The sense of IAM (3)

 

“Then what am I” Q asks:

Impossible to say. Knowledge is built on what is already known.  You brachiate from tree to tree as it were.  Self realization is not something you can get to know because you already know it.  It cannot be separated out from any state of the mind.  It is known with every state of awareness. “Pratibodha videtam” (known with every state of consciousness) says Sankara in a commentary on Kena Upanisad.

As Maharaj says:

You are nothing perceivable or imaginable.  Yet without you (i.e. true self) 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 without you?”

M.  is adopting the saksin approach to this problem where the pure consciousness that pervades all things is poured so to speak, into the mould of a separate entity, the jiva, the person.  Pure consciousness has taken this form of limitation/upadhi.  Indeed a salient difference in Vedanta is the regarding of brain-body as inert (jada) only becoming conscious as it is pervaded by pure consciousness.  This citta (consciousness) in that form acts as a witness (saksin).

But says Q: Is not this ‘I am’ also an experience?

As M. has been saying- what gives you the core of the experience of identity is this pure consciousness at any one time but the mistake is take the common factor to be an embodied experience.

“Memory creates the illusion of continuity.  In reality each experience has its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the common factor at the root of all experiencer-experience relations.  Identity and continuity are not the same.   Just as each flower has its own colour, but all colours are caused by the same light, so do many experiencers appear in the undivided and indivisible awareness, each separate in memory, identical in essence."

How is this supreme awareness to be got?  Essentially what M. says is that you must ‘let it come to you’.  Practice.  You will not become isolated locked in an esoteric delusion, the erosion of separateness will be steady.  The ‘I AM’ practice makes you stick  to the moment and not be carried along.