An Advaita forum focusing on Realisation, enlightenment, non-duality, Real Love, peace, freedom, Your original nature, abiding naturally, the Oneness, the Nothingness, and Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
Also, as for Maharaj, you will find more of the message that he offered in his later talks. During his last years, he said of I AM THAT: "That book and whatever was expounded at that time was only relevant for that period. I am speaking differently today" and am "emphasizing different aspects." His final understanding, quite different from what he offered early on, is the basis of pointers offered to seekers well along the "path." Maharaj made clear at the end that the pointers in I AM THAT will take you to the midpoint of "the race"; only the pointers in his final talks point the way to "the finish line."
F.: If the lightness is not manifest, then persons will experience anxiety, depression or other conditions that will trigger emotional intoxication and self-defeating motion / action.
Such sufferers at that point will be driven to shift beyond the no do-er witnessing and to revert to the do-er mode because they think that they must act, must do something - even something rash - to escape, to gain control, or to hand the reins of control over to someone else.
Having been pulled away from abidance as their original nature by relative fears and desires, feeling as if they are being drawn below the surface of the ocean by one wave after another, seemingly certain that they are drowning and need rescuing, it is at that point that persons allow themselves to be locked into the types of attachment mentioned yesterday.
If they speak of the condition to Me, this speck of conscious awareness will say: "You do not ever have to take a place to the rear of anyone; you do not have to delude yourself into thinking you are taking a place beside when you will actually be taking a place to the rear; you do not ever have to accept the role of being nothing more than the background music to someone else's song. You might play the game for a time, but you cannot last, living the lie that you will be living at that point."
The talk here is only of freedom from things relative so that the independence of the Absolute can be felt and so that the prerequisties for peace - freedom and independence - can manifest.
To attach or not to attach - it's all the "stuff" of the relative; choosing is always confusing, so it will always pull one into the strum und drang of the relative existence by way of the unconscious influence of personality / personalities.
Personalities, provided free rent inside the "mind," travel about as if on one's shoulders and back - riding along like additional heavy burdens (as if the challenges of the relative existence are not enough) and leaving them in a position where they can forever whisper their lies into your ears.
Being bogged down in the relative and being weighed down by the agendas of those personas will insure that there will be no chance at all for a sense of lightness to remain consistently.
From their positions on your shoulders and back, it is as if the whisperings of those personalities are forever encouraging you to turn left when the "path" is to the right; encouraging you to go right when independence and freedom and peace are to the left; encouraging you to go the way of choas that is camouflaged with all sorts of attractive, enticing ribbons and bows.
It is those fear-mongering and desire-driven personas (not any relative conditions which are always guaranteed to be temporary) that are the enemies of lightness. They will forever bring to the forefront the notions of choice - encouraging you to "decide whether to chose left or right;
chose him or her; chose this course or that (even if all of the choices are senseless). Just choose something ... anything ... any port in this storm. But above all, do not just stand there and witness what is happening without taking drastic, panic-inspired action. Ignore the captain that is blowing the still and act."
In the process, the always-self-destructive voices of the self / selves will eliminate any chance to enjoy the ease and sanity of spontaneous living.
The antidote to feeling the stress of needing to choose, needing to make attachments, needing to act, and needing, period?
1. Understanding this pointer offered to beginners by Maharaj: "All you need is a quiet mind."
2. Understanding this pointer offered to seekers that are farther along the "path": "There is no such thing as peace of mind; there is only peace if you are out of your mind." Leave the imaginary world of the mind and come home ... come back to Your Original Nature, to the only "place" where stability exists.
3. Returning to the center of the "path" now in order to reach that calm state where You are abiding as Your original nature.
4. Returning to a state of non-action, which can only happen when there is freedom from the pull of personality-driven desires and freedom from the push of personality-driven fears.
5. Immersing Your Self in the kind of spontaneity that can only happen when witnessing prevails. The deer make no choices. They move about slowly, they take only as much as is truly needed with no sense that "more" would provide them something that is "missing," and they merely witness humanity's surrounding strum und drang.
They never "think" that they must attach to that insane, anxiety-provoking, depression-producing train of events.
You are invited to consider the truth behind these sharings from a speck called "Maharaj":
Questioner: "I am restless. How can I gain peace?"
Maharaj: "For what do you need peace?"
Questioner: "To be happy."
Maharaj: "Are you not happy now?"
Questioner: "No, I am not."
Maharaj: "What makes you unhappy?"
Questioner: "I have what I don’t want, and want what I don’t have."
Maharaj: "Why don’t you invert it: want what you have and care not for what you don’t have?"
Questioner: "I want what is pleasant and don’t want what is painful."
Maharaj: "How do you know what is pleasant and what is not?"
Questioner: "From past experience, of course."
Maharaj: "Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have you succeeded?
Questioner: "No, I have not. The pleasant does not last. Pain sets in again."
Maharaj: "Which pain?"
Questioner: "The desire for pleasure, the fear of pain, both are states of distress. Is there a state of unalloyed pleasure?"
Maharaj: "Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle."
What about you? Have you succeeded? After years of taking action and fluctuating between periods of happiness and unhappiness and creating chaos and generating internal disharmony and external disharmony and making hundreds of thousands of decisions to "Try this - okay, now try that - okay, give this a shot" what is your present condition after all of that? Have you succeeded?
If You do not see that all of the not-you's combined have never truly brought even one real success - one real result that permanently ended your fears and desires and brought stability - then is it not time to stop?
Is it not time to stop taking action and fluctuating and creating chaos and generating internal disharmony and external disharmony and making hundreds of thousands of additional decisions of the type that have always failed to produce what you desire and which in the end always failed to alleviate the fears that rob you of peace?
More often than not, the True Self is relegated to the darkness so early on that most have no clue at all that there is something other than the chaos generated by the false selves that mark and mar the relative existence.
If You glimpsed Your Self but have lost sight of That because of the smokescreen of your relative challenges, can You not look back and see where You left You? Can you not look back and see the consequences that began to accure at that point?
Do you not miss the stability that was enjoyed during that period of knowing the Self and functioning spontaneously as a result of the wisdom that can only be accessed via that Self?
Would you be willing to stop listening to the voices of the false selves long enough to try to hear the voice of Truth and authenticity calling from the shore, beckoning You back home?
That has consistently been the offer here: come home. Follow the "path" in its exact order to complete the "journey" so that you can come home to Your Original Nature and stay at home. Relax in the Truly Loving arms of Pure Awareness. Let Pure Awareness wrap its arms around You and hold You. Feel the tension leave. Feel the anxiety subside. Feel the depression being lifted. Feel the security of those arms. Feel the relaxation. Feel the lightness return.
Feel that touch of lightness and Oneness and Love. Be still and know that in those arms, You can witness the storms that roll in and roll out. Know that the Self cannot be caught in any of those storms. Know that the Self shall forever provide the platform from which all storms can be witnessed.
Maharaj spoke of the "storm of desires and fears." If You will find WHO is enticing you into the storm of fears and desires, then You need not ever again be pulled into those relative storms.
Be awake enough to see storms as they approach; stand aside as they come and go; do not attach to ships that are already in their own storm; and allow the peace to come and bring with it the everlasting sense of lightness that you deserve.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
Such sufferers at that point will be driven to shift beyond the no do-er witnessing and to revert to the do-er mode because they think that they must act, must do something - even something rash - to escape, to gain control, or to hand the reins of control over to someone else.
Having been pulled away from abidance as their original nature by relative fears and desires, feeling as if they are being drawn below the surface of the ocean by one wave after another, seemingly certain that they are drowning and need rescuing, it is at that point that persons allow themselves to be locked into the types of attachment mentioned yesterday.
If they speak of the condition to Me, this speck of conscious awareness will say: "You do not ever have to take a place to the rear of anyone; you do not have to delude yourself into thinking you are taking a place beside when you will actually be taking a place to the rear; you do not ever have to accept the role of being nothing more than the background music to someone else's song. You might play the game for a time, but you cannot last, living the lie that you will be living at that point."
The talk here is only of freedom from things relative so that the independence of the Absolute can be felt and so that the prerequisties for peace - freedom and independence - can manifest.
To attach or not to attach - it's all the "stuff" of the relative; choosing is always confusing, so it will always pull one into the strum und drang of the relative existence by way of the unconscious influence of personality / personalities.
Personalities, provided free rent inside the "mind," travel about as if on one's shoulders and back - riding along like additional heavy burdens (as if the challenges of the relative existence are not enough) and leaving them in a position where they can forever whisper their lies into your ears.
Being bogged down in the relative and being weighed down by the agendas of those personas will insure that there will be no chance at all for a sense of lightness to remain consistently.
From their positions on your shoulders and back, it is as if the whisperings of those personalities are forever encouraging you to turn left when the "path" is to the right; encouraging you to go right when independence and freedom and peace are to the left; encouraging you to go the way of choas that is camouflaged with all sorts of attractive, enticing ribbons and bows.
It is those fear-mongering and desire-driven personas (not any relative conditions which are always guaranteed to be temporary) that are the enemies of lightness. They will forever bring to the forefront the notions of choice - encouraging you to "decide whether to chose left or right;
chose him or her; chose this course or that (even if all of the choices are senseless). Just choose something ... anything ... any port in this storm. But above all, do not just stand there and witness what is happening without taking drastic, panic-inspired action. Ignore the captain that is blowing the still and act."
In the process, the always-self-destructive voices of the self / selves will eliminate any chance to enjoy the ease and sanity of spontaneous living.
The antidote to feeling the stress of needing to choose, needing to make attachments, needing to act, and needing, period?
1. Understanding this pointer offered to beginners by Maharaj: "All you need is a quiet mind."
2. Understanding this pointer offered to seekers that are farther along the "path": "There is no such thing as peace of mind; there is only peace if you are out of your mind." Leave the imaginary world of the mind and come home ... come back to Your Original Nature, to the only "place" where stability exists.
3. Returning to the center of the "path" now in order to reach that calm state where You are abiding as Your original nature.
4. Returning to a state of non-action, which can only happen when there is freedom from the pull of personality-driven desires and freedom from the push of personality-driven fears.
5. Immersing Your Self in the kind of spontaneity that can only happen when witnessing prevails. The deer make no choices. They move about slowly, they take only as much as is truly needed with no sense that "more" would provide them something that is "missing," and they merely witness humanity's surrounding strum und drang.
They never "think" that they must attach to that insane, anxiety-provoking, depression-producing train of events.
You are invited to consider the truth behind these sharings from a speck called "Maharaj":
Questioner: "I am restless. How can I gain peace?"
Maharaj: "For what do you need peace?"
Questioner: "To be happy."
Maharaj: "Are you not happy now?"
Questioner: "No, I am not."
Maharaj: "What makes you unhappy?"
Questioner: "I have what I don’t want, and want what I don’t have."
Maharaj: "Why don’t you invert it: want what you have and care not for what you don’t have?"
Questioner: "I want what is pleasant and don’t want what is painful."
Maharaj: "How do you know what is pleasant and what is not?"
Questioner: "From past experience, of course."
Maharaj: "Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have you succeeded?
Questioner: "No, I have not. The pleasant does not last. Pain sets in again."
Maharaj: "Which pain?"
Questioner: "The desire for pleasure, the fear of pain, both are states of distress. Is there a state of unalloyed pleasure?"
Maharaj: "Every pleasure, physical or mental, needs an instrument. Both the physical and mental instruments are material, they get tired and worn out. The pleasure they yield is necessarily limited in intensity and duration. Pain is the background of all your pleasures. You want them because you suffer. On the other hand, the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain. It is a vicious circle."
What about you? Have you succeeded? After years of taking action and fluctuating between periods of happiness and unhappiness and creating chaos and generating internal disharmony and external disharmony and making hundreds of thousands of decisions to "Try this - okay, now try that - okay, give this a shot" what is your present condition after all of that? Have you succeeded?
If You do not see that all of the not-you's combined have never truly brought even one real success - one real result that permanently ended your fears and desires and brought stability - then is it not time to stop?
Is it not time to stop taking action and fluctuating and creating chaos and generating internal disharmony and external disharmony and making hundreds of thousands of additional decisions of the type that have always failed to produce what you desire and which in the end always failed to alleviate the fears that rob you of peace?
More often than not, the True Self is relegated to the darkness so early on that most have no clue at all that there is something other than the chaos generated by the false selves that mark and mar the relative existence.
If You glimpsed Your Self but have lost sight of That because of the smokescreen of your relative challenges, can You not look back and see where You left You? Can you not look back and see the consequences that began to accure at that point?
Do you not miss the stability that was enjoyed during that period of knowing the Self and functioning spontaneously as a result of the wisdom that can only be accessed via that Self?
Would you be willing to stop listening to the voices of the false selves long enough to try to hear the voice of Truth and authenticity calling from the shore, beckoning You back home?
That has consistently been the offer here: come home. Follow the "path" in its exact order to complete the "journey" so that you can come home to Your Original Nature and stay at home. Relax in the Truly Loving arms of Pure Awareness. Let Pure Awareness wrap its arms around You and hold You. Feel the tension leave. Feel the anxiety subside. Feel the depression being lifted. Feel the security of those arms. Feel the relaxation. Feel the lightness return.
Feel that touch of lightness and Oneness and Love. Be still and know that in those arms, You can witness the storms that roll in and roll out. Know that the Self cannot be caught in any of those storms. Know that the Self shall forever provide the platform from which all storms can be witnessed.
Maharaj spoke of the "storm of desires and fears." If You will find WHO is enticing you into the storm of fears and desires, then You need not ever again be pulled into those relative storms.
Be awake enough to see storms as they approach; stand aside as they come and go; do not attach to ships that are already in their own storm; and allow the peace to come and bring with it the everlasting sense of lightness that you deserve.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
