In sleep consciousness is dormant, when you get up consciousness says, ‘I had a good sleep’. You can give it any name you like – body, mind but it is an attribute that was dormant in sleep – it is not the senses telling you.
The food-body will always have desires; beingness is the fragrance of the same body. Prior to it I did not know myself; it was an experienceless state, suddenly the eight clues (five elements and three gunas) of experience and knowingness were fed lots of information – birth, body and so forth, with all this I started suffering. My Guru initiated me into an inquiry about myself.
Did I experience my birth and parents? I hadn’t, so I rejected it. In the process I started investigating my own beingness, it was a temporary state, so I have disposed it off. I am free from fear now as I know this state will go. I have no fear of my beingness because I will experience the same (the going of beingness).
Because of concepts I considered myself a personality and due to this conceptual state my true state suffered. Just as I admonish you, I listen to my friends, their thoughts talk to me, even visions appear, I tell them to shut up. I admonish thoughts and visions. Will anybody quarrel with his thoughts? When these foreign or alien thoughts are kept aside, the Self starts sprouting and imparting knowledge. Then it is the realized principle that prevails which was never created, but behaves as though created.
Who observes or witnesses then? ‘I the Absolute.’ If there are no thoughts then there is no fear, and then the Self sprouts. In the absence of beingness, what have I been doing? My unborn children, what are they doing? The same that I did prior to the appearance of this beingness.
World, mind and all are expansive, how did this calamity occur with the arrival of beingness? So I must investigate the cause of the trouble that is, beingness. Think how you came into this body complex instead of investigating the world. The body falls down but what happened to me? For that principle for which you get no reply, is perfect, whatever answer you get is wrong.
If I think of this world, why should I not inquire about prior to consciousness? If I tackle this question, I must investigate what is this principle of ‘I am’? I would prefer to play with that child not born because eternal Parabramhan and unborn children are alike. You want to have knowledge. What do you mean by that? Hold on to that principle which understands, recognizes thoughts and be quiet.
For your sake, what are you? Investigate that. Forget who is torturing whom; stabilize in your most confidential being as ‘you are’. What are you? Investigate. The problems of manifest world can be solved later. There is no right answer to ‘who are you?’ No answer is the most correct one; any reply you get is not eternal. That eternal, unborn principle is now talking which has been accused of birth. ‘I feel I am guilty’.
Whatever guilt you accept you have to suffer. In a country not visited a robbery occurs, the Police arrest you here. If you accept you suffer, maybe a life term. I don’t accept the charge; I have not visited that place. I am not a robber. I plead that – ‘my only guilt is that I accept that I am born’. Give it up! The Absolute has no scope, it’s unborn. Prior to my appearance (beingness) it never occurred to me that I was, so where is the scope for feeling guilty either? If you had wisdom, you would reject beingness.
Excerpted from ‘I Am Unborn, Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.’
The 116th birth anniversary of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj will be observed on April 9
Nisargadatta Maharaj
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