Our linear type of thinking includes the grammatical convention that a transitive verb like “know” must have a subject, and a predicate; there cannot be “knowing” without someone who knows and something to be known. Our identification with this convention is so powerful that we cannot grasp the fact that there can be “knowing” or “understanding” as such without the knower and the thing known. This inability to put down the ghost of the individual entity – a creation of Maya – shows the extent to which we let conventions and concepts rule our lives. This is indeed the basis of the obsession “what will happen to me when I die?” The answer which Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj gave to such a query was, “you will be precisely what you were a hundred years ago”. The question is as misconceived as the question - what happens to my lap when I stand up, or to my fist when I open my hand.
~ Explorations into the Eternal - Forays into the teaching of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
2 comments:
Great. Nisargadatta removed my fear of death.
Manu, Thank you for re-spotlighting the raw and simple, completely a-personal truth found in Jean Dunn's pivotal book, "Prior to Consciousness". I can only read small sections, maybe a chapter at a time, because of the fire within which it feeds, and melts the meaning of all words away, and I sink into a space where no words apply. I have long found it to be the most challenging book of Nisargattta's satsangs, but this is because it so effectively, irrefutably, and logically presents irrefutable 'proof' of the fiction of our mistakenly identified-with personalities and histories, and proves the non-reality of the egos with which we have mistakenly identified ourselves with. This takes us to real advaita, and requires, through earnest inquiry and discovery, that what we thought to be ourselves, and all out dualistic relations with the loves and hates which dance before us, to be nothing but maya (falseness, illusion).
For 'myself', this requires the supreme sacrifice, the sacrifice of a very comforting and seeming sweet but False illusion of my personality, and my mind's programs, to be , in the Teacher's words, "the child of a barren woman." This text takes the reader right to the heart of the teaching, and a kind of 'Death of the False', and embrace of the Real, no matter how painful, no matter what and 'who' we treasure. This is a cliff, perhaps The cliff, to which the Mountain Path leads.
To Jen Dunn and Manu,
Namaste!
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