June 28, 2012

"Nothing you can see, feel, or think is so. - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Is it any wonder that those who recognize and dare to profess this truth are so often persecuted as mad?

"Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being." - N.M.

This is our money-back guarantee that we, too, can awaken into precisely what he is. Bring earnestness in abundance.

"The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears.  'I am' is the impersonal Being.  I am this is the person.  The person is relative and the Pure Being - fundamental." - N.M.

This radical (from our usual point of view) truth, once recognized, will inform and absorb the seeker into a gauntlet of ineluctable ripening.

"When you start questioning your dream, then awakening is not far away." - N.M.

"The mistake of students is in their imagining the inner to be something to get hold of, and forgetting that all perceivables are transient and, therefore, unreal." - N.M.

There is no imagining, no mentation at all in samadhi, no memory, no expectation--and no absence of these either--just a noticing of what has always been so, as one might notice that daytime is riven through and through with sunlight.  There it is: no big deal: reality illuminated.

"My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing.  You cannot know my world until you are there." - N.M.

You are already there.  You have always been there.  Now the scales must fall from your eyes.  To be "the ground of all knowledge," to be "the immutable and perennial awareness of all that happens to the senses and the mind," is to abide before thought and beyond sensation, to abide continuously in supramental and supersensuous freedom--calm, clear, collected to the world's eye, and in truth devoid of even that, pure and unqualified, naked before the inner eye.

June 20, 2012

"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, too, struggled to put this thing into words and resorted to lending perspective where none exists.  How else to convey?  There is no "behind" or "within" of enlightened awareness, but to share it he assigns familiar orientations for our benefit.  He is dead on with "the light is all."  This resounds later through Ramana Maharshi's cinema projector light illuminating film upon a screen.  Truly, though, our cinematic perspective of the material world is illusory, as are all perspectives from our supposed personal point of view.

"It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades and contains us"...and it can be experienced when "there is no screen or ceiling between ourselves and the infinite heavens"...when "the walls are taken away"...when we awaken to "independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand."  In other words, when we transcend the limiting factors of our senses and mental processing.

Fifty years before Vivekananda brought Eastern wisdom to our shore, Emerson transcribed the experience of enlightenment.  Masters such as V then provided the detail and proof of method necessary to pollinate those of us with ears to hear.    

June 17, 2012

"The painter is in the picture" (NM) and all of it and none of it is in me.

"Whatever you may say [about the Supreme] will be both true and false.  Words do not reach beyond the mind." - NM

As a wave construed as an ocean is both true and false, so, too, are our thoughts and words "of" the Supreme but not nearly the whole of it.

"When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being.  It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility." - NM

Fearless awareness composed of complete and total abandonment, a skeleton of ashes.

Our personal, misidentified selves intercept life as leaves intercept wind.  Our real selves intercept consciousness as daytime intercepts sunlight.

"The entire universe strives to fulfill a desire born of compassion." - NM

All of us at heart constitute a holy impulse.

"The entire field of becoming is open and accessible; past and future coexist now." - NM

As more recently stressed by Eckhart Tolle, which adds resonance and validity.

"See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all." - NM

Nisargadatta shares here a literal description, not an allusion or analogy for the benefit of teaching.  He speaks of the 360 degree global vision without center and without end, of a vision absent ourselves and beyond perspective, of consciousness without content, immediately recognized without memory or desire as our essence, our fulfillment, the end of all seeking.  It is "am" without trace of "I."  

June 5, 2012

"Because of you, there is a world." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Look at it this way: above and beyond and through, all-encompassing and all-pervading, is an infinite field of potentiality: the Supreme Reality.  It is beyond being and not-being.  Arising from this field is consciousness, which might be compared to the vibrations of the radio spectrum pervading all of space, and like receiver tuners our body-minds pluck channels from this spectrum and interpret them locally as our reality.  Our conditioned understanding of reality, then, is actually fabricated and delimited, a colloquial concoction of our sensual and cognitive apparatus.  What's more, this apparatus and its world are both ultimately composed of consciousness; in fact, we are consciousness reflected back upon itself through the body-mind conduit, although most of us are ignorant of this.  Why is this important to realize?  First and foremost, to discern the real from the false is why we are here, to awaken, to fully realize what we truly are.  Furthermore, we lose our fear of death and with it all of the misguided misery this fear imposes upon our lives and our temporal world.  We realize deeply that when our body-minds finally blink out, the spectrum of consciousness continues and we are this consciousness.  We finally experience truth as Being-Knowledge-Bliss, a fresh perspective infused with acceptance, love and freedom.

"It's the same story the crow told me,
It's the only one he knows.
Like the morning sun we come,
And like the wind we go."
 - Robert Hunter
    

June 2, 2012

Nisargadatta on the gnani: "In relation to consciousness, he is awareness.  In relation to the universe he is pure being"

In relation to clarity he is the living water, and God the fountain of form.