and your body won't work, as it happens when you die. So consciousness seems to be the substratum of your body.
But let's dive deeper into this. What about deep sleep? Or when you have a swoon or when you are dumbed by narcotics. In that state you aren't conscious anymore and yet you remained alive, as you inferred in retrospect. 'The whole night I wasn't there. I was fast asleep. Still now, waking up, I'm 'back again'. But this is absurd! I must have been there in deep sleep also, yet unaware. There must have been an 'I' also in the middle of the night.' So you agree that the feeling of 'I' is not dependent on the body nor on consciousness. In deep sleep there was no body nor was there consciousness. Yet you were there, alive. There must have been an 'I' all along.
So the real I is not your relative consciousness nor your body. In deep sleep they were suspended, yet you remained. So your I amounts to something like 'the feeling of being alive'. 'I am' you say to yourself, and this feeling of 'I am' is even there when you're not in the body or when unconscious, as in deep sleep. This 'amness' seems to be you true identity. Now Nisargadatta grasps our shoulder and looks us straight in the eyes and says: 'Always remain with this true identity! This is your real I. Do not for a single moment lose sight of this feeling of 'amness'. Divest your self of all other thoughts about your self. For they are all lies and false deductions.'
But how does it look like, this real I? How does it feel? Where am I to look? How can I realize being this real I? For it seems to be something different from what I conceive myself to be right now. Nisargadatta would only give negative answers when confronted with these questions. The 'I' is not such and such a thing, he said. It only is. Only being is its characteristic, or to be more precise, it is beyond being and non-being. It is a mere nothingness and not even that, for by now we have started to predicate it, and it may as well be concluded that it is everything at the same time. In deep meditation it can be experienced but only as a wide open space of deep emptiness and stillness. But not even that, for it is experienced to be so dynamic that it is fullness and completeness also. We can not know it. For it is the ultimate subject that can never be an object of thought or intuition. How could our eye see its self? We can only be it. Sink into it. Rest in it. But we can never know it.
This is the position the small child is in. His consciousness is a vast open space full of dynamics and possibilities. But his consciousness and his feeling of self have this great disadvantage of not lettingitself be known. In the beginning the child is totally satisfied and at ease with this unknowable self. For it is such a joy just to be and who wants to know, if being alone is fun enough? But then the mind with its rationality develops in his consciousness. The characteristic of the mind is that it wants to know. So it becomes dissatisfied with this unknowable self. It wants to put some labels on it, like it has done with everything else that came to mind. Now the first thing that comes to mind as being 'I' is the body because it seems in some way or another to be controlled by the self. So it is concluded that the body must be the self.
All kinds of feelings connected to the body, like pleasure and pain, satisfaction or frustration, fear or lust, seem so close to the feeling of I, that there must be a connexion between these feelings and the sense of self. Somehow I must have generated these feelings and if I have generated them, I must be the one responsible and in charge. These feelings have a grip on me. What else can I be than these feelings? Also in the mind all kinds of thoughts, images and representations enter consciousness, so exhilarating and exciting that it must be me generating these thoughts and representations. For what else am I? I must be something, mustn't I?
So the child starts to identify his self with these feelings, these thoughts and these representations. He loses sight of the true kernel of his life force and he mixes his subject up with the objects that enter his stream of consciousness. He is beguiled and fooled by mere objects in the space and time continuum. Only because the ultimate subject of his life escapes all objectivation and can not therefore be known.
the two mirrors
To understand this a little bit more let us imagine a dark room with two mirrors placed on opposite sides, facing each other. In between the two mirrors a lamp is placed. The light of the lamp makes it possible for the two mirrors to reflect each others images. In the beginning both mirrors were clean and empty. So both mirrors reflected only each others emptiness perfectly. But in the course of time the right mirror in the room somehow became all covered with dust. The dust settled more and more in the course of time. After the lapse of years the original right mirror couldn't be seen anymore, but was now covered with stains and dirt. Though the left mirror always stayed perfectly clean and empty, it now looked as if this left mirror also had become covered with dirt and stains. For it didn't do anymore than to reflect the image of the right mirror.
But then suddenly (after how many years?) the caretaker of the room entered. He saw the condition the right mirror was in. He right away took out his sponge and cleaned the right mirror. With contentment he now saw that half work done was all work done. For the left mirror wasn't in need of cleaning. It now reflected a perfectly clean and empty image of itself again. Cleaning one mirror was enough, he saw with a laugh.
Now the left mirror is your true Self. It always stays in its self perfectly clean, empty and unsullied. But the way it looks is conditioned by the state of the right mirror, the relative consciousness of the ego-self. If this relative consciousness is calm, empty and peaceful, without all kinds of stains covering up its natural being, then the true Self can reflect its true nature of an empty stainless mirror also.
Nisargadatta says that we cannot do anything to reach, to realize or the know the Left Mirror. It simply cannot be done with an act of the ego-self. Due to the fact that our true Self is of another dimension. The only thing we can do (and if we want to 'work' spiritually, let this be our sadhana, our religious path) is to clean our relative consciousness of the stains of all mental images, of all conceptualizations, of all judgments, of all feelings, in short of all the objects that enter our stream of consciousness, in order for the one true Mirror to reflect the right image and be its true Self again. So the religious path is a via negativa. It is a path of emptying out one's self of all objects of consciousness. 'Entledigung' as Meister Eckhart used to call it.
the unreality of the right mirror
But after realizing this Nisargadatta takes one last final step back in consciousness (as the genius he was) to reveal us the ultimate truth. For the fact is, he says, that in reality the right mirror does not exist. There is only one mirror, the left One. The existence of the right one is only an optical illusion. It looks like the god/Brahman has created numberless mirrors to reflect itself but they are only rays of reflection coming from Its self. In fact every mirror is the One itself.
For relative consciousness in the cosmos has no substantiality. It is a reflection that only lives in the time and space continuum for a short period of time, stretched out over a limited space. When its allotted time is over it dies and is again taken up into its Source, the One. It needs a definite body to manifest itself. It needs content of mind to keep up the illusion of its existence. Both relative consciousness and its body are mere illusions in time and space.
But though an illusion, our consciousness serves a purpose. It's because of our soul that we can experience the One and also that the One can experience the soul, because, like we said, the Mirror can not see itself. Probably that's the reason that the One has created the manifest world, to be able to see Its self. So when we feel the energy, the love, bliss and the joy of the One it can only be in our relative consciousness. In the absolute position of truth there is only the deep stillness and emptiness of God. This is what we truly are.
seeing the false as false
It might seem that there are two selves, an absolute one and a relative, and that the absolute Self is witnessing the relative one. When we still live in the illusion of having a separate identity this having two selves is our reality. When we first start to meditate we slowly learn to be a witness to all the objects that enter the stream of our consciousness, that is: we learn to take more and more the position of our absolute I. This is probably a necessary step in losing the identification with our relative I (and so lose all identification with all of the objects in our consciousness). But Nisargadatta urges us to go on and to realize a higher state: to see that we are not divided in and against our selves. We are not in a psychic schism. Do we really think we have two 'I's'? Is it not our deepest experience that we are one and whole? One of the two must be our false 'I'. Which one? 'Make this question the question of your life', Nisargadatta says.
All it takes is seeing the false as false. It doesn't take time to have insight in which of the two 'I's' is the real one. All it needs is a quantum leap in your consciousness, an altering of Gestalt. See how your false 'I' always changes. See that it is conditioned by your consciousness and your body. That it is no more than a result of thought, place and time. Is there a personality, is there a definite individual, when we totally live in the present, when the past with its conditioning and the future with its hopes and anticipations fall away?
http://home.wxs.nl/~brouw724/Nisargadatta.html
I will call this man 'the mystic with the hammer'. Far more than Friedrich Nietzche will he be remembered as having changed our way of perceiving and thinking about the world. This simple man who had no formal eduction whatsoever, this simple cigarette salesman from Mumbai, will one day be considered to be one of the greatest philosophers ever to have walked the earth.
you are not what you think
Nisargadatta Maharaj had the ability to always take a step further back in consciousness. He was a genius in taking the absolute position. From that absolute position there was no 'Nisargadatta' anymore, but, so to speak, only absolute Consciousness talking to relative consciousness. Everything personal was closely scrutinized and put aside as untrue. Only a universal stance was worth considering, because only universality could make a claim to truth. He always said that identification with the object was the source of all falsehood in the psyche and therefore of all misery. What did he mean by this 'identification with the object'?
Who are you? I'm a conscious person in a particular body, you say? But can that body that you call 'yours' live for one second without consciousness? Doesn't consciousness come first? Is it not a 'conditio sine qua non' for your body to exist? It seems that consciousness is your true identity and not your body. Your consciousness seems to be the vital cause for your body to exist. You cannot think or act without being conscious. Your body cannot perform its vital functions without your underlying consciousness to tell it how to perspire or how to digest. Take your consciousness away and your body won't work, as it happens when you die. So consciousness seems to be the substratum of your body.
But let's dive deeper into this. What about deep sleep? Or when you have a swoon or when you are dumbed by narcotics. In that state you aren't conscious anymore and yet you remained alive, as you inferred in retrospect. 'The whole night I wasn't there. I was fast asleep. Still now, waking up, I'm 'back again'. But this is absurd! I must have been there in deep sleep also, yet unaware. There must have been an 'I' also in the middle of the night.' So you agree that the feeling of 'I' is not dependent on the body nor on consciousness. In deep sleep there was no body nor was there consciousness. Yet you were there, alive. There must have been an 'I' all along.
So the real I is not your relative consciousness nor your body. In deep sleep they were suspended, yet you remained. So your I amounts to something like 'the feeling of being alive'. 'I am' you say to yourself, and this feeling of 'I am' is even there when you're not in the body or when unconscious, as in deep sleep. This 'amness' seems to be you true identity. Now Nisargadatta grasps our shoulder and looks us straight in the eyes and says: 'Always remain with this true identity! This is your real I. Do not for a single moment lose sight of this feeling of 'amness'. Divest your self of all other thoughts about your self. For they are all lies and false deductions.'
But how does it look like, this real I? How does it feel? Where am I to look? How can I realize being this real I? For it seems to be something different from what I conceive myself to be right now. Nisargadatta would only give negative answers when confronted with these questions. The 'I' is not such and such a thing, he said. It only is. Only being is its characteristic, or to be more precise, it is beyond being and non-being. It is a mere nothingness and not even that, for by now we have started to predicate it, and it may as well be concluded that it is everything at the same time. In deep meditation it can be experienced but only as a wide open space of deep emptiness and stillness. But not even that, for it is experienced to be so dynamic that it is fullness and completeness also. We can not know it. For it is the ultimate subject that can never be an object of thought or intuition. How could our eye see its self? We can only be it. Sink into it. Rest in it. But we can never know it.
This is the position the small child is in. His consciousness is a vast open space full of dynamics and possibilities. But his consciousness and his feeling of self have this great disadvantage of not lettingitself be known. In the beginning the child is totally satisfied and at ease with this unknowable self. For it is such a joy just to be and who wants to know, if being alone is fun enough? But then the mind with its rationality develops in his consciousness. The characteristic of the mind is that it wants to know. So it becomes dissatisfied with this unknowable self. It wants to put some labels on it, like it has done with everything else that came to mind. Now the first thing that comes to mind as being 'I' is the body because it seems in some way or another to be controlled by the self. So it is concluded that the body must be the self.
All kinds of feelings connected to the body, like pleasure and pain, satisfaction or frustration, fear or lust, seem so close to the feeling of I, that there must be a connexion between these feelings and the sense of self. Somehow I must have generated these feelings and if I have generated them, I must be the one responsible and in charge. These feelings have a grip on me. What else can I be than these feelings? Also in the mind all kinds of thoughts, images and representations enter consciousness, so exhilarating and exciting that it must be me generating these thoughts and representations. For what else am I? I must be something, mustn't I?
So the child starts to identify his self with these feelings, these thoughts and these representations. He loses sight of the true kernel of his life force and he mixes his subject up with the objects that enter his stream of consciousness. He is beguiled and fooled by mere objects in the space and time continuum. Only because the ultimate subject of his life escapes all objectivation and can not therefore be known.
the two mirrors
To understand this a little bit more let us imagine a dark room with two mirrors placed on opposite sides, facing each other. In between the two mirrors a lamp is placed. The light of the lamp makes it possible for the two mirrors to reflect each others images. In the beginning both mirrors were clean and empty. So both mirrors reflected only each others emptiness perfectly. But in the course of time the right mirror in the room somehow became all covered with dust. The dust settled more and more in the course of time. After the lapse of years the original right mirror couldn't be seen anymore, but was now covered with stains and dirt. Though the left mirror always stayed perfectly clean and empty, it now looked as if this left mirror also had become covered with dirt and stains. For it didn't do anymore than to reflect the image of the right mirror.
But then suddenly (after how many years?) the caretaker of the room entered. He saw the condition the right mirror was in. He right away took out his sponge and cleaned the right mirror. With contentment he now saw that half work done was all work done. For the left mirror wasn't in need of cleaning. It now reflected a perfectly clean and empty image of itself again. Cleaning one mirror was enough, he saw with a laugh.
Now the left mirror is your true Self. It always stays in its self perfectly clean, empty and unsullied. But the way it looks is conditioned by the state of the right mirror, the relative consciousness of the ego-self. If this relative consciousness is calm, empty and peaceful, without all kinds of stains covering up its natural being, then the true Self can reflect its true nature of an empty stainless mirror also.
Nisargadatta says that we cannot do anything to reach, to realize or the know the Left Mirror. It simply cannot be done with an act of the ego-self. Due to the fact that our true Self is of another dimension. The only thing we can do (and if we want to 'work' spiritually, let this be our sadhana, our religious path) is to clean our relative consciousness of the stains of all mental images, of all conceptualizations, of all judgments, of all feelings, in short of all the objects that enter our stream of consciousness, in order for the one true Mirror to reflect the right image and be its true Self again. So the religious path is a via negativa. It is a path of emptying out one's self of all objects of consciousness. 'Entledigung' as Meister Eckhart used to call it.
the unreality of the right mirror
But after realizing this Nisargadatta takes one last final step back in consciousness (as the genius he was) to reveal us the ultimate truth. For the fact is, he says, that in reality the right mirror does not exist. There is only one mirror, the left One. The existence of the right one is only an optical illusion. It looks like the god/Brahman has created numberless mirrors to reflect itself but they are only rays of reflection coming from Its self. In fact every mirror is the One itself.
For relative consciousness in the cosmos has no substantiality. It is a reflection that only lives in the time and space continuum for a short period of time, stretched out over a limited space. When its allotted time is over it dies and is again taken up into its Source, the One. It needs a definite body to manifest itself. It needs content of mind to keep up the illusion of its existence. Both relative consciousness and its body are mere illusions in time and space.
But though an illusion, our consciousness serves a purpose. It's because of our soul that we can experience the One and also that the One can experience the soul, because, like we said, the Mirror can not see itself. Probably that's the reason that the One has created the manifest world, to be able to see Its self. So when we feel the energy, the love, bliss and the joy of the One it can only be in our relative consciousness. In the absolute position of truth there is only the deep stillness and emptiness of God. This is what we truly are.
seeing the false as false
It might seem that there are two selves, an absolute one and a relative, and that the absolute Self is witnessing the relative one. When we still live in the illusion of having a separate identity this having two selves is our reality. When we first start to meditate we slowly learn to be a witness to all the objects that enter the stream of our consciousness, that is: we learn to take more and more the position of our absolute I. This is probably a necessary step in losing the identification with our relative I (and so lose all identification with all of the objects in our consciousness). But Nisargadatta urges us to go on and to realize a higher state: to see that we are not divided in and against our selves. We are not in a psychic schism. Do we really think we have two 'I's'? Is it not our deepest experience that we are one and whole? One of the two must be our false 'I'. Which one? 'Make this question the question of your life', Nisargadatta says.
All it takes is seeing the false as false. It doesn't take time to have insight in which of the two 'I's' is the real one. All it needs is a quantum leap in your consciousness, an altering of Gestalt. See how your false 'I' always changes. See that it is conditioned by your consciousness and your body. That it is no more than a result of thought, place and time. Is there a personality, is there a definite individual, when we totally live in the present, when the past with its conditioning and the future with its hopes and anticipations fall away?
http://home.wxs.nl/~brouw724/Nisargadatta.html
