22-02-2013, 03:57 PM
I AM THAT Talks with SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ
I AM THAT Talks.pdf (Size: 3.61 MB / Downloads: 44)
The Sense of ‘I am’
Questioner: It is a matter of daily experience that on waking up
the world suddenly appears. Where does it come from?
Maharaj: Before anything can come into being there must be
somebody to whom it comes. All appearance and disappear-
ance presupposes a change against some changeless back-
ground.
Q: Before waking up I was unconscious.
M: In what sense? Having forgotten, or not having experienced?
Don’t you experience even when unconscious? Can you exist
without knowing? A lapse in memory: is it a proof of non-
existence? And can you validly talk about your own non-
existence as an actual experience? You cannot even say that
your mind did not exist. Did you not wake up on being called?
And on waking up, was it not the sense ‘I am’ that came first?
Some seed consciousness must be existing even during sleep,
or swoon. 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?
Q: I am always somebody with its memories and habits. I know
no other ‘I am’.
M: Maybe something prevents you from knowing? When you do
not know something which others know, what do you do?
Q: I seek the source of their knowledge under their instruction.
M: Is it not important to you to know whether you are a mere
body, or something else? Or, maybe nothing at all? Don’t you
see that all your problems are your body’s problems — food, clo-
thing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival — all
these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not
be a mere body.
Q: What benefit there is in knowing that I am not the body?
M: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a
way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more.
Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you
find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your
mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to
emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly.
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 to 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.
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 ‘be-
long’. 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?
Q: The sense of being an experiences, the sense of ‘I am’, is it
not also an experience?
M: Obviously, every thing experienced is an experience. And in
every experience there arises the experiencer of it. Memory
creates the illusion of continuity. In reality each experience has
its own experiencer and the sense of identity is due to the com-
mon 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,