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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Wake up, you monkeys. You should realise you really don’t know much.”
— Dennis McKenna
2
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Take someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: he's free.”
― Jalalu'l-Din Rumi
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited October 2023
“When you ask yourself, who am I, the important thing is to realize that you won't be able to answer that question. So anything the mind comes up with is wrong, no matter what you say. And even if you say, ah, I've got it: I'm consciousness! Wrong, because it's a concept. Who you are is not believing in a concept. It's just a concept. So who am I? This was recommended by Ramana Maharshi and other spiritual sages as a profound meditation. Who am I? That question, you can ask it yourself with eyes open or eyes closed and then wait for the answer, which is not going to come as an actual answer that you could identify. It's not going to come as a thought or a word or anything you can talk about or think. The answer is the space after the question 'who am I?'.”
— Eckhart Tolle
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited October 2023
“What we call consciousness is memory.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
(This blew my mind. Because he discusses that everything that appears in consciousness are objects that are recognised from memory. If you go all the way back to baby-state before you have a memory full of stuff, all you see are surfaces and textures which you do not recognise.)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Recognition and naming are one and the same. Whether I name it or not, the very recognition of you as a man or that as a pillow, itself means that the naming is already there, whether I use the word or not. That is the reason why I point out to the people who say that the word is not the thing, the word is the thing. If the word is not the thing, what the hell is it? It is all right for the philosophers to sit and discuss everlastingly that the word is not the thing. That implies that there is something there other than the word.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited October 2023
“Thought is a mechanism for protecting the self. So anything that is born out of thought is destructive -- whether it is religious thought or scientific thought or political thought -- all of them are destructive.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
“All our actions are born out of ideas. Our ideas are thoughts passed on to us from generation to generation. Thought is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life around us. That is why you create all these ecological problems, problems of pollution, and the problem of possibly destroying ourselves with the most destructive weapons that we have invented.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
— Alan Watts
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
― Ram Dass
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited October 2023
“In these 28 years that I have been making candles, the world has changed very much. I think that if we don’t get back in touch with our ‘essential’ quality, we are going to disappear from this planet.
As a species we are living in challenging times: technology has allowed us to be more connected but we have somehow lost contact with the essential. The candles are my contribution to help us not forget that, and to rescue the light that resides inside each one of us.”
— Swami Yama
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“If you can stop taking the world and your stuff seriously, you’ll be a lot happier.”
— me
"La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida, ay Dios"
Rubén Blades (Pedro Navaja)
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”
― Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.”
― Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Culture is a perversion. It fetishises objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines.”
— Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“I may be a teacher in spiritual awakening, but that doesn't mean I consider myself some enlightened master. I'm just a person with a passion for the experience of mystery.”
— Tim Freke
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Everything that you repress goes underground and comes back stronger.”
— Osho
Increasingly I find quotes and truth in all things. The more mundane, the more ordinary the more supposedly ignorant, often the more profound.
For example the Brexit campaigns slogan,
**"Take Back Control" **
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“A computer is like a bicycle for the mind.”
— Steve Jobs
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”
— Terence McKenna
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”
— Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
— Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”
— Terence McKenna
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited November 2023
“Believe and you will never find, and whatsoever you find will be nothing but the projection of your own belief – it will not be truth. What has truth to do with your believing? Doubt, and doubt totally, because doubt is a cleansing process. It takes out all junk from your mind.”
— Osho
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“I am against prayer because it is basically business. It is bribing God. It is hoping that you can buttress his ego: ”You are great, you are compassionate, you can do anything you want.” And all this is being said because you want something. There is a motivation behind it; otherwise you would not pray, if there is no motivation.
I am against prayer. I am for meditation.”
— Osho
As we may know anyone can be a Buddha, even clansmen, such as Shakyamuni. However to be a leg end, Boddhi Satvia, Crazy Wise Gal … well that takes time, circumstance and enlightenment at the least …
Thank the dharma we have the almost countless leaves in the forest for the known future at least …
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Once you know that you are indomitable and there is no failure, you come to life disregarding your desires and fears, and live by truth alone.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: The memory of my wonderful experiences haunts me. I want them back.
M: Because you want them back, you cannot have them. The state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experience. Nothing of value can happen to a mind which knows exactly what it wants. For nothing the mind can visualize and want is of much value.
(Question asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The right use of mind is in the service of love, truth, beauty.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“By focussing the mind on the sense of being, 'I am so-and-so' dissolves; 'I am a witness only' remains and that too submerges in 'I am all'. Then the all becomes the One and the One — yourself, not to be separate from me.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“If the truth can be presented in such a way as to be understood, it will be believed.”
— William Blake
1
DavidA human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First NationsVeteran
"Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.”
-- Socrates
3
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light.”
― Timothy Leary
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: Why should mere attention make all the difference?
M: So far your life was dark and restless (tamas and rajas). Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality, are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature (sattva). It is in the nature of sattva to reconcile and neutralize tamas and rajas and rebuild the personality in accordance with the true nature of the self. Sattva is the faithful servant of the self, ever attentive and obedient.
Q: And I shall come to it through mere attention?
M: Do not undervalue attention. It means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your heart to it — which means attention. All the blessings flow from it.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ~Voltaire~
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Just as the colours in this carpet are brought out by light but light is not the colour, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fulness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on ‘I am’, ‘I know’, ‘I love’ — with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
All I know is that I don't know nothin...And that's fine!
Jesse Michaels (Operation Ivy)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“There is nothing wrong with the senses, it is your imagination that misleads you. It covers up the world as it is, with what you imagine it to be — something existing independently of you and yet closely following your inherited, or acquired patterns. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude, which you do not see and which is the cause of sorrow. You cling to the idea that you were born into a world of pain and sorrow; I know that the world is a child of love, having its beginning, growth and fulfillment in love.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Explanations are meant to please the mind. They need not be true. Reality is indefinable and indescribable.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: How is it that here my mind is engaged in high topics and finds dwelling on them easy and pleasant. When I return home I find myself forgetting all I have learnt here, worrying and fretting, unable to remember my real nature even for a moment. What may be the cause?
M: It is your childishness you are returning to. You are not fully grown up; there are levels left undeveloped because unattended. Just give full attention to what in you is crude and primitive, unreasonable and unkind, altogether childish, and you will open. It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential. It comes effortlessly when the main, obstacle is removed — inattention, unawareness. In awareness you grow.
(Question asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: How do I go about teaching the mind to be peaceful in practice?
M: Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away
from it.
Q: By suppressing my thoughts and feelings I shall provoke a reaction.
M: I am not talking of suppression. Just refuse attention.
Q: Must I not use effort to arrest the movements of the mind?
M: It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet — you just find your way between.
(Questions asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: Do you call it relinquishment, renunciation?
M: There is nothing to renounce. Enough if you stop acquiring. To give you must have, and to have you must take. Better don’t take. It is simpler than to practise renunciation, which leads to a dangerous form of ‘spiritual’ pride.
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“You have a mind which is spread in time. One after another all things happen to you and the memory remains. There is nothing wrong in it. The problem arises only when the memory of past pains and pleasures — which are essential to all organic life — remains as a reflex, dominating behaviour. This reflex takes the shape of ‘I’ and uses the body and the mind for its purposes, which are invariably in search for pleasure or flight from pain. When you recognize the ‘I’ as it is, a bundle of desires and fears, and the sense of ‘mine’, as embracing all things and people needed for the purpose of avoiding pain and securing pleasure, you will see that the ‘I’ and the ‘mine’ are false ideas, having no foundation in reality. Created by the mind, they rule their creator as long as it takes them to be true; when questioned, they dissolve.
The ‘I’ and ‘mine’, having no existence in themselves, need a support which they find in the body. The body becomes their point of reference. When you talk of ‘my’ husband and ‘my’ children, you mean the body’s husband and the body’s children. Give up the idea of being the body and face the question: Who am I? At once a process will be set in motion which will bring back reality, or, rather, will take the mind to reality. Only, you must not be afraid.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
Comments
“Wake up, you monkeys. You should realise you really don’t know much.”
— Dennis McKenna
“Take someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: he's free.”
― Jalalu'l-Din Rumi
“When you ask yourself, who am I, the important thing is to realize that you won't be able to answer that question. So anything the mind comes up with is wrong, no matter what you say. And even if you say, ah, I've got it: I'm consciousness! Wrong, because it's a concept. Who you are is not believing in a concept. It's just a concept. So who am I? This was recommended by Ramana Maharshi and other spiritual sages as a profound meditation. Who am I? That question, you can ask it yourself with eyes open or eyes closed and then wait for the answer, which is not going to come as an actual answer that you could identify. It's not going to come as a thought or a word or anything you can talk about or think. The answer is the space after the question 'who am I?'.”
— Eckhart Tolle
“What we call consciousness is memory.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
(This blew my mind. Because he discusses that everything that appears in consciousness are objects that are recognised from memory. If you go all the way back to baby-state before you have a memory full of stuff, all you see are surfaces and textures which you do not recognise.)
“Recognition and naming are one and the same. Whether I name it or not, the very recognition of you as a man or that as a pillow, itself means that the naming is already there, whether I use the word or not. That is the reason why I point out to the people who say that the word is not the thing, the word is the thing. If the word is not the thing, what the hell is it? It is all right for the philosophers to sit and discuss everlastingly that the word is not the thing. That implies that there is something there other than the word.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
“Thought is a mechanism for protecting the self. So anything that is born out of thought is destructive -- whether it is religious thought or scientific thought or political thought -- all of them are destructive.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
“All our actions are born out of ideas. Our ideas are thoughts passed on to us from generation to generation. Thought is not the instrument to help us to live in harmony with the life around us. That is why you create all these ecological problems, problems of pollution, and the problem of possibly destroying ourselves with the most destructive weapons that we have invented.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
— Alan Watts
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
― Ram Dass
“In these 28 years that I have been making candles, the world has changed very much. I think that if we don’t get back in touch with our ‘essential’ quality, we are going to disappear from this planet.
As a species we are living in challenging times: technology has allowed us to be more connected but we have somehow lost contact with the essential. The candles are my contribution to help us not forget that, and to rescue the light that resides inside each one of us.”
— Swami Yama
“If you can stop taking the world and your stuff seriously, you’ll be a lot happier.”
— me
"La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida, ay Dios"
Rubén Blades (Pedro Navaja)
“Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sickeningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryptofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”
― Terence McKenna
“But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.”
― Terence McKenna
“Culture is a perversion. It fetishises objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines.”
— Terence McKenna
“I may be a teacher in spiritual awakening, but that doesn't mean I consider myself some enlightened master. I'm just a person with a passion for the experience of mystery.”
— Tim Freke
“Everything that you repress goes underground and comes back stronger.”
— Osho
"What you resist persists"
~Carl Jung~
“Truths can be communicated only to people who have some understanding.”
— Osho
“The only difference between television and heroin is that on heroin you can still think your own thoughts.”
— Terence McKenna
“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”
~Oscar Wilde~
Increasingly I find quotes and truth in all things. The more mundane, the more ordinary the more supposedly ignorant, often the more profound.
For example the Brexit campaigns slogan,
**"Take Back Control" **
“A computer is like a bicycle for the mind.”
— Steve Jobs
“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”
— Terence McKenna
“The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”
— Terence McKenna
“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.”
— Terence McKenna
“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”
— Terence McKenna
“Believe and you will never find, and whatsoever you find will be nothing but the projection of your own belief – it will not be truth. What has truth to do with your believing? Doubt, and doubt totally, because doubt is a cleansing process. It takes out all junk from your mind.”
— Osho
“I am against prayer because it is basically business. It is bribing God. It is hoping that you can buttress his ego: ”You are great, you are compassionate, you can do anything you want.” And all this is being said because you want something. There is a motivation behind it; otherwise you would not pray, if there is no motivation.
I am against prayer. I am for meditation.”
— Osho
Dear Friends of the Buddha and her nones,
As we may know anyone can be a Buddha, even clansmen, such as Shakyamuni. However to be a leg end, Boddhi Satvia, Crazy Wise Gal … well that takes time, circumstance and enlightenment at the least …
Thank the dharma we have the almost countless leaves in the forest for the known future at least …
Un-Anon
The unforgiving are often the unforgiven too.
Anon
“Once you know that you are indomitable and there is no failure, you come to life disregarding your desires and fears, and live by truth alone.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
Q: The memory of my wonderful experiences haunts me. I want them back.
M: Because you want them back, you cannot have them. The state of craving for anything blocks all deeper experience. Nothing of value can happen to a mind which knows exactly what it wants. For nothing the mind can visualize and want is of much value.
(Question asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
“The right use of mind is in the service of love, truth, beauty.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“By focussing the mind on the sense of being, 'I am so-and-so' dissolves; 'I am a witness only' remains and that too submerges in 'I am all'. Then the all becomes the One and the One — yourself, not to be separate from me.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
"Don't go there 'cause you'll never return."
The Strokes
“If the truth can be presented in such a way as to be understood, it will be believed.”
— William Blake
"Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.”
-- Socrates
“The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light.”
― Timothy Leary
Q: Why should mere attention make all the difference?
M: So far your life was dark and restless (tamas and rajas). Attention, alertness, awareness, clarity, liveliness, vitality, are all manifestations of integrity, oneness with your true nature (sattva). It is in the nature of sattva to reconcile and neutralize tamas and rajas and rebuild the personality in accordance with the true nature of the self. Sattva is the faithful servant of the self, ever attentive and obedient.
Q: And I shall come to it through mere attention?
M: Do not undervalue attention. It means interest and also love. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your heart to it — which means attention. All the blessings flow from it.
(Questions asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
~Voltaire~
“Just as the colours in this carpet are brought out by light but light is not the colour, so is the world caused by you but you are not the world.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fulness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on ‘I am’, ‘I know’, ‘I love’ — with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
All I know is that I don't know nothin...And that's fine!
“There is nothing wrong with the senses, it is your imagination that misleads you. It covers up the world as it is, with what you imagine it to be — something existing independently of you and yet closely following your inherited, or acquired patterns. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude, which you do not see and which is the cause of sorrow. You cling to the idea that you were born into a world of pain and sorrow; I know that the world is a child of love, having its beginning, growth and fulfillment in love.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Explanations are meant to please the mind. They need not be true. Reality is indefinable and indescribable.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
Q: How is it that here my mind is engaged in high topics and finds dwelling on them easy and pleasant. When I return home I find myself forgetting all I have learnt here, worrying and fretting, unable to remember my real nature even for a moment. What may be the cause?
M: It is your childishness you are returning to. You are not fully grown up; there are levels left undeveloped because unattended. Just give full attention to what in you is crude and primitive, unreasonable and unkind, altogether childish, and you will open. It is the maturity of heart and mind that is essential. It comes effortlessly when the main, obstacle is removed — inattention, unawareness. In awareness you grow.
(Question asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
Q: How do I go about teaching the mind to be peaceful in practice?
M: Whenever a thought or emotion of desire or fear comes to your mind, just turn away
from it.
Q: By suppressing my thoughts and feelings I shall provoke a reaction.
M: I am not talking of suppression. Just refuse attention.
Q: Must I not use effort to arrest the movements of the mind?
M: It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet — you just find your way between.
(Questions asked of Nisargadatta Maharaj)
Q: Do you call it relinquishment, renunciation?
M: There is nothing to renounce. Enough if you stop acquiring. To give you must have, and to have you must take. Better don’t take. It is simpler than to practise renunciation, which leads to a dangerous form of ‘spiritual’ pride.
“You have a mind which is spread in time. One after another all things happen to you and the memory remains. There is nothing wrong in it. The problem arises only when the memory of past pains and pleasures — which are essential to all organic life — remains as a reflex, dominating behaviour. This reflex takes the shape of ‘I’ and uses the body and the mind for its purposes, which are invariably in search for pleasure or flight from pain. When you recognize the ‘I’ as it is, a bundle of desires and fears, and the sense of ‘mine’, as embracing all things and people needed for the purpose of avoiding pain and securing pleasure, you will see that the ‘I’ and the ‘mine’ are false ideas, having no foundation in reality. Created by the mind, they rule their creator as long as it takes them to be true; when questioned, they dissolve.
The ‘I’ and ‘mine’, having no existence in themselves, need a support which they find in the body. The body becomes their point of reference. When you talk of ‘my’ husband and ‘my’ children, you mean the body’s husband and the body’s children. Give up the idea of being the body and face the question: Who am I? At once a process will be set in motion which will bring back reality, or, rather, will take the mind to reality. Only, you must not be afraid.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj