Wednesday 29 January 2020

Nisargadatta Maharaj on Awareness


Writing about the unknowability of the Self leaves me with a strong sense of high grade impostership as if to say ' notice as I shuffle these cards my fingers never leave my hands'. Yes quite, but all this is happening and the Self continues to manifest ungraspably just beyond the tip of my mind. Nisargadatta Maharaj would say 'don't follow it (your mind) remain in the sense of the awareness of being as represented by I Am.


Q: Then what am I?

M: It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, I am not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. It just makes no sense. What you can point out as 'this' or 'that' cannot be yourself.Surely, you can not be 'something' else. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable. Yet, without you there can be neither perception nor imagination. You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting; the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. Can there be perception, experience without you? An experience must ‘belong'. Somebody must come and declare it as his own. Without an experiencer the experience is not real. It is the experiencer that imparts reality to experience. An experience which you cannot have, of what value is it to you?

Nisargadatta gives one no surprises, nothing that sets the illative antennae fibrillating yet his distinctions have a power of epistemic suggestion:

Q: I am puzzled. How can one be aware and yet unconscious?

M: Awareness is not limited to consciousness. It is of all that is. Consciousness is of duality. There is no duality in awareness. It is one single block of pure cognition.

What he is calling awareness is that absorbed immediate consciousness in which there is no differentiation. That 'single block of pure cognition'!

I AM THATby Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj is available in all formats on archive.org
Here is the epub:

I AM THAT

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