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Reality must be always real. It is not with forms and names. That which underlies these is the Reality. It underlies limitations, being itself limitless. It is not bound. It underlies unrealities, itself being real. Reality is that which is. It is as it is. It transcends speech. It is beyond the expressions 'existence, non-existence', etc.

The reality which is the mere consciousness that remains when ignorance is destroyed along with knowledge of objects, alone is the Self (Atma). In that Brahma-swarupa (real form of Brahman), which is abundant Self-awareness, there is not the least ignorance.

The reality which shines fully, without misery and without a body, not only when the world is known but also when the world is not known, is your real form (nija-swarupa).

The radiance of consciousness-bliss, in the form of one awareness shining equally within and without, is the supreme and blissful primal reality. Its form is silence and it is declared by Jnanis (Self-realised) to be the final and unobstructable state of true knowledge (jnana).

Know that jnana alone is non-attachment; jnana alone is purity; jnana is the attainment of God; jnana which is devoid of forgetfulness of Self alone is immortality; jnana alone is everything.

Ramana Maharshi - Be As You Are

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He knows what is best and when and how to do it.

Leave everything entirely to Him.

His is the burden: you have no longer any cares.

All your cares are His.

Such is surrender.

This is bhakti.

(Talk 450)

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Avidya is only our ignorance and nothing more. It is ignorance or forgetfulness of the Self. Can there be darkness before the Sun? Similarly, can there be ignorance before the Self-evident and Self-luminous Self? If you know the Self there will be no darkness, no ignorance and no misery.

It is the mind which feels the trouble, misery, etc. Darkness never comes nor goes. See the Sun and there is no darkness. Similarly, see the Self and avidya will be found not to exist.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

...from Talk 363; 20th February, 1937

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papaji experience

Papaji (Hariwansh Lal Poonja) (1910-97)

In the first few months after my realization, I did not have a single thought. I could go to the office and perform my duties without ever having a thought in my mind. It did not take me long to realize that a mind and
thoughts are not necessary to function in the world. When one abides as the Self, some divine power takes charge of one’s life. All actions then take place spontaneously and are performed very efficiently, without much mental effort or activity.

On one of my visits to Tiruvannamalai, I took my seven-year old daughter with me. She sat before the Maharshi and went into a deep meditative trance. She spent several hours in that condition before returning to her normal waking state. Major Chadwick [No.42], who was watching
all this, approached the Maharshi and said, “I have been here for more than ten years, but I have never had an experience like this. This seven year old girl seems to have had this experience without making any efforts. How can this be?”The Maharshi merely smiled and said, “How do you
know that she is not older than you?”

My daughter did not want to go back to Madras.The Maharshi advised her to first finish her education and then come back if she wanted to do so. If anyone asked her, “What happened that day when you were in
trance before the Maharshi?” she could not answer and just cried.

I would sometimes accompany the Maharshi on his walks around the Ashram. I watched him remonstrate with the workers who wanted to prostrate to him rather than carry on their work. Everything
he did contained a lesson for us. Every step he took was a teaching in itself. The Maharshi preferred to work in a low-key and in an unspectacular way. There was no demonstration of his power, just a subtle emanation of grace, which seeped into the hearts of those who came into contact with him.

One incident that I witnessed illustrates very well the subtle andindirect way the Maharshi worked. A woman brought her dead son to the Ashram. The boy had apparently died of snakebite. The woman cried and begged the Maharshi to bring him back to life, but he did not respond to her repeated requests. After a few hours, the Ashram manager made her take
the corpse away. As she was leaving the Ashram, she met some kind of a snake charmer who claimed that he could cure her son. The man did something to the boy’s hand where he had been bitten, and the boy immediately revived.

The devotees attributed the miraculous cure to the Maharshi, saying, when a problem is brought to the attention of a jnani, some ‘automatic divine activity’ brings about a solution. According to this theory, the Maharshi has done nothing consciously to help the boy, but at a deeper, unconscious level, his awareness of the problem has caused the right
man to appear at the right place. The Maharshi, of course, disclaimed all
responsibility for the miraculous cure.‘Is that so?’ was his only response
when told about the boy’s dramatic recovery. This was typical of him.

The Maharshi never performed any miracles. The only ‘miracles’ he indulged in were those of inner transformation. By a word, a look, a gesture, or merely by remaining in silence, he could quieten the minds of people around him, enabling them to become aware of who they really were.

In July 1947, a month before Independence, Devaraja Mudaliar
[No.35] told me about the problems which I could face if I did not bring my family to India from the Punjab, which was soon to become a part of Pakistan. I told him, “I am not going. I cannot leave the company of the Maharshi.” I had reached a stage in my relationship with the Maharshi where I loved him so much, I couldn’t take my eyes off him or contemplate the thought of going to the other end of the country for an indefinite period.

When Mudaliar told the Maharshi that Poonja’s family seems to be stranded in West Punjab and he did not want to go there, the Maharshi told me, “There will be a lot of trouble in the area you come from. Why don’t you go and bring your family out?” Though this amounted to an order; I was still hesitant. I then explained the main reason for my reluctance to go: “I am far too attached to your physical form. I cannot leave you. I love you so much that I cannot take my eyes off you.”

“I am with you wherever you are,” was his answer. From the way he spoke to me I could see that he was determined that I should go. I accepted the decision. I prostrated before him and for the first time in my life I touched his feet as an act of veneration, love, and respect. He will not
normally let anyone touch his feet, but this was a special occasion and he did not object. Before I rose, I collected some of the dust beneath his feet and put it in my pocket as a sacred memento. I also asked for his blessings because I had an intuition that this was our final parting.

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work

You imagine one cannot do work if the mind (identification) is killed. Why do you suppose that it is the mind alone that can make one do work? There may be other causes which can also produce activity. Look at this clock, for instance. It is working without a mind. 

Again suppose we say the jnani has a mind. His mind is very different from the ordinary man’s mind. He is like the man who is hearing a story told with his mind all on some distant object. The mind rid of vasanas, though doing work, is not doing work. On the other hand, if the mind is full of vasanas, it is doing work even if the body is not active or moving.

- Sri Ramana Maharishi.

💛

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Be nobody.

When you are somebody there are so many duties that even to be yourself is such a hassle. When you are nobody, you escape from every trap. It is immediate freedom!

--Mooji

Osho

BELOVED OSHO, WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF A SANNYASIN?

"The third quality of a sannyasin is a trust in one's own organism.

People trust others, the sannyasin trusts his own organism. Body, mind, soul, all are included. If he feels like loving he flows in love. If he does not feel like loving he says "Sorry" --but he never pretends.

A non-sannyasin goes on pretending. His life is a life lived through masks. His whole life becomes a false, pseudo life, a parody. And he is never satisfied, naturally; he cannot be, because satisfaction comes only out of authentic living. If you are not feeling loving you have to say so; there is no need to pretend. If you are feeling angry you have to say so. You have to be true to your organism, you have to trust your organism. And you will be surprised: the more you trust, the more the organism's wisdom becomes very, very clear to you.

Your body has its own wisdom --it carries the wisdom of the centuries in its cells. Remember to trust your own organism. When you feel that the body is saying don't eat, stop immediately. When the body is saying eat, then don't bother whether the scriptures say to fast or not. If your body says eat three times a day, perfectly good. If it says eat one time a day, perfectly good. Start learning how to listen to your body, because it is your body. You are in it; you have to respect it, and you have to trust it. It is your temple; it is sacrilegious to impose things on your body. For no other motive should anything be imposed! And this will not only teach you trust in your body, this will teach you, by and by, a trust in existence too --because your body is part of existence. Then your trust will grow, and you will trust the trees and the stars and the moon and the sun and the oceans: you will trust people. But the beginning of the trust has to be trust in your own organism. Trust your heart.

When you don't want to make love, then love is the ugliest thing in the world. Only the most beautiful can be the most ugly. Love is one of the most beautiful experiences, but only when you are flowing in it, when it is spontaneous, when it is passionate, when you are full of it, overpowered by it, possessed by it, drunk with it, absorbed in it --only then. Then it takes you to the highest peak of joy. But if you are not possessed in it, and you are not even feeling any love for your wife or your husband, and you are making it... then the English expression is right: making love. Then you are making it, it is not happening. It is ugly, it is prostitution. To whom you are doing it is not the point; it is prostitution. It is criminal. And this is not going to make you in any way spiritual. You will only become sexually repressed, that's all. If you make love you will feel guilty, if you don't make love you will feel guilty.

If your organisms are saying, "Be together, grow together, flow together"; if your organism is feeling happy and thrilled and excited and there is ecstasy, go with the woman one life, two lives, three lives, as many lives as you want be together, and you will be coming closer and closer to God. And your intimacy will have a quality of spirituality.

A sannyasin is one who trusts in his own organism, and that trust helps him to relax into his being, and helps him to relax into the totality of existence. It brings a general acceptance of oneself and others. It gives a kind of rootedness, centering. And then there is great strength and power, because you are centered in your own body, in your own being. You have roots in the soil. Otherwise you see people uprooted, like trees that have been pulled up from the soil. They are simply dying, they are not living. That's why there is not much joy in life. You don't see the quality of laughter; the celebration is missing. And even if people celebrate that too is false. Celebration has to happen first in your own home, at close quarters. Then it becomes a great tidal wave and spreads all over existence."--OSHO...

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CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

Q: What is liberation?

M: It is to know that you were not born. 

'Be still and know that I am God'.

To be still is not to think, 'I am God'.

You have lost hold of your Self. Turn inwards. If you look for the mind's source, it will vanish leaving the Self behind. You will become conscious of it later but that does not mean that your nature is different from meditation even now. 

Stillness or peace is realization. There is no moment when the Self is not. So long as there is doubt or the feeling of non­ realization, an attempt must be made to rid oneself of these thoughts. The thoughts are due to identification of the Self with the non-self. 

When non-self disappears, the Self alone remains. To make room, it is enough that cramping is removed. 

Space is not created afresh. No! — more than that — space is there, even in the cramping.

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Know that that which is worthy [to be attained] is only Silence, which is mere Self, the [wrong] knowledge ‘I’ having died as ignorance [ajnana]. If you ask the truth, “Why [is it so]?”, [it is because that state of Silence is] the space [of Jnana] in which nothing exists to desire and [thereby] be a cause of misery.

('Guru Vachaka Kovai':  1012; drawing is by Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.)

[Note by Sri Sadhu Om and Michael James: 'Desire is the sole cause of misery, and it can arise only if something other than oneself exists. Therefore, since Silence, the state of Self, is the space of mere consciousness in which nothing other than Self exists, it alone is worthy to be attained. In order to attain this Silence, the ego, the wrong knowledge ‘I am the body’, must be destroyed, having being found to be nothing but a non-existent ignorance.']

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Avidya is only our ignorance and nothing more. It is ignorance or forgetfulness of the Self. Can there be darkness before the Sun? Similarly, can there be ignorance before the Self-evident and Self-luminous Self? If you know the Self there will be no darkness, no ignorance and no misery.

It is the mind which feels the trouble, misery, etc. Darkness never comes nor goes. See the Sun and there is no darkness. Similarly, see the Self and avidya will be found not to exist.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

...from Talk 363; 20th February, 1937

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Is there death for you? For whom is death? The body which dies, were you aware of it, did you have it, during sleep? That which does not exist always, but exists at one time and not at another, cannot be real. You exist always and you alone are therefore real.

'Day by Day with Bhagavan'

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Q: What are the hindrances to the realization of Reality?

M: Memory, chiefly, plus habits of thought and accumulated tendencies.

Q: How can we get rid of these hindrances?

M: Discover the Self through meditation, by tracing every thought back to its origin which is the mind. Never allow thought to continue. If it does, it will be unending; take it back to its source which is mind, and they (thoughts and mind) will die of inaction, for the mind only exists 'by thought; take away thought and there is no mind. 

As each doubt and depression arises, ask yourself, 'Who is it that doubts? Who is it that is depressed?' Tear everything away until there is nothing but the source left. 

Live only in the present. Realization is already here. The state free from thoughts is the one real state. 

There is no such action as realization. Is there anyone who is not realizing the Self? Does anyone deny their existence? Because we admit our existence, how is it that we do not know our Self? 

It is thoughts that separate us from our happiness. How do we know that we exist? If you say it is because of the world around us, then how do you know that you existed in sleep?

p 170

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This empty consciousness is the same as what is called Brahman. Some call it knowledge and others an empty vacuum. 

Some call it the spirit, and others use the term embodied spirit (puruṣa). Others call it the empty Intellect, and Shaivites give it the names of Śiva and the soul.. 

Oṃ Śri Gurubhyo Namaḥ Hariḥ Oṃ

Maharṣi Vasiṣṭha in Yoga Vasistha Maharamayana

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CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

Q: What is liberation?

M: It is to know that you were not born. 

'Be still and know that I am God'.

To be still is not to think, 'I am God'.

You have lost hold of your Self. Turn inwards. If you look for the mind's source, it will vanish leaving the Self behind. You will become conscious of it later but that does not mean that your nature is different from meditation even now. 

Stillness or peace is realization. There is no moment when the Self is not. So long as there is doubt or the feeling of non­ realization, an attempt must be made to rid oneself of these thoughts. The thoughts are due to identification of the Self with the non-self. 

When non-self disappears, the Self alone remains. To make room, it is enough that cramping is removed. 

Space is not created afresh. No! — more than that — space is there, even in the cramping.

5

BELOVED OSHO, WHAT ARE THE QUALITIES OF A SANNYASIN?

"The third quality of a sannyasin is a trust in one's own organism.

People trust others, the sannyasin trusts his own organism. Body, mind, soul, all are included. If he feels like loving he flows in love. If he does not feel like loving he says "Sorry" --but he never pretends.

A non-sannyasin goes on pretending. His life is a life lived through masks. His whole life becomes a false, pseudo life, a parody. And he is never satisfied, naturally; he cannot be, because satisfaction comes only out of authentic living. If you are not feeling loving you have to say so; there is no need to pretend. If you are feeling angry you have to say so. You have to be true to your organism, you have to trust your organism. And you will be surprised: the more you trust, the more the organism's wisdom becomes very, very clear to you.

Your body has its own wisdom --it carries the wisdom of the centuries in its cells. Remember to trust your own organism. When you feel that the body is saying don't eat, stop immediately. When the body is saying eat, then don't bother whether the scriptures say to fast or not. If your body says eat three times a day, perfectly good. If it says eat one time a day, perfectly good. Start learning how to listen to your body, because it is your body. You are in it; you have to respect it, and you have to trust it. It is your temple; it is sacrilegious to impose things on your body. For no other motive should anything be imposed! And this will not only teach you trust in your body, this will teach you, by and by, a trust in existence too --because your body is part of existence. Then your trust will grow, and you will trust the trees and the stars and the moon and the sun and the oceans: you will trust people. But the beginning of the trust has to be trust in your own organism. Trust your heart.

When you don't want to make love, then love is the ugliest thing in the world. Only the most beautiful can be the most ugly. Love is one of the most beautiful experiences, but only when you are flowing in it, when it is spontaneous, when it is passionate, when you are full of it, overpowered by it, possessed by it, drunk with it, absorbed in it --only then. Then it takes you to the highest peak of joy. But if you are not possessed in it, and you are not even feeling any love for your wife or your husband, and you are making it... then the English expression is right: making love. Then you are making it, it is not happening. It is ugly, it is prostitution. To whom you are doing it is not the point; it is prostitution. It is criminal. And this is not going to make you in any way spiritual. You will only become sexually repressed, that's all. If you make love you will feel guilty, if you don't make love you will feel guilty.

If your organisms are saying, "Be together, grow together, flow together"; if your organism is feeling happy and thrilled and excited and there is ecstasy, go with the woman one life, two lives, three lives, as many lives as you want be together, and you will be coming closer and closer to God. And your intimacy will have a quality of spirituality.

A sannyasin is one who trusts in his own organism, and that trust helps him to relax into his being, and helps him to relax into the totality of existence. It brings a general acceptance of oneself and others. It gives a kind of rootedness, centering. And then there is great strength and power, because you are centered in your own body, in your own being. You have roots in the soil. Otherwise you see people uprooted, like trees that have been pulled up from the soil. They are simply dying, they are not living. That's why there is not much joy in life. You don't see the quality of laughter; the celebration is missing. And even if people celebrate that too is false. Celebration has to happen first in your own home, at close quarters. Then it becomes a great tidal wave and spreads all over existence."--OSHO...

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