Further to the ‘I AM’ inquiry which Nisargadatta was instructed in by his guru I find that there is a universal aspect to this realisation. Jacques Maritain in his book ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ mentions a couple.
One who is very near to us one day gave us the following testimony of such a knowledge: “Before receiving the faith,” that person (his wife Raissa ?) told us “it often happened that by a sudden intuition I experienced the reality of my own being, of the deepest, first principle that placed me outside nothingness. It was a powerful intuition and its violence often frightened me; that intuition gave me, for the first time, knowledge of a metaphysical absolute”
Maritain in a footnote to this witness:
In Jean-Paul’s autobiography mention is made of a like intuition:
“ One morning, while I was still a child, I was standing on the threshold of my house and looked to the left, towards the wood-shed, when suddenly the idea came to me out of the sky like a bolt from the blue:I am an I and from that moment it never left me; my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever.”
Lord Alfred Tennyson :
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?
No comments:
Post a Comment