TODAY'S CONSIDERATIONS
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Next, quotations from Maharaj will be offered, excerpted from the book QUOTATIONS AND POINTERS dealing with NON-DUALITY, ADVAITA, NISARGA YOGA and more
The quotations and pointers from Maharaj which will be offered during the next few days will be arranged by category and subject matter. The quotes offered today will deal with:
"RELATIVE PROBLEMS" and "SOLUTIONS"
"Don’t you see that all your problems are your body’s problems - food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival? All these lose their meaning the moment you realise that you may not be a mere body."
"It is selfishness, due to a self-identification with the body, that is the main problem and the cause of all other problems."
"The ultimate state . . . is that state where no needs are felt at any time, where nothing is useful for anything."
"Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done."
"All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You have enclosed yourself in time and space, squeezed yourself into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body and thus created the innumerable conflicts of life and death, pleasure and pain, hope and fear. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions."
"In the waking state all these problems arise, for such is its nature. But, you are not always in that state. What good can you do in a state into which you fall and from which you emerge, helplessly?"
"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!"
"Centuries roll on, but the human problem does not change - the problem of suffering and the ending of suffering."
"This 'I Amness' is the very source of all misery."
"Witnessing is natural and no problem. The problem is excessive interest, leading to self-identification. Whatever you are engrossed in you take to be real."
"What problems can there be which the mind did not create?"
"Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten. It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, coloured by like and dislike. Truth and Love are man's real nature and . . . the heart is the means of its expression."
" . . . Without the mind there will be no problems."
"I have no personal problems. But the world is full of living beings whose lives are squeezed between fear and craving. They are like cattle driven to the slaughter house, jumping and frisking, carefree and happy, yet dead and skinned within an hour."
"Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem."
"What is wrong with a life which is free from problems? Personality is merely a reflection of the real. Why should not the reflection be true to the original as a matter of course, automatically? Need the person have any designs of its own? The life of which it is an expression will guide it. Once you realise that the person is merely a shadow of the reality, but not reality itself, you cease to fret and worry. You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown."
"The problem is universal - suffering and the ending of suffering. The cause of suffering is dependence and independence is the remedy."
"Just realise that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done."
"To solve a problem you must trace it to its source. Only in the dissolution of the problem in the universal solvents of enquiry and dispassion, can its right solution be found."
"Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person."
"All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself. When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire."
"The problem is not yours -- it is your mind's only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours."
"While it lasts, the dream has temporary being. It is your desire to hold on to it, that creates the problem. Let go. Stop imagining that the dream is yours."
"All waiting is futile. To depend on time to solve our problems is self-delusion. The future, left to itself merely repeats the past. Change can only happen now, never in the future."
"The world problems were created by numberless people like you, each full of his own desires and fears. Who can free you of your past, personal and social, except yourself? And how will you do it unless you see the urgent need of your being first free of cravings born of illusion? How can you truly help, as long as you need help yourself?"
"Once the conviction: 'I am not the body' becomes so well grounded that he [the seeker] can no longer feel, think and act for and on behalf of the body, he will easily discover that he is the universal being, knowing, acting, that in him and through him the entire universe is real, conscious and active. This is the heart of the problem. Either you are body-conscious and a slave of circumstances, or you are the universal consciousness itself -- and in full control of every event."
"No problem is solved completely, but you can withdraw from it to a level on which it does not operate."
"When you know your true being[ness], you have no problems. You may please your parents or not, marry or not, make a lot of money or not. It is all the same to you. Just act according to circumstances, yet in close touch with the facts, with the reality in every situation."
By contrast, those thoughts and words and actions are driven by duality find facts to be anathema and prefer to distort the truth in order to manipulate the masses (and that has long proved to be effective for those who would cotnrol).
In the U.S., for example, when one spokesperson for the president was asked, "Why did he have his press secretary offer up a provable falsehood?" the reply was, "He was offering alternative facts." The reporter's response: "Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods."
One symptom of the Ultimate Sickness has long been identified as an inability to differentiate between true and false, between fact and fiction, between the real and the non-real, between veracity and lies.
Maharaj advised: "See your world as it is, not as you imagine it to be."
He recommended "deliberate daily exercise in discrimination between the true and the false" and non-dual teachers have long suggested that seekers develop "the faculty of discrimination" (referring not to the development of biases and prejudices but to the development of the ability to differentiate and distinguish between the real and the not-real, between truth and lies.).
It has been pointed out here for 28 years that
belief
always includes
lie.
Recognizing how widespread the Ultimate Sickness was - and is - among the masses, Maharaj invited seekers to "consider the familiar way of thinking and see its falseness"; such is the way it is when the masses abide.in the realm of duality.
At the heart of the Sickness is the belief that learned ignorance is based in truth. So much for "the Knower" and "Knowing."
Thus Maharaj said:
"All talk of gnana is a sign of ignorance. It is the mind that imagines that it does not know and then comes to know. Reality knows nothing of these contortions. Even the idea of God as the Creator is false. Do I owe my being to any other being? Because l am, all is."
To be continued.
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