The idea that you must go to Tiruvannamalai and see Maharshi is only a function of the intellect.
Really no help is required.
You are already in your original state; how can anyone help you to arrive where you already are? The help given is only to clear out your wrong notions. The great men, the gurus can help only by removing the obstacles in your way.
- Bhagavan in Conscious Immortality
COMPLETE FAILURE
Q: I want what you wanted.
Adya: What did I want?
Q: You wanted to become enlightened.
Adya: I wanted to become enlightened. Ok. It didn’t work out.
Q: Did you at least become awake?
Adya: No. Awakeness became awake. Enlightenment becomes enlightened. The me, the little guy, little Steven Larry Gray, that meditated in his parent’s backyard for hours and hours a day, every single day, in the morning and the evening, and did nothing but do the good Buddhist thing, diligently, terribly, terribly disciplined, he didn’t get enlightened. He never made it. He never crossed the river of nirvana, it never happened to him.
What he did was, for whatever reason, maybe the seeking was necessary, is he got exhausted. It just completely exhausted itself. The little one that was trying to get awake and enlightened got so exhausted, so stricken by I can’t do this, I can’t, and I could no longer tell myself I can. That means the complete and utter destruction of denial. Because the denial is “I can”. And your experience keeps showing you “you can’t.”
And so I got so exhausted psychically, internally, emotionally, spiritually that I couldn’t keep it up anymore. And i had to see the truth. I was willing to see the truth only because I was exhausted. I can’t do it. And in that “I can’t do it,” and not as a spiritual strategy, emptiness woke up out of the seeker. The seeker didn’t wake up. Consciousness woke up from the seeker, from the personality, from the “me” that was trying so hard.
— Adyashanti
from “Big Sword Swinging”
LIBERATION
Questioner: Kindly tell us how you realized.
Maharaj: I met my Guru when I was 34 and realized by 37.
Q: What happened? What was the change?
M: Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. I saw that in the ocean of pure awareness, on the surface of the universal consciousness, the numberless waves of the phenomenal worlds arise and subside beginninglessly and endlessly. As consciousness, they are all me. As events they are all mine.
There is a mysterious power that looks after them. That power is awareness, Self, Life, God, whatever name you give it. It is the foundation, the ultimate support of all that is, just like gold is the basis for all gold jewellery. And it is so intimately ours! Abstract the name and shape from the jewellery and the gold becomes obvious. Be free of name and form and of the desires and fears they create, then what remains?
Q: Nothingness.
M: Yes, the void remains. But the void is full to the brim. It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.
- I AM THAT ch 12
Question: In my present state, is there sufficient faith, humility and surrender in me? If not, how to make them complete?
Ramana: You are perfect and complete, so abandon the idea of incompleteness. There is nothing to be destroyed. Ahankara, the individual "I", is not a real thing. It is the mind that makes the effort and the mind is not real. Just as it is not necessary to kill a rope that one imagines to be a snake, so also there is no need to kill the mind. Knowing the form of the mind makes the mind disappear. That which is forever non-existent is already removed.
Fixing the mind firmly on Brahman , the point of concentration, restraining sense organ in their respective centers. Holding the body steady and giving up all thoughts for it's maintenance . Attaining identity with Brahman and being one with it . Continuously drink the bliss of Brahman in your own self. Of what use of other things? They are entirely false. Empty illusion.
~ vivekchudamani
Adi shakaracharya
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