Our True Nature
Nisargadatta Maharaj
on Seeing the True as True ....
“You can only know your self by being yourself without any attempt at self-definition and self-description."
When I say ‘I am’, I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus, I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is known.
The fact is you. The only thing you know for sure is: ‘here and now I am’. Remove the ‘here and now’, the ‘I am’ remains unassailable.
’I am’ is ever fresh. You do need to remember in order to ‘be’ As a matter of fact, before you can experience anything, there must be the sense of being. At present your being is mixed up with experiencing.
All you need to do is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences.
Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences, and you will no longer be misled by names and forms.
Be content with what you are sure of.
And the only thing you can be sure of is ‘I am’.
Stay with it and reject everything else.
Before you conceptualize anything, you are, even before the knowingness, you are.
Awareness is ever there.
It need not be realized.
You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting; the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.
The perceived cannot be the perceiver.
Whatever you see, hear or think of, remember - you are not what happens, you are (s)he to whom it happens.
What is really your own, you are not conscious of.
What you are conscious of is neither you nor yours. Yours is the power of perception, not what you perceive.
Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that while all happens, comes and goes, you alone are, the changeless among the changeful, the self-evident among the inferred.
Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications.
What changes is not real, what is real does not change. Now, what is it in you that does not change?
You must realize yourself as the immovable behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens.
As the person is a changing stream of mental objects that I as the subject take to be my body-mind, I cannot be a person. I am, but I can't be this or that.
