Nisargadatta on Ajativada

 Questioner: Repeatedly you have been saying that events are causeless, a thing just happens and no cause can be assigned to it. Surely everything has a cause, or several causes. How am I to understand the causelessness of things? 

Maharaj: From the highest point of view the world has no cause. 

Q: But what is your own experience? 

M: Everything is uncaused. The world has no cause.

(All quotes from 'I AM THAT' by Nisargadatta Maharaj : sect/appearance and reality) 

Nisargadatta is not making some sort of Human point. He appears (good word that) to be holding the rather rigorous view called ‘ajativada’. Ajati meaning ‘not born’. What is unreal can have no origin. The cosmos is an appearance - ‘vivarta’. Vivartavada holds that the cosmos is not a freestanding or independent entity. It never emerges from the Absolute but remains within it. There is thus no causal chain in the sense of A causing B and B causing C or a train of distinct events. None of this happens according to the ajativada doctrine.  

This line of thinking has Buddhist overtones. In the Sunyavada view: ‘Emptiness is form, form is emptiness’ .(Sunya - empty)

The world does not have a cause says Maharaj. ‘That all depends on what you mean by cause's says Cyril Joad. One might see a certain similarity to scholastic thinking re contingency and causality in which the cosmos is retained within the will of the Absolute in a current way and not just prior to the ‘big bang's. The whole enchilada is kept in existence now.

Nisargadatta next moves to the material analogy. There are all kinds of vessels made of clay, all kinds of jewellery made of gold but in the final analysis there is only clay and gold in different forms.

M: Of course, everything is inter-linked. And therefore every- thing has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is, because the world is as it is. You see, you deal in gold ornaments and I — in gold. Between the different ornaments there is no causal relation. When you re-melt an ornament to make another, there is no causal relation between the two. The common factor is the gold. But you cannot say gold is the cause. It cannot be called a cause, for it causes nothing by itself. It is reflected in the mind as ‘I am’, as the or- nament’s particular name and shape. Yet all is only gold. In the same way reality makes everything possible and yet nothing that makes a thing what it is, its name and form, comes from reality.

But why worry so much about causation? What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes — why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

This is offered as a solution to the appearance of multiplicity. Vivarta (appearance) is a consistent doctrine in Vedanta. You only seem to see variety. There is only unity.

The questioner gets annoyed at this escalation up the metaphysical ladder. Actually one can sympathise at this noetic evasiveness.  

Q: Words like God, universe, the total, absolute, supreme are just noises in the air, because no action can be taken on them. M: You are bringing up questions which you alone can answer. Q: Don’t brush me off like this! You are so quick to speak for the totality, the universe and such imaginary things! They cannot come and forbid you to talk on their behalf. I hate those irres- ponsible generalizations! And you are so prone to personalize them. Without causality there will be no order; nor purposeful action will be possible.

The Questioner has a valid point. God is not a bystander. This existence has a divine purpose. Q wants to align himself with it, just that, and let what comes by grace happen in its own time.

Q: My own feeling is that my spiritual development is not in my hands. Making one’s own plans and carrying them out leads nowhere. I just run in circles round myself. When God considers the fruit to be ripe, He will pluck it and eat it. Whichever fruit seems green to Him will remain on the world’s tree for another day.

Reading 'Process and Reality' (in my shed)

 

Well then have I definitively given up on ‘Being and Time’? Yes.  My feeling was that the trek was not worth the trudge.  Now I have to look for a ‘hard’ book to read, a challenge that might be worth the slog.  I have lit on ‘Process and Reality’ by A.N. Whitehead.  Published in 1929 based on the Gifford Lectures of ‘27 and ‘28.  I’ve looked at it before on several occasions and have a general idea of the scope and ambition of what is his major work which has given rise to a school of process philosophy and theology.  One major difference between this work and B&T is that when Whitehead gives you neologisms/locutions he details precisely how this new expression serves to distinguish his thought from that which has gone before.  Thus ‘substance’ might be replaced by ‘actual entity’ and ‘universal’ by ‘eternal object’.  That that sentence under advisement.  As I go on my understanding will change.

The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.  (pg. 7 ed. Griffin and Sherburne )

He later adds that his process philosophy has a relation to Eastern thought:

In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Nisargadatta in answer to a question about causality responds treating the universe as a single block:

Q: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law.

M: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (#4 I AM THAT)

Descartes' Maxim, Nisargadatta's Sadhana

 Descartes wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’, I think therefore I am.  Nisargadatta stuck with ‘I AM’ with Being.  That sounds portentous but what did it entail:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!  

Very good, fine, splendid but how did he carry on his business ventures, his chain of tobacco shops, his family life?  You may as well ask how do animals which have comparatively little powers of intellection manage.  Rote, routine, stimulus/response, habit; all those powers which allow us to navigate  in life in a waking but unconscious state.  In fact I would assert that Nisargadatta’s intuition was enhanced by remaining in that state of immersion in being.  Out of that place comes our capacity for transformation and creative energy.  He writes in his masterwork ‘I AM THAT’:

 My Guru told me: "...Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am.' Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all." My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done." I did believe him and soon realized how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking, "I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond." I simply followed his instruction, which was to focus the mind on pure being, "I am," and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the "I am" in my mind and soon the peace and joy and deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared—myself, my guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained, and unfathomable silence. (I Am That, Dialogue 51, April 16, 1971).

Martin Heidegger whose ‘Being and Time’ I’m reading at the moment had a similar sense of the importance of being but he I think was overwhelmed by the other element of Descartes' maxim, thinking.  Rapt in that endless rumination he excogitated numerous overwrought expressions of the implications living in the neighborhood of Being brings.  

As I continue reading that baffling work in an agonistic engagement, so to speak, I will have more to say which will be very likely quite mistaken.

Consciousness and Remorse

 “It matters little whether the intuition of being resemble the innate gift of an imperial intelligence serenely relying upon its limpid strength and upon the cooperation of a pure and delicate flesh, and of a vivid and perfectly balanced sensibility, as seems to have been the case for Thomas Aquinas; whether, alternatively, it spring unexpectedly like a kind of natural grace at the sight of a blade of grass or a windmill, or at the sudden perception of the reality of the self; whether it proceed from the implacability with which the being of things independent of ourselves becomes abruptly evident to us, suddenly casting our own being back upon its solitude and its frailty; whether I make my way towards it by inner experience of duration, or of anguish, or of certain moral realities which transcend the flow of time—these alternatives, I repeat, are of slight moment.”   (From Existence and the Existent by Jacques Maritain)

First note and put aside for the moment the likeness to the focus on ‘I AM’,  the sadhana of Nisargadatta Maharaj. I ask what does intuition mean in this case?  Is it a sort of immediate knowledge without going through the normal reasoning process, ‘he just knew in that instant’, sort of thing?

‘I AM’ is always there, always cleansed of the past, a pure presence that pervades my present condition, simply illuminating it.  This ‘I AM’ is not my present mental state but the immediacy of my awareness of it demonstrates the self luminous cognition of my contemporary mental contents.  It is as though those states were to flow through it.  Past and present are given now and in every awareness memory shines through.

How are we to get free and live in consciousness as such leaving remorse behind. (Remorse from re-mordere -  re-bite )  Can the past break away and be rendered toothless?

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.

The Sense of 'I AM' (2)

Our  friend Q, the questioner, reverts to a Humean position.

“I am always somebody with its memories and habits.  I know no other ‘I am’.”

How does a conscious state become conscious of itself as a series, asks Hume, and proceeds not to give a very satisfactory answer.  By implication Maharaj would say to him, ‘perhaps you ought to ask someone who knows the answer  to that conundrum.’  It is after all very important to discover whether you are the body or something else. “Or maybe nothing at all?”  If you could resolve that then you would cease to worry about a great many things that now bother you, namely, friends, health, fortune etc.

This attitude is so outside the scope of the mind of friend Q that he does not see these benefits and in a way he is right.  Going on this adventure into viveka/discrimination on the basis of supposed benefit is a poor approach.  M. implies this by reverting to a recommendation to an open minded practice of ‘I AM’.

“When the mind stays in the ‘I am’, without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalized but can be experienced.  All you need to do is try and try again.  After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it - body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc.  All these self-identifications are misleading,  Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.”

More later:

The Sense of 'I am' as answered by Nisargadatta

 

As  I was saying in my previous post a mistake is a take  by which I mean that the ontological depth out of which perception rises is preserved even when there is error.  The deep structure is maintained.

Nisargadatta’s teaching is an illustration of how Advaita  blurs the distinction between religion and metaphysics.  He uses the standard dialectic of adhiropa / apavada or affirmation followed by qualification and correction.  You move towards the implications of a position and find a resolution to its internal difficulties.

The first dialogue in the book centres on the spiritual practice of keeping the central fact of experience constantly before the mind namely ‘I AM’.

Reading this dialogue it almost seems like a set-up allowing Maharaj to develop his characteristic teaching.

“Questioner: It is a matter of daily experience that on waking up the world suddenly appears.  Where does it come from?”

 May I interject here to ask from the perspective of Western philosophy:

Is this a suggestion that the world exists in consciousness only, a not unknown position in philosophical circles that takes the form of subjective idealism or representationalism?

M. rejects this saying that this ‘sudden appearance’ must have a background for it to appear on.  The experience of change must have a changeless background, one which is not an experience as such because of course experience implies changeability.

The Q. who is caught in the grip of the model of awareness as being simply that of mental subjects and mental objects replies that - “Before waking  up I was unconscious”

M. in an  acute observation brings up the commonplace experience of a loss of memory?  You have no consciousness of that yet  you  do not believe that you did  not exist during that time.  Your existence then is not reliant on being conscious of it.  Similarly on waking from a dreamless sleep ‘I  am’ is an immediate awareness.  I am - a body- in the world can be intellectually broken up but in fact it is a simultaneous awareness.  “A single idea of having a body in a world”.

All states of awareness including memory lapses and deep dreamless sleep are unified by the changeless  background of pure consciousness.  Nisargadatta Maharaj uses the same argument as Shankaracarya in  relation to waking up from Deep Dreamless Sleep.  You know that you have been asleep and that there is a continuity between the individual that is woken up when called and the one prior to falling asleep.

Then he says and this is an intriguing light on the disputed claim made by Jacques Maritain that there is an intuition of being.

 

“On waking up the experience runs: ‘I am - the body- in the world.’   It may appear to arise in succession but in fact it is all simultaneous, a single idea of having a body in a world. Can there be the sense of ‘I am’ without being somebody or other?”

To be continued:

I am, it is: Mystical Conjugation

 

What is this thing called Being mentioned so frequently in philosophy?  Philosophers ascribe to it a power that is there but somehow cannot be separated out, but we are at the same time immersed in it.  How?  So powerful is it that Nisargadatta Maharaj achieved enlightenment but continually keeping before his mind ‘I am’.  Etienne Gilson reflects on the power of the self-definition of God,” I am that I am”.

“There is then a resemblance between Being and beings.  It is written inGenesis 1:26 Let us make man in our image and likeness.There is at least one sense in which this is true, and this first sense is presupposed by all the others:to beimplies necessarily a certain likeness to HE WHO IS.”  (The Elements of Christian Philosophy)

When I first heard that response to Moses in Exodus 3:13-14: I AM WHO AM at the age of 15 it gave me a most uncanny feeling , a premonitory saltation to the age of 27 when at the instantaneous recognition of the reality of God, that name came into my head.

What is the deep reality for the  philosopher who espouses a realist ontology behind the apparently simple recognition in experience of something - it is and it is this.  How is that propaedeutic to the mystical immersion in pure being.  Let me affirm that being mistaken is founded on the default nature of the unity of being.  A mistake is a take.

The very first chapter of Nisargadatta’s teaching (‘I AM THAT) is called ‘The Sense of ‘I am’.  I’ll have a look at that next and then at that exceptionally lucid book of Etienne Gilson’s ‘Methodical Realism’.

Anon.

The Incomprehensible I AM

 I AM is not a thought.  As a practice it is an avenue to being.  It does not carry any ontological weight as a theory.  It  is purely being present to the self luminous.  No particular thoughts matter because all awareness is pervaded by that presence.   There is no understanding this I AM because you cannot get outside it to comprehend it.  I live it but it escapes my grasp.

The I AM of Nisargadatta Paradox and Practice

 

This focus on ‘I AM’ by Nisargadatta as per the injunction of his guru is not a version of the Cartesian critique.  It is not a reflection on fundamental data out of which we proceed to construct a world, in Descartes’ case by the grace of God who is not a deceiver.  It is primarily a practice and not an epistemological or ontological position.  Yet it can appear to be so and Maharaj (Nisargadatta) often in his elucidations veers close to a subjective position. My view is that this interpretation is due to the action of the very potent mind virus that is Subjective Idealism.  Realism seems too naive; a mind independent world falls before the fact of illusion, the state of our brain is the state of the world and so forth.  All this purports to be the thinking man’s position.

Q:When I wake up in the morning, the world is already there, waiting for me. Surely the world comes into being first. | do, but much later, at the earliest at my birth. The body mediates between me and the world. Without the body there would be neither me nor the world.

M:The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it. Have a good look at yourself and all these misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve. Just as all the little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe Is in you and cannot be without you. (Chapter 44 I AM THAT)

Nisargadatta recognises the realism position of the Questioner in this chapter and  by challenging it with a seemingly subjective idealist position attempts to prod him towards a deeper analysis. It proceeds by the usual adhiropa/apavada dialectical method which is the primary procedure of Advaita.  Each understanding is sublated by a subsequent one.  You have to dwell where you are and only move via insight.  You can’t just intellectually claim  a new understanding, you must feel the force of it.

In this case the authority of the guru challenges the standard realist position, a naive common sense one, infra philosophical as Etienne Gilson puts it.  Is there a way that both can be simultaneously true, this world as mind dependent and a real mind independent world?  Nisargadatta asserts:

In other words, the absolutely material and the absolutely spiritual, the totally objective and the totally subjective are identical, both in substance and essence.

How this ‘identity’ is to be understood is explicated in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra. cf topic

Nisargadatta on Idealism and Realism

 

Nisargadatta is not promulgating an ontology/epistemology.  He uses the existing philosophy of the enquirer as a means to attainment of a path that might lead to enlightenment.  The point is finding water by drilling deep not by a multitude of small holes.  Sifting through various approaches, realism or idealism, internal or external reality is beside the point for him.  Sincere seeking using the dialectical advaitic method of adhiropa/apavada or statement followed by retraction.  Maharaj challenges the Questioner’s implicit realism:

“M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way.  Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.  Have a good look at yourself and all those misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve.  Just as all our little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.”

The important thing is getting detached from the panoply of awareness to focus on the central fact which cannot be sublated, the I AM you are in the moment.  What are you at with your theories, you can only be distracted by them.  By being in the presence of a master one has other business than that.

On the face of it Maharaj seems to be offering a pure subjective idealism as a ‘final’ theory.  Such would be the western way of doing philosophy.  In advaita/nondualism the theory ends in the unsayable, the apophatic.  Move towards the ‘trikala abheda’ or that which is un-contradicted in the three moments of time;  past, present, and future.

Last word from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Don’t mentalise and verbalise.  Just see and be”

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

Nisargadatta Maharaj on Personality / Advice to a Seeker

Questioner: Why do you keep on dismissing the person as of no importance? Personality is the primary fact of our existence. It occupies the entire stage.

Maharaj: As long as you do not see that it is mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire, you will think yourself to be a person – living, feeling , thinking, active, passive, pleased or pained. Question yourself, ask yourself. ‘Is it so?’ And soon you will see your mistake. And it is in the very nature of a mistake to cease to be, when seen.

The Questioner reveals some of his history:

I am an adopted child. My own father I do not know. My mother died when I was born. My foster father, to please my foster mother, who was childless, adopted me – almost by accident. He is a simple man – a truck owner and driver. My mother keeps the house. I am 24 years now. For the last two and a half years I am travelling, restless, seeking. I want to live a good life, a holy life. What am I to do?

Maharaj: Go home, take charge of your father’s business, look after your parents in their old age. Marry the girl who is waiting for you, be loyal, be simple, be humble. Hide your virtue, live silently. The five senses and the three qualities (gunas) are your eight steps in Yoga. And ‘I am’ is the Great Reminder (mahamantra). You can learn from them all you need to know. Be attentive, enquire ceaselessly. That is all.

(from I AM THAT: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj )

The ‘I am’ is the focus on consciousness as such and not any particular conformation of it.

The Mind of the Sage

What is it to be real in advaita? It is to be uncontradicted in all three moments of time; past, present,future. The ordinary changeful mental activity which we identify with is therefore unreal in that ultimate reckoning. However for everyday purposes we can distinguish between reality and illusion, delusion and confusion. Normal confirmation or disconformation applies.

‘Unreal nescience’ is therefore a technical term for the ontological foundations of the subject/object divide. The ‘opponent’ impugning the advaitic understanding fails to realise this:

Opponent: How, again, can the means of valid knowledge, such as direct perception as well as the scriptures, have as their basis a cognizer who is subject to nescience?

Vedantin: Since a man without self-identification with the body, mind, senses etc., cannot become a cognizer and as such the means of knowledge cannot function for him since perception and other activities (of a man) are not possible without accepting the senses etc. (as his own) ; since the senses cannot function without (the body as) a basis since nobody engages in any activity with a body that has not the idea of the Self superimposed on it; .....

(from the preamble to B.S.B.)

The knowledge that this superimposition is always taking place does not annihilate the mind of the realised sage. Nisargadatta Maharaj explains:

I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food to be served on time. When starved or sick , my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly but somehow I am not in it, I feel myself floating over it, aloof and detached.

(from section 57 of I am That /Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Nisargadatta on Samadhi (from I am That)

Matter is Consciousness Itself:
Maharaj: Everything moves according to its nature. ... Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutraliszes the action. Everything happens, but there is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end it is as if nothing happened.


"Therefore I keep on saying that all happens by itself. There is order in my world too, but it is not imposed from outside. It comes spontaneously and immediately, because of its timelessness. Perfection is not in the future. It is now.

Maharaj is not bound by the maya of identification with a physical body. "I make no distinction between the body and the universe. Each is the cause of the other, each is the other, in truth. But I am out of it all."

"The most difficult are the intellectuals. They talk a lot, but are not serious."

How to go into Samadhi:

"If you are in the right state, whatever you see will put you into samadhi. After all samadhi is nothing unusual. When the mind is intensely interested, it becomes one with the object of interest - the seer and the seen become one in seeing, the hearer and the heard become one in hearing, the lover and the loved become one in loving. Every experience can be the ground for samadhi."
Questioner: Are you always in a state of samadhi?
Maharaj: Of course not. Samadhi is a state of mind, after all. I am beyond all experience, even of samadhi. I am the great devourer and destroyer; whatever I touch dissolves into void (akash).
Q: I need samadhis for self-realisation.
M: You have all the self-realisation you need, but you do not trust it. Have courage, trust yourself, go, talk, act: give it a chance to prove itself. With some realisation comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable.

What is the stars?

To answer Captain Boyle’s question (Juno and the Paycock) and say that the stars and all the furniture of the cosmos is an illusion, in the simplistic way that some proponents of advaitic vedanta do, would be wrong. Or should I say non-wrong because that 'all’ is not describable as real or unreal. Our attempt at closure fails because the criteria of closure are only operative, if at all, within the cosmos. For this reason the jnanis direct seekers into positive methods of inquiry:

For this reason, from the standpoint of the highest truth Advaitins should not be considered and spoken of as people who proclaim the falsity of the world. They should be considered, rather, as people who proclaim the sole existence and (undifferentiated) reality of the self. A false notion cannot be real while it lasts and then undergo obliteration at the time of correction. We find in the world that a rope, for example, will remain exactly what it is, even it be falsely imagined as a snake or the like. And in the same way, the Absolute remains what it is, even when it is falsely imagined as the world and soul and so forth. This is the finally accepted truth.

(pg. 116 The Method of Vedanta by Sri SSS.)

The sentence beginning with A false notion seems to be backsliding into illusionism away from the positive inquiry of such as Ramana Maharshi with his Who Am I atma vichara or Nisargadatta’s reflection on I am. I rather take it to be a saving irony because analogies as such are still within the cosmos. There is no final answer in them.


Boyle: An’, as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question — what is the stars, what is the stars?
…
Joxer: Ah, that’s the question, that’s the question — what is the stars?
Boyle: An’ then, I’d have another look, an’ I’d ass meself — what is the moon?
Joxer: Ah, that’s the question — what is the moon, what is the moon?
“Juno and the Paycock”, Seán O’Casey (1924)

The Talks of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Satsang or the company of the seekers of the truth is a central recommendation of spiritual practice. There can be no greater satsang than the presence of a master, a satguru. According to those adepts who are sensitive to auras, a master’s extends for hundreds of feet all around him or her. When you sit at the feet of a Master then you are sitting inside their aura. Naturally the falsity within you is made manifest by this. Nisargadatta in his talks and dialogue demonstrates how the sun scatters the fog of specious attainment.

In I AM THAT no. 28: All Suffering is Born of Desire a questioner introduces himself :

Questioner: I come from a far off country. I had some inner experiences on my own and I would like to compare notes. Maharaj: By all means. Do you know yourself?
Q: I know that I am not the body. Nor am I the mind.
M: What makes you say so?
Q: I do not feel I am in the body. I seem to be all over the place everywhere. As to the mind, I can switch it on and off, so to say. This makes me feel I am not the mind.
M: When you feel yourself everywhere in the world, do you remain separate from the world? Or, are you the world?
Q: Both. Sometimes I feel myself to be neither mind nor body, but one single all-seeing eye. When I go deeper into it, I find myself to be all I see and the world and myself become one.
M: Very well. What about desires? Do you have any?
Q: Yes, they come, short and superficial.

Comparing notes with the Maharaj is bumptious. It is instructive how the questioner’s continued attention to Nisargadatta dissolves this facade, a spray on vedanta. Its origins are made clear by:

M: How did you come to your present state?
Q: Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings have put me on my way. Then I met one Douglas Harding who helped me by showing me how to work on the 'Who am I ?'

Douglas Harding’s Headless teaching seems the perfect reductio of subjective idealism. The central tenet is that because you can’t see your own head you are in effect headless or your visual awareness is headless. It is breathtakingly simple and obvious.

As the interview proceeds real questions emerge:

Q. How does self-identification happen?
M: The self by its nature knows itself only. For lack of experience whatever it perceives it takes to be itself. Battered, it learns to look out ( viveka) and to live alone ( vairagya). When right behaviour ( uparati), becomes normal, a powerful inner urge ( mukmukshutva) makes it seek its source. The candle of the body is lighted and all becomes clear and bright.
Q: What is the real cause of suffering?
M: Self-identification with the limited ( vyaktitva). Sensations as such, however strong, do not cause suffering. It is the mind bewildered by wrong ideas, addicted to thinking: 'I am this' 'I am that', that fears loss and craves gain and suffers when frustrated.
Q: A friend of mine used to have horrible dreams night after night. Going to sleep would terrorise him. Nothing could help him.
M: Company of the truly good ( satsang) would help him.
Q: Life itself is a nightmare.
M: Noble friendship ( satsang) is the supreme remedy for all ills, physical and mental.
Q: Generally one cannot find such friendship.
M: Seek within. Your own self is your best friend.
Q: Why is life so full of contradictions?
M: It serves to break down mental pride. We must realise how poor and powerless we are. As long as we delude ourselves by what we imagine ourselves to be, to know, to have, to do, we are in a sad plight indeed. Only in complete self-negation there is a chance to discover our real being.

That last answer is not a harsh reproof only a simple statement that probably all his listeners could apply to themselves. At a remove from this darshan the reader’s abnegation must be diluted by the comforting props of everyday life. We need to become strange to ourselves not just by tricks of psychological dissociation.