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Balance
USA
967 Posts |
 Posted - Dec 10 2008 : 12:33:00 AM
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From Nisargadatta's "I Am That"
The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet it is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self, the world is but a colorful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear, he enjoys it as it happens.
The universe is a stage on which the world drama is being played. Sportsmen seem to make tremendous efforts: yet their sole motive is to play and display.
All that lives and works for protecting, perpetuating and expanding consciousness—this is the world's sole meaning and purpose. It is the very essence of Yoga—ever raising the level of consciousness, and discovering new dimensions with their properties, qualities and powers. In that sense, the entire universe becomes a school of Yoga.
Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me, they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself. I may perceive the world just like you, but you believe to be in it, while I see it as an iridescent drop in the vast expanse of consciousness.
The whole of it is imagination. Even space and time are imagined. All existence is imaginary. All depends on you. It is by your consent that the world exists. Withdraw your belief in its reality and it will dissolve like a dream.
There is only imagination. It has absorbed you so completely that you just cannot grasp how far from reality you have wandered. No doubt imagination is richly creative. Universe upon universe are built on it. Yet they are all in space and time, past and future, which just don't exist.
Out of a lump of gold, you can make many ornaments—each will remain gold. Similarly, in whatever role I may appear and whatever function I may perform, I remain what I am: the "I am"— immovable, unshakable, independent. What you call the universe or nature, is my spontaneous creativity. Whatever happens, happens. But such is my nature that all ends in joy.
"I am" is an ever present fact, while "I am created" is an idea. Neither God nor the universe have come to tell you that they have created you. The mind, obsessed by the idea of causality, invents creation and then wonders "who is the creator?" The mind itself is the creator. Even this is not quite true, for the created and its creator are one. The mind and the world are not separate. Do understand that what you think to be the world is your own mind. All space and time are in the mind.
This world is painted by you on the screen of consciousness and is entirely your own private world. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real.
Consider the world in which you live—who else knows about it? Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent, and is based on a misunderstanding. He pleads with you to get out of it. You got into it by forgetting what you are, and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are. There is no reality in it. It cannot last.
The world has no existence apart from you. At every moment it is but a reflection of yourself. You create it, you destroy it. Your personal universe does not exist by itself. It is merely a limited and distorted view of the real.
You are not of the world—you are not even in the world. The world is not, you alone are. You create the world in your imagination like a dream. As you cannot separate the dream from yourself, so you cannot have an outer world independent of yourself. You are independent, not the world. Don't be afraid of a world you yourself have created.
The world is but a reflection of my imagination. Whatever I want to see, I can see. To know that you are a prisoner of your mind, that you live in an imaginary world of your own creation is the dawn of wisdom.
I see you suffer in your dream and I know that you must wake up to end your woes. When you see your dream as dream, you wake up. You need not bring your dream to a definite conclusion, or make it noble, or happy, or beautiful; all you need is to realize you are dreaming. Stop imagining, stop believing. See the contradictions, the incongruities, the falsehood and the sorrow of the human state, the need to go beyond.
You insist that your world is independent of your mind. How can it be? Your desire to know other people's minds is due to your not knowing your own mind. First know your own mind and you will find that the question of other minds does not arise at all, for there are no other people. You are the common factor, the only link between the minds. Being is consciousness. "I am" applies to all.
Ultimately nothing is mine or yours, everything is ours. Just be one with yourself and you will be one with all, at home in the entire universe.
What you see is nothing but yourself. Call it what you like, it does not change the fact. Through the film of destiny, your own light depicts pictures on the screen. You are the viewer, the light, the picture and the screen. Even the film of destiny is self-selected and self-imposed.
Nothing exists by itself. All is the Self, all is myself. All is you and yours. There is nobody else. This is a fact.
Love is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity. When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, what remains is all-embracing love. To see myself in everybody, and everybody in myself, most certainly is love.
When you realize that all is in your mind, and that you are beyond the mind, that you are truly alone, then all is you. Love says "I am everything." Wisdom says "I am nothing." Between these two, my life flows.
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From Nisargadatta's "I Am That"
