MEDITATIONS with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

 Nirupana 80

Thursday, December 14, 1978

The primary concept is the sense ‘I am’.

It is consciousness.

Hold onto the basic concept ‘I am alive’.

Your sensation ‘I am’ is God.

Do not forget this all your life.

It is the same as maya.

She signifies the power of God.

One must be convinced that he is not the body; he is consciousness.

All the names of God belong to

consciousness.

A seeker has no form. One who still identifies with the body is an aspirant. The conviction that ‘I am not the body’ must be there. It must be firmly established that ‘I am consciousness only’.

This is the goal of every seeker:

‘I have no shape. I am in the house but I am not the house’.

You say, ‘I am’, but can you give me some information about yourself while keeping aside the word ‘I’?

The one who is before the words ‘I am’,

is he a human being?

Does he have a form?

That knowledge does not have a body. There is no question of its being either a man or a woman. Yet it has a flavor.

Consciousness is prior to everything. It is

consciousness that remembers the Guru.

A seeker has no form, just as thirst and hunger have no form.

Have I not told you that you are not the body

(even before the body dies)?

(In answer to someone’s question regarding astrology, Maharaj said that its effects were true because we believed it to be true and as a result suffered from its consequences. If we take ourselves to be as pure,

formless consciousness, how can the movement of planets affect us?

The universe with its planetary system

is within our consciousness.)

One who has no notion of devotion or God is truly bound. One who looks for Him desires liberation. One who follows a method is a seeker. He becomes the siddha, the liberated one.

When you see misery in the world, you feel pain because you consider yourself an individual. The individual is bothered by the sense of ‘I’ or ‘mine’. The totality has no such botheration. If you meditate on

‘I am the whole world along with its pleasure and pain’, your personal sense of misery will go.

Consciousness with its three gunas is the same in all animals. It is the beingness. The subtle feeling of being awake is the manifest identity of maya. In her womb are the three gunas. Nobody wants death. That means the consciousness ‘I am’ wants to continue. Such is the power of maya.

To see the subtle consciousness is to see the world with its innumerable beings. There is no one who can be called a doer or a creator or a destroyer. The feeling ‘I am’ is the highest devotion.

So long as friction between prana and the essence of food is there, one feels ‘he is’. When prana leaves, beingness comes to an end. In the body, the friction between pure Sattva (quality of knowingness) and prana

is continuing. This creates the knowledge ‘I am’. When prana gets separated, beingness disappears. No one can be rescued from the jaws of death unless all this is understood.

Tamas and Rajas are involved in everyday activity. Rajas is the worker and Tamas is the one that takes pride in the work. Sattva is the onlooker. Consciousness is the characteristic of the essence of the food-body. Once prana leaves the body, you will not remember that ‘you were’. The world and the wakefulness are not different.

Follow the words of the Guru to understand this. Your manifest consciousness has to become unmanifest again.

Hold onto consciousness at least before you go to sleep. When you wake up, hold onto knowingness in the same way. You are pure consciousness for a few seconds after awakening, and then the person becomes

wakeful. The most sacred thing in the world is consciousness. Without doing anything else, meditate on consciousness.

You feel you are the body, but you are only consciousness.