chapter five

Confusion No More

One morning I had a visitor, one wearing ochre-coloured robes, a swami. He had written a few books, the blurb on one of which said: ‘After graduation with honours from the university, he spent several years in monasteries and caves practising raja yoga and meditation. Ultimately, he realized the core of his being, which is beyond the boundaries of individual self.’

He started by saying that he had read several of my books and that he was a ‘fan’ of mine! One of the first things he said was that he was appalled by the number of fake gurus he had come across who did not have even the rudiments of true understanding. Then he went on to say that he was astonished to read that Nisargadatta Maharaj not only used to get angry very quickly, very often, but that he was a smoker, smoking locally produced cigarettes called bidis; and to add to that, he said, he made and sold these bidis in his shops!

I told him that, according to my concept, no ‘one’ gets angry but that anger arises, varying in intensity and frequency, according to the ‘programming’ in the body-mind organism, which is a psychosomatic apparatus (genes plus conditioning, over neither of which anyone has had any control). Oh, he said, that is only a play on words which a fake guru hides behind, in order to hide his lack of control over his own physical and mental weaknesses. Surely, he said, a sage must have total control over all his desires and all his actions. Then, he said, he would like to present me with a copy of his book. I asked him what the book was about. He said, it was about the mystical wisdom of non-doing, which means, he said, that everything happens and therefore the principle of non-doing means that no one has the power of control over the body and mind! I could not believe my ears. This is what this man tells me about what his book was all about, and yet, only a few minutes ago, he had condemned Nisargadatta Maharaj for his anger and his habit of smoking. He suddenly came to his senses when the other visitors could not help laughing.

He quickly got up, said his goodbyes and left, saying he had another appointment.

This is an area of enormous confusion: what does Self-realization mean and how does a Self-realized human being live his daily life? Conditioned as they are by hundreds of years of confusion, the spiritual seekers have come to have the idea that the Self-realized sage is a kind of superman, a ‘perfect’ human being, totally in control of his mind and body, totally disciplined, whom everybody looks up to for advice and guidance in all situations in life, and who will protect his disciples from all difficulties in life. And, of course, there are plenty of people in this world who do not fail to take full advantage of this fact. Hence so many prosperous ashrams and millionaire gurus.

The area of confusion for most spiritual seekers is thus around two questions: (1) What exactly is Self-realization? What does it precisely mean? And (2) How does a Self-realized being live his daily life? Does he have a daily life like any ordinary human being? Curiously enough, though, it is not very often that the spiritual seeker asks himself: what do I expect Self-realization to do for me for the rest of my life that I did not have before? And, truly, this is the vital question. What is more, from what I have read about the talks between a guru and his disciples, I have never come across this specific question being asked by a disciple to his guru: after Self-realization, Sir, what did you get for the rest of your life that you did not have before?

It is, actually, the great Buddha who gave specific answers to these two questions:

Enlightenment means the total acceptance of the fact: events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer of any deed.
Enlightenment means the end of suffering. ‘Suffering’, obviously, cannot include the pain that everyone – including the sage – has to suffer from moment to moment, depending upon his destiny, or God’s will, according to the Cosmic Law. What the Buddha meant by ‘suffering’ was, again obviously, the suffering that the human being has created for himself because of his mistaken belief in his sense of volition, free will, his responsibility for his own actions: the load of guilt and shame for his own actions and the load of hatred and malice towards the ‘other’ for his actions. The disappearance of this load is what the Buddha means by ‘end of suffering’.

There is another area of confusion which is felt not by all spiritual seekers but by those who have had the dubious privilege of having had an ‘experience of ecstasy’. What these people forget is that that experience was in the moment, which merely proved to that person that the separate entity was an illusion and that Reality is oneness. But what that experiencer forgets is that it is the illusory separate entity which must live the rest of his life in the illusory phenomenal manifestation, and it is this forgetfulness which leads the spiritual seeker to seek, not the Ultimate Understanding, but a repetition of that experience. And in this seeking – which can prove to be unbearably frustrating – the seeker forgets that the experience itself was a ‘happening’ over which he had never had any control. And, therefore, he tries all kinds of methods and disciplines in order to ‘achieve’ that experience of oneness which had actually ‘happened’, perhaps because of the very fact that when it happened there was no seeker trying to achieve it.

It is an undeniable fact that enlightenment, Self-realization, the Ultimate Understanding or whatever can only happen, that it is not something which one can achieve through self-effort. As the Buddha has stated, there is no individual doer. No one does anything, no one achieves anything, everything happens according to the Cosmic Law.

The area in which the spiritual seeker should turn his attention to, therefore, is how to be in that mental state of total relaxation, in which the vacant mind would be able to receive the happening called ‘enlightenment’.

The traditional approach is from the periphery inwards, and through time, practice, discipline and renunciation, gradually to come upon that inner beauty and ‘love’ – in fact to do everything not to make oneself narrow, petty and shoddy; peal off little by little, no hurry, take time; tomorrow will do, next life will do – and at last when one does come to the centre, what does one find there, at the end of twenty, thirty years? Nothing but frustration. Why? For the simple reason that the mind has been made incapable, dull and insensitive. What is really necessary is a total revolution, a complete mutation in our minds, in our way of living, in the activities of our daily living.

What is our daily way of living? Is there any time or inclination to understand oneself – self-knowledge – and observe one’s behaviour in our relationship with the ‘other’? What actually happens is that in daily living you are pursuing a self-projection. You are this, which is not acceptable, so you want that. It is only because you do not have a clear understanding of this that you create that to understand, or to escape from this. So your action is strictly within the limits of your own projection, whether it is the ‘other’, or God, or the state. Such activity is the activity of a dog chasing its tail.

The this includes what we take ourselves to be in the spiritual field. For example, I am ignorant, I am a sinner. How can I improve myself? I must find myself a guru, and so on. The that includes my projected ideal of God-realization, attainment of a permanent state of ‘bliss’ (how can we live our daily life in a state of bliss?!), absolute Truth, knowing Ultimate Reality, liberation from the cycle of rebirths, and so on. Just as a treasure lost in a dream cannot be found by the most efficient authority for the simple reason that the treasure has no existence at all apart from my mind, exactly so, ideals like moksha, mukti, kaivalya, God-realization etc. cannot be reached or acquired with or without the aid of a guru, for the simple reason that they are only products of one’s own mind. There can only be an ultimate understanding within oneself – one can only be a beacon within oneself.

I am this and I want to become that. In trying to become that, there is conflict, struggle. In this struggle we are inevitably concerned with fulfilment by gaining an end. Fulfilment is the goal, the drive behind it is the effort put in by the ‘me’, the seeker – whatever the goal. Desire creates its own opposite, and trans-formation is not a matter of being centred in one desire, but of being free from the conflict which craving and pursuing brings. Only with the dissolution of conflict can there be tranquillity, and only then can Reality come into being.

Thus we find that man is always seeking: seeking a purpose, seeking a goal, seeking satisfaction, and the highest satisfaction he calls God. We always feel that something is missing, and so we try to fill that void in ourselves, that loneliness, that emptiness with lots of ideas, purposes, with significance, culminating in a permanency that we call God, samadhi – one keeps on inventing names. We need something to cling to, and we keep seeking – and we are in conflict.

Conflict cannot arise unless there is the consciousness of the ‘me’. There is awareness of the conflict only when the ‘me’ suddenly becomes conscious of itself. So long as everything is moving smoothly without any contradictions, there is no consciousness of a ‘me’ in action and effort. The moment I am blocked in any way, I am aware of myself and become miserable. The fact of the matter is that we want to live without being blocked, and conflict, suffering will exist so long as I do not understand myself. Therefore, to understand oneself is surely more important than overcoming sorrow and conflict.

How does the ‘me’ arise? A. Gesele, the psychologist, has observed the development of the self in children at various stages in the early years of life. He says:

Up to eighteen months of age, the child is self-engrossed but not self-aware, since he does not very clearly recognize the ‘not-self’. At two years, he begins to use self-reference words, ‘mine’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘I’, in that order. At three years of age, the idea of ‘persons’ becomes clear. At five and six the child begins to see even in terms of individual qualities.

It is necessary to see the whole movement of the ‘me’, the ‘self’, the ‘what I am’ non-analytically so that in the very observation itself there can be instant understanding. If you see the action of the ‘me’ which is in relationship, the seeing itself is the ending of the ‘me’. This seeing frees one from the conditioning of the ‘me’. It is an interesting fact that the brain is the result of time: it is conditioned to protect itself physically; but when it tries to protect itself psychologically, then the ‘me’ begins, and our misery starts. It is this effort to protect itself psychologically that is the affirmation of the ‘me’. Knowledge acquired psychologically by the brain, it asserts itself in relationship as the ‘me’ with its experiences, its will, its violence. And then comes division, conflict and sorrow in relationships.

There are various concepts about how the psyche, the ego, the self, the ‘me’-person has come into being; and all perhaps have in them certain facts, which together constitute the self. Where there is any kind of possession there must be the beginning of the self. And, from this reaction, this instinct, the self gradually increases in strength and vitality and soon becomes well established. The gradual increase in possessions gives the feeling of separations as an individual.

It is a basic fact that the self is put together by thought (intellect), which is not an individual possession. Thought is the content of the impersonal Consciousness. It is the Consciousness which has identified itself through intellect as the individual ‘me’-self. For this reason, too, the ‘me’ can never become a better ‘me’. It is this self, this separative self-centred activity which imagines that one day it will make itself something that it is not. What is to be understood is that there is no ‘becoming’ of the self; there can only happen the ending of selfishness, of anxiety, of pain and sorrow, which are the context of the psyche, the ‘me’. There is only the ending of all that, and most importantly, such ending is not a matter of duration. It is actually a matter of apperceiving that there never was a ‘me’ as the doer of any deed, and such apperception is of the moment, never any duration.

The cause of all conflict, anxiety is the belief – a wrong one – that an action happens as a result of someone doing something. Actually, as the Buddha has put it so succinctly: ‘Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer of any deed.’

Relationships between human beings are based on the image forming and a defensive mechanism to protect oneself from the action of the ‘other’. In all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves. The images are fictitious and one cannot live in an abstraction. All our relationships – whether they be with property, ideas or people, are based essentially on this image-forming, and hence there is always conflict, at all levels of being.

To observe ourselves without the image of personal doership – which is the past, our accumulated experience and knowledge – happens very rarely, but when this does happen, there is a state of mind that is wholly alone and pure – not in isolation – in stillness. And such stillness is purity, beauty without the corruption of any image-forming.

It is only when we see anything or anyone without any pre-conception, without any previous image, that we can be in direct contact with anything in life. All our relationships are actually imaginary, based on images formed by thought. It is only when we understand the true relationship between each other, based on non-doership, that there is absence of any guilt and shame for one’s own supposed action, and absence of hatred and malice, jealously and envy towards the ‘other’. Such a clean, innocent relationship – possible only on the basis of non-doership – may be termed peace, tranquillity, love.

The accumulations, the stored up memories – all based on personal doership – are indeed the ‘me’ and the ‘other’. It is this sense of personal doership that makes the ‘me’, the ego, the self build a wall around itself. It is the sense of personal activity of the ‘me’ that leads to isolation. Becoming aware of its isolation, it begins to identify itself with anything other than the ‘other’ doer: with virtue, with good deeds, with an ideology. And such identification, with anything other than the ‘other’ causes further isolation, which means escape from the present moment. If one wishes to be free from sorrow, one must stop running away from the What-is, and this can happen only with the total acceptance that no one does any deed, that everything is a happening, depending on the Cosmic Law.

It is an interesting fact that sorrow, memory, the thought of ‘me’, everyone of them, all belong to time, and when we happen to stay in the present moment – when one is attending to something with the working mind totally engrossed in what is being done, something extraordinarily pure and beautiful happens: the ‘me’ is absent. In fact, the ‘me’ – even as mere identification with a name and form – exists only in relationship with the ‘other’. Therefore, when time is absent, and the ‘other’ is absent, the ‘me’ cannot exist either. There is only the present moment and the ‘Presence’. It is only the arising of thought – and the arising of the ‘me’ together with the thought – that destroys the present moment and the ‘Presence’. In other words, when the ‘me’, the spiritual seeker is absent, there can never be any question of any confusion: the ‘me’ as the seeker-doer IS the confusion. The only way to avoid confusion is to avoid thinking – horizontal thinking by the ‘me’. Simply being aware of the arising of the horizontal thinking – the confusion – removes the confusion.

Unnecessary confusion

Most masters have clearly stated that it is necessary for the spiritual seeker to keep the body reasonably fit and healthy for the spiritual effort to have the maximum effect. They have also warned that it is as much necessary not to pamper the body, but to try to control it as much as necessary.

And then you come across, in the daily newspaper, the pronouncements of a half-baked guru, and you are amused. They are:

‘The human body is the temple of God. You have to take great care of your body.’
‘There is no point in subjecting your body to torture (through various disciplines) – since God dwells within, you must take good care of it and protect it.’
‘When your body is well cared for, you experience great and divine love in it … great divinity dwells in this very structure, in this very system.’
‘This body is a gift – so you have to understand that it is not really yours. Once you understand that it is a gift of love from God, your attitude towards it will change for the better.’
‘Instead of putting your body down, through meditation you elevate yourself and develop healthy feelings towards yourself.’
‘The body has to be strong for you to experience joy and self-esteem.’
‘If you care for the body with great love, with great joy, as the gift you have received from God, it will reveal the Truth to you.’
‘When you see the light in this body, that very light will provide you with shelter and security.’
‘When you respect the body … it becomes one with the universe; there is no wall when you see another person, only love throbs between you.’

And then, my amusement turned to amazement when I gathered that the writer was the head of a prosperous, million-dollar ashram!

Satchitananda

The Hindu concept of satchitananda can create considerable confusion unless it is clearly understood. Unfortunately, it is usually explained in a way that cannot avoid confusion.

As the ‘swami’ has tried to explain it, ‘Hey, I’m in Nirvana!’ We talk like this when we feel good. But what is it like to actually attain nirvana, otherwise known as moksha or Self-realization?’ This very question raises the hopes of the seeker that the supreme state of self-realization means ‘happiness’ of the kind and of the intensity that one has never experienced in life. Surely, thinks the spiritual seeker, such happiness compared with which, sexual orgasm must be nothing!

There is a joke about this misconception. Every Sunday afternoon, four philosophers used to meet for lunch. One Sunday, one of the philosophers announced: ‘Last night God appeared to me in my dream and offered me total happiness or total knowledge. I, of course, chose total knowledge.’ Promptly, the other three, with great expectation, said: ‘Come on, come on, tell us all about it.’ Came the answer: ‘I’m afraid, it was the wrong choice.’

‘Satchitananda’ is supposed to be the ultimate state of Self-realization. Sat is existence; chit is consciousness. In this state of satchit, what is supposed to happen is the condition of ananda: supreme bliss, pure and permanent bliss and joy. This is what causes the confusion. The confusion arises because the very basis of life and living in phenomenality is not clearly understood. Life can never be anything other than a mix of both pleasure and pain – one thing one moment and the other the next moment. Pleasure and pain go together not because, as the ‘swami’ explains, ‘The world is imperfect and man also is imperfect’! Pain and pleasure go together because the basis of manifestation, and its functioning that we call ‘life’ and ‘living’, is the existence at any moment of both the polaric counterparts – interdependent opposites – of every conceivable kind, beginning with male and female. The ‘swami’ suggests: ‘For real and permanent happiness one needs to rise above petty desires and seek ultimate reality. There is supreme bliss and satisfaction there – an indescribable joy and peace.’

The poor misguided ‘swami’ does not realize that ‘bliss’, (or ‘joy’) and ‘peace’ cannot go together: ‘bliss’ or ‘joy’ is in the moment and cannot be but momentary, whereas peace is the anchor which the Self-realized being has, while facing life from moment to moment. This is the unfortunate confusion. As Ramana Maharshi has declared: ‘Peace is much higher than joy.’ A sage cannot live his life in phenomenality – no one can – if he is in ‘permanent bliss’. But a sage can and does live his life, anchored in peace and harmony, while facing life, like everyone else, from moment to moment.

To crown his total misconception of the whole matter of Self-realization, the ‘swami’ declares:

Whichever the figure (of Self-realized people), I have little doubt that most of them are from India.

As my young, modern grandson studying in the USA said, ‘Holy shit.’

Confusion for the spiritual seeker cannot arise if the conceptual basic principles in the happening of the manifestation – and the functioning of that manifestation that we call ‘life’ and living – are deeply engraved on his psyche. They are:

Phenomenal manifestation is the activization of the Noumen-al potential primal Energy-Source-Consciousness – or by whatever name known; when the energy generated by the ‘Big Bang’ exhausts itself, sometime or the other, the activized manifestation will go back into the potential, until a similar happening happens in due course.
The totality of the phenomenal manifestation is the total of all the three-dimensional objects of every conceivable type or species, for example, a stone, a growing plant, an animal, a human being. All are part of the totality of manifestation, all basically three-dimensional objects.
Whatever happens at any moment to any manifested object can happen – in fact, according to the principle of pre-determination, whatever has happened in the eternal picture – can only be according to a conceptual Cosmic Law which has been in operation from day one till eternity. No one can ever possibly know the basics of this impersonal Cosmic Law.
The Creator – Energy or Consciousness or God or Whatever – has infused in the three-dimensional object called the human being: (a) life-animus as an animal, with senses, with sentience or active consciousness which is the functional element functioning through the senses of the animal; (b) mind-intellect which creates the ego-identification with a particular body and name as a separate entity with the sense of volition or personal doership.
The basis of the functioning of manifestation is duality: the existence at any moment of both the polaric counterparts of every conceivable kind, beginning with male and female and going on to the dualities like beauty and ugliness, good and evil, health and illness, ignorance and knowledge, light and darkness, etc. The sage is a sage because he has accepted this fact; he has realized that his own programming is a combin-ation of several positive and negative elements, that he himself cannot be a perfect human being, nor can anyone else, and therefore is able to accept whatever happens without too much of a critical eye and without too much judgement. In other words, he is able to accept the what-is in the moment without any difficulty.The ordinary person, on the other hand, is not generally able to accept this duality as the basis of life and living, views everything with a very critical eye and prefers one against the other among the many dualities in life. And is, therefore, usually dissatisfied and frustrated and generally unhappy.In other words, the sage lives his life having accepted the duality as the basis of life, with a very tolerant attitude and is, therefore, generally at peace, contented and tranquil. The ordinary person on the other hand lives in dualism, continu-ously comparing and judging, wanting one thing in preference to the other. And is, therefore, discontented, disgruntled, un-happy, confused.
An aspect of the basis of life that is not clearly understood is the uncertainty in life. No one can know what the next moment will bring – pain or pleasure – and no one can avoid it either. Spiritual seeking has nothing to do with this. Not realizing this, many a seeker has wasted considerable time and effort in going to some godman or other hoping to lessen such pain – physical or psychological or financial. Actually this really cannot be called ‘spiritual’ seeking at all but considerable confusion is caused by not understanding this aspect of life. The best of sages have had to bear the suffering of such pain themselves. If this is understood, considerable confusion and frustration could be avoided.If one does any kind of spiritual effort with the object of lessening one’s suffering of this kind, it is bound to end in frustration, and confusion too. There is the case of a prominent politician who regally announced that he had ‘lost his faith in God’ because, before leaving on a journey, his wife had visited a particular, famed temple, and yet during that journey, she had died in an accident. There was another spiritual seeker who was proud of the fact that he had never missed even a single day’s pooja of just about an hour every day. Then one day, his only son died. He bravely accepted this fact, and adopted a relative as a son. This adopted son, too, met with an accidental death. This fact so confused and frustrated him, that he went to the pooja room, collected all the god figures in a piece of cloth and threw them in the well (this was sometime ago, in a village), and thereafter never did any pooja himself, nor did he attend any pooja, ever.This is one aspect of life, a spiritual seeker would ignore at his own peril: everything is predetermined, and no one can reduce the pain, or increase the pleasure, that has been assigned to him by the Creator, according to a Cosmic Law.
The Buddha had announced: ‘Enlightenment means the end of suffering.’ This could cause a certain amount of confusion if it is not clearly understood that the ‘suffering’ referred to by the Buddha was not the day-to-day pain and grief, but the suffering caused to an individual by his belief in volition and free will, by his belief that all action happening through his body is his action, for the consequences of which he himself was responsible. This suffering is the load of guilt and shame for one’s own actions, and the load of hatred and malice, jealousy and envy one feels towards the ‘other’ for his actions. Only the full and total acceptance of non-doership – there is no individual doer of any action – would remove this kind of suffering.

Finally, there is the ultimate question: what precisely does a spiritual seeker want? The answer is clear: what he wants is to be anchored in peace and harmony while facing life from moment to moment. This is where the spiritual seeker’s seeking ends. But ultimately, the question could remain: with the mind settled, most of the time, in peace and tranquillity, is that the end of the seeking? The answer, again, is: yes. Yet again the enquiry continues: the seeker’s seeking has ended. But is there something beyond the seeker’s seeking that could happen in that state of contentment, peace and tranquillity, that is unknown to the seeker? This really is a most absorbing question: the state of the mind.

The human mind is perhaps the most mysterious and interesting thing in the universe with which the human being is primarily concerned. Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the human mind is its lack of stillness and silence. This is because the mind is like a machine which is constantly ‘on’, everlastingly busy whether awake or asleep. Even when we are alone by ourselves, not engaged in anything specific, what happens? There is hardly ever any stillness, silence. We talk to ourselves, actually uttering words without any audible sounds, silently vocal. We also see images, even with closed eyes, entertaining things, events, persons in the mind, and this is how the perennial conflict begins between opposing desires and urges.

The restless mind is ready to be influenced by anything that attracts its nature, the programming in the organism. There is actually no basic difference between the so-called religious person whose mind is occupied with the ‘higher values’ like virtue or God, and the ordinary man whose mind is occupied with money, fame, wine or women. The one will be generally regarded as a holy man, an extraordinary being, whereas the man who is concerned with material, worldly matters will be regarded as just an ordinary man like the rest of us. But the pertinent point is that in both cases the mind is occupied: what the mind is occupied with is not relevant. Can the occupied mind ever be able to receive something ‘new’? It is absolutely essential for the mind to be vacant, to be empty, and to be unoccupied to be able to move into unknown depths, into untrodden spaces. Only out of this emptiness of the mind can anything fresh, creative arise.

There is no space in the structure of the mind, as it normally is, for the simple reason that it is too crowded with fears, hopes based on the future. Only when there is silence, stillness can there be immense, timeless space. Only then can there be a possibility of coming upon that which can be considered as the sacred, the eternal, the real. This can happen only when there is total freedom from the perpetual dualism between ‘What-is’ and ‘What-should-be’. This can happen only when one is completely alone – not isolated – when ‘one’ is all there is, representing all humanity. This can happen only when there is an awakening of intelligence that events happen, deeds are done, but that there never has been an individual doer of any deed.

Throughout the world, human beings are constantly seeking security and the very basis of phenomenal living is insecurity. In this seeking after security, an illusion, one is caught in certain patterns of belief, dogma, ideology, the same belief from childhood, the same traditional rituals. We get attached to people, to ideas, to symbols or concepts because in them we seem to find some sort of security.

Once one is able to accept that there is really no such thing as security in life – to realize that psychologically there can be nothing permanent – gives one a totally different approach to life. No one can deny that it is essential to try to have outward security – food, clothing and shelter – but it is absolutely necessary to see very clearly that the outward security has nothing to do with psychological security. One can try to discipline the mind, con-trol it, shape it but such torture does not make the mind quiet. As it clearly mentioned by Lord Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita:

Even for a wise man, the energy within the body-mind organism produces actions according to his own natural characteristics. All living creatures follow their natural tendencies. What is the use of any external control or restraint?

(iii. 33)

It is only when you really observe and listen, out of silence, that the mind can be quiet. It is not something you can cultivate, because it is not the product of time or of effort or of comparison. It is clearly the product of observation in daily living, the observation of your thoughts and the understanding of thought. It is only when the mind is totally aware, passively aware, that it can be extraordinarily silent, quiet – not stagnant but highly awake in that silence. Such a mind is, of course capable of using the experience of the past, but it has actually left the past – and the future – completely.

If you really want to understand something, there suddenly arises a quietness in the mind; when you wanted to listen to music or look again at a painting you have loved, you will have noticed that there has arrived suddenly a deep quietness of mind. In that alert yet passive state of mind, there is receptivity, understanding. So long as the mind is in conflict, condemning, blaming someone – oneself or the ‘other’ – for some happening or other there can be no understanding, no transformation. It is only in the passive awareness of the mind that regeneration can happen – transformation, revolution, total apperception.

Here again, there is a specific area for confusion: a still mind does not mean concentration of mind, but rather freedom, self-knowledge and deep silence. A mind that is sought to be made still through meditation, through compulsion, through conformity, through ritualistic discipline, is not a still mind but a dull mind. The mind that can be open to fresh creation has to be, on the other hand, not a dull, stagnant mind but a mind that is very very attentive, very much aware of every thought, word and feeling which reveals our innermost natural state. This is the real confusion.

Concentration means exclusion, and therefore, distraction: there is a constant conflict going on when you are trying to concentrate on something while you mind flies off in various directions. Meditation truly does not mean a seeking, a probing, an exploration. It does not mean taming of the brain to conform to a discipline, nor is it a self-analytical introspection. On the contrary, meditation must happen naturally; thought happens naturally, and all that needs is a very keen awareness of the thought as it appears and disappears. Out of such awareness of thought, arises keen all-inclusive attention, not concentration and exclusion. It is attention that is open to stillness and silence, leading to something creative, something sacred, something infinitely holy, whereas concentration is a process that causes the mind to build a wall to stop other thoughts arising.

It is so very necessary to see the clear distinction between true meditation which brings about the natural state of mind, the Sahajavastha of Patanjali. It comes into being when there is a clear understanding, an apperception that naturally overcomes all wanting and desire, including the desire for personal emancipation.

True meditation brings about at times the most refreshing feeling of lightness, and sometimes, its depth is beyond measure. Its very essence is extraordinary freedom, without the slightest desire to possess any recollection or experience. Meditation simply cannot be any private personal pleasure or experience. It is freedom itself in its essence.

The total acceptance of non-doership leads to the acceptance of What-is, leads to a state of mind in which there is no dualism of any kind; on the other hand, there is a total negation of the past, of the tradition, so that the mind becomes very keenly aware of the present moment, without any choice, without any distortion, without any resentment, bitterness. The mind is totally free to receive the Truth, the sacred, the unknown.

It is important to realize that an experience is not Reality. Considerable confusion has been caused by the concept that experience is the final authority for the acceptance of a concept, but the fact of the matter is that Reality and Truth cannot be experienced. It is What-is. All knowledge or experience is only an illusion. As has been said, ‘Knowledge bends experience and experience shapes knowledge.’ Also, there is the fact of what is known as ‘virtual reality’ which again confirms the fact that what seems like Reality, what is apparently experienced as Reality could well be an illusion. Many people have been led astray by chas-ing an experience and have ended in awful frustration. The only Reality is the What-is, in which there is no preference; it includes both the polaric counterparts of every conceivable kind.

In our educational system we are hardly ever taught to look at life impartially – just looking impartially at the various happenings in our daily living, just observing them without a critical, judgemental attitude – witnessing – can be an astonishingly beautiful and fruitful happening. This is what can lead to what may be called ‘fulfilment’ – transcending the background of tradition, habit and prejudice, which is actually what constitutes confusion and suffering for the spiritual seeker. A mind filled with beliefs, conclusions, previous experience cannot be receptive to the truth of any matter.

The fact of the matter is that the mind that would have genuine insight, penetration, discernment, must necessarily be very clear, without any distortions or prejudices or ready-made conclusions. A mind capable of insight must necessarily be free from escapes, free from suppression. Freedom implies an emptiness to observe. It is only this emptiness, this vacancy that can bring about insight. The mind has become conditioned to be aware of only those things, events or facts that stand out distinctly from their background. If there is no discrepancy or anything special or different, then the mind is conditioned to ignore it. It is this very conditioning that one needs to be fully aware of, for the insight to happen.

For the mind to be free of all its burden of distinctions and prejudices, it is absolutely essential for the mind to accept totally – not just intellectually – that events happen, deeds are done but that there is no individual doer of any deed. This view has received unqualified support not only from mystics for hundreds of years but, for some time now, even from the most honoured physicists, including the famous mathematician, Stephen Hawking, that everything is ‘predetermined’. If everything is predetermined, everything has already happened (as Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita), then no one does anything. But each one has to test the concept of non-doership in the fire of his own experience for the concept to turn into Truth for him.

If the concept of non-doership is accepted totally, then the mind becomes totally free of any guilt or shame for one’s own apparent actions, and also totally free from any sense of hatred and malice, jealously and envy for the ‘other’. In other words, the mind becomes totally free and vacant, so that whatever happens is merely witnessed, without blaming anyone for anything. When something is happening, it is merely witnessed – the mind is in a witnessing state. If at any moment, there is nothing to be witnessed, the state of mind would be what may be called the non-witnessing state. And if, for any reason, the non-witnessing state is not disturbed, it would go into a deeper state that could be called an impersonal Awareness, in which the separate entity all but disappears. And that must be the deepest kind of Awareness in which there is no vestige of the ego, which has already lost its sense of personal doership, and has thus become what Ramana Maharshi called ‘the remnants of a burnt rope’, totally harmless and ineffective.

It is interesting – and instructive – to observe clearly the actuality of our living. What the actuality of our living amounts to is trying to escape from What-is, and it is this that causes pain and sorrow in life, and turns life into a constant struggle and conflict: the ambition, the search for fulfilment, gaining and losing an argument, and, of course, the endless pursuit of pleasure. What many of us do is to try to escape from this What-is into its opposite, which is sometimes called religion or spirituality.

It is strange that we do not realize that escaping from the What-is can never be successful. However hard we may try to escape from ourselves, the conflict, the pain and the pleasure, the basic fear and so on never leave us; they surface again and again. The fact of the matter is that the problem cannot have a solution: the solution itself has an opposite! The only answer is to face the problem itself, to analyse it truly objectively, without any personal conditioning: one simply cannot escape from life. The very basics of the phenomenal manifestation – and its functioning that is ‘life’ as we know it – is the existence of polaric counterparts, or interconnected opposites all the time. If we keep on choosing one against the other all the time, we are bound to be frustrated. ‘What-should-be’ simply does not exist. All there is, is ‘What-is’. It is this ‘What-is’ that we must comprehend in its totality, not creating the opposite, or escaping from it. It is this effort to escape from the reality of What-is that causes enormous confusion.

Another cause of confusion in the spiritual seeking – as in all seeking – is the fact that most of us, most of the time, do not listen totally; nor do we see, observe something with totality. If we are listening to a concept being detailed by a speaker, how often do we listen totally? What actually happens is that while we think we are listening – or observing – our mind is so busy, at the same time, refuting it or collecting arguments against it. Total listening can happen only when the mind is quiet; only when there is no intervening screen of our own previous convictions and prejudices, only when the mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity’, in a state of sensitivity. This does not mean allowing ourselves to be brain-washed. In fact the concept we are listening to needs to be tested thoroughly in the fire of our own experience, but not while we are listening to it. This is really important, in order to avoid confusion.

A serious cause of confusion is the fact that we take ‘fragmentation’ as the basic fact of life. It is not. We may have to divide the whole into parts in order to study each part separately, but it is a total mistake to take separation as the basis of life. The moment one says one is a Hindu or a Muslim and keeps thinking in that perspective, one forgets that one is being constantly conditioned wrongly. Similarly, fragmentation happens when there is a continuous comparison with the ‘the other’. Unfortunately, measuring ourselves against something or someone has been the basis of most systems of education. To avoid confusion, it is absolutely essential to understand – and keep in mind – that fragmentation is not the essence of ‘What-is’ or Reality.

It must be clearly understood, therefore, that the problem is not how to get rid of classes or sects, but to understand that it is the mind or thinking or conceptualizing which brings about fragmentation. It is this passive awareness of things as they are – the highest form of true intelligence, true wisdom – without the fragmentation, that brings about peace and harmony in our daily living. Such peace, the absence of fragmentation, is the source of spontaneous action, the most effective action.

It is generally accepted that the real creator of the problems is the ‘me’ in relation to the ‘other’, but it is not realized that it is the process of thinking, of conceptualizing that creates the ‘me’. When there is no conceptualizing, no distinguishing, no fragmentation, there is no ‘me’. The stillness of the mind, the source of spontaneous action, has its own creative understanding of ‘What-is’, for the very reason that in the still, quiet mind, where there is no movement of thought, there is no observer, no experiencer, no ‘me’. The ‘me’ is the accumulation of past experiences, memories of the past, a totally worthless collection of mental garbage.

What causes the mind to stray from its stillness, its silence? Not ‘desires’ as you may be inclined to think. A little investigation will reveal that the ‘desire’ itself – the arising of a thought, a desire – is not in anyone’s control, not the ordinary person, nor the sage. It is the pursuit of the desire that brings out the ‘me’ into action, in the case of the ordinary person. The sage witnesses the desire arising in his body-mind organism. If the desire is satisfied, as part of What-is, the sage has no hesitation in enjoying the pleasure to the full (and hence is known as Mahabhogi, super enjoyer) but if the desire is not fulfilled, he does not pursue it. He accepts that the satisfaction of that particular desire is not part of ‘What-is’ in the moment, and does not pursue it – as the ordinary person does.

It is only the negation of the past conditioning, with its trad-ition and its discipline and its authority that means freedom – freedom to die to the moment, freedom from the doership of the ‘me’.

Finally, the area of the deepest confusion is perhaps the notion or concept of ‘time’. This is because it is not clearly recognized that there are, basically, two distinct kinds of time: (1) time by the clock: this ‘time’ is obviously a necessary part of the mechan-ism of living; (2) psychological ‘time’, created by thought or conceptualizing: I must do this; I must achieve that. There is only chronological ‘time’, all else is deception created by the thinking mind.

The ‘me’, the thinking mind, the experiencer, coming in after the experience of the present moment, creates ‘time’ wanting to continue the experience if it is pleasant, or hoping that the night-marish experience will not happen in the future. So ‘time’ is considered as a means of evolving into something better. It is absolutely necessary to realize that ‘time’ cannot bring about transformation, and in so thinking, we are only avoiding the ‘What-is’, the only reality, in the present moment. There is psychological ‘time’ only when one moves away from the ‘What-is’.

In order to avoid confusion and frustration, it is absolutely necessary to understand that there is really no psychological ‘time’ at all. The religious, the evolutionary books have told us that we need time to improve, to change from What-is to What-should-be. The distance is time, and we have unfortunately been following this pattern blindly, without questioning. Hence the confusion, the frustration, the pain in life.

The understanding, the Self-realization, can never come tomorrow. It can only be now or never. In fact, there is no ‘never’, only ‘now’.

It is only when the mind-heart is free from the burden of pride and arrogance, and guilt and shame on account of one’s own deeds, and also free from the burden of hatred and malice towards the ‘other’ for his deeds, that the mind-heart can be open and receptive to that experience in which you are steadily anchored. In fact that experience then turns out not to be an experience but in fact our true nature. This real experience is indeed a harmonious blending of the head and the heart, when the mind-heart becomes pure, with the removal of the dirt of personal doership.

The different fields in which the human being has his experiences are: (1) thinking, (2) doing, (3) perceiving, (4) feeling. These experiences keep changing from moment to moment, but the one experience, constant without any change, is the changeless experience of the ‘I Am principle’, the screen on which the other experiences appear and disappear. With this deep understanding the sage ignores the fleeting experiences and stays anchored at the central I Am experience, in peace, harmony and contentment, in beauty and love.

When the thinking-doing-perceiving feeling disappears, the apparent thinker-doer-perceiver-feeler also disappears, and I remain as pure Consciousness. The ignorant person, in his confusion, believes that the body-mind lives, while in fact it dies at the end of every perception, thought, feeling or action. It is the I Am principle that continues unchanged throughout this process.

The fact of the matter is that that I Am principle and the manifest phenomenal ‘reality’ can only be the One and not two. The actual ‘Reality’ is neither the known nor the unknown, but the basis of both. In other words, the subjective I Am and the objective manifestation are one and the same.