It is about a touch. Without any reason, something arises spontaneously, within something that is no experience, no knowledge, no form, not ‘a thing’ whatsoever. Only when you notice it, you can say ‘something arises’, not before. So manifestation and the noticing of it are one and the same. This is a most subtle kind of touch. It is this very first vibration, this most subtle kind of touch which Nisargadatta called ‘consciousness’, the principle ‘I am’.
The crucial element of the quote is to be found in the last paragraph: “That knowledge of ‘I am’ is the greatest foe and the greatest friend.” It includes everything – and consequently you can be left here with an overwhelming feeling of disorientation. Very often this disorientation is only reinforced in other passages, by the emphasis on the illusory element (‘the greatest enemy’), because that which indeed is real, the Absolute, is described as ‘something that can not be experienced’. However here Nisargadatta most strongly says that indeed, although it might be your greatest enemy, you would do well to fully worship it. So whether illusion or not, at this moment it does not matter at all, because ultimately it is only God, the ever creating principle that brings about everything. It is true this means that you can be seduced to cling to a form, but also by the same token you can be liberated from this clinging by the same principle.
Worship This Touch of ‘I Am’
In one of the Puranas, the ‘old books’ of Hinduism, we find a passage that bears resemblance to the quote. “She, when pleased, becomes propitious and the cause of the freedom of man.”2 It is all about worshipping this principle as totally as possible, to pay attention to it, to please it. The sense of ‘I am’ is so common, so ordinary, that you overlook it easily and hence Nisargadatta strongly emphasizes not to do so, but on the contrary to fully honour precisely this: to worship it as the highest God. He keeps hammering at it to keep quiet here and to devote yourself fully to this consciousness, to this touch.
“‘You are’, that itself is the atman.* Atman is not to know anything; that very knowledge is the atman. Worship atman as the God; there is nothing else. You worship that principle only; nothing else needs to be done. This very knowledge ‘you are’ will lead to the highest, to the Ultimate. This ‘you are’ is there so long as the vital breath is present. And when you worship that ‘you are’ as the manifest Brahman [Saguna Brahman] only, you reach immortality. … You must continually remember, ‘chew the cud’. … You must continually think about it.”3
We may wonder what exactly is ‘worship’, because the rise of a verbal prayer is often associated with this word. Worship could be described as continually paying attention to something with your whole heart. In daily life the best example of this is being in love. If you are in love, your attention is totally going towards your beloved, whether you ‘want’ to do so or not. You are full of it and everything that is going in the direction of the beloved occurs effortlessly. This you may call worship. So now we are invited to practise this worship, this being in love in regard to our ordinary consciousness itself, to formless experience as such, ‘the touch of beingness’, ‘the feeling of beingness’. How are we supposed to put this worship into practice?
It means that you totally merge with this beingness, with this primal vibration. Take all of your passion to this unlocalizable ‘place’, applaud this vibration and do not be worried about the fact that this is still a form of duality, a form of energy or ‘corporality’. Worship Her, cheer Her, do not hold back anything, give yourself totally to Her, so that you may melt with Her. Then She shows you, within the merging, that ‘two’ has ceased to exist. She being an enemy can only be the case if you let yourself be carried along by Her temptation.
“The very source of all happiness is your beingness. Establish yourself there, be there. If you get involved with the flow of Maya there will be misery. Do you understand what the flow is? All that Maya, the activities. You try to derive pleasure from the activities; this is the product of beingness. Be still in your beingness. What I have told you, remember it, chew it, recollect it. It will lead you to the stillness. Establish in that knowledge.”4
Knowingness and Surrender
It is here Nisargadatta points out how in the ‘supreme principle’, the ‘I am’ principle, the liberating element can be distinguished from the seducing, binding element.* Sometimes I compare this with a fountain in a pond. The ‘I am’ principle is the mouth of the fountain. At that point the water is powerfully spouting up high, causing thousands of drops being shaped to form together what is called a ‘fountain’. The fountain’s mouth has hardly taken form yet; there is only the experience of the propelling-force to be, the drive towards form. Then the advice is: stay at the fountain’s mouth, abide there, and surrender to its formless vibration. Do not try in any way to manipulate the force itself.
“What natural processes can you stop? Everything is spontaneous. Presently you are in the consciousness, which is stirring, vibrant. Don’t think you are something separate from this stirring, vibrant consciousness.”5
By staying at the fountain’s mouth, worshipping That which is giving all this unfoldment, you are set free.
“The devotee with his firm determination and God by his fascination for devotion are attracted towards each other, and the moment they come face to face they merge, the one into the other. The devotee loses his phenomenal consciousness automatically, and when it returns, he finds that he has lost his identity – lost into that of God which cannot be separated again;”6 and:
“I am the God, I am the devotee, and I am the worshipping; all the same, one common principle.”7
God’s binding aspect of Maya, Seducer, fades away as soon as you understand that you need not let yourself be carried away by Her to Her forms of creation. You just have to notice What is seeing Her.
“Meditate on that which knows you are sitting here. Your feeling that your body is here is identification with the body, but that which knows that this body is sitting here is the expression of the Absolute.”8
The liberating character of the ‘I am’ principle is present as much in the knowing aspect as in the aspect of surrender. At this point the approaches of jñana (knowingness, understanding) and bhakti (devotion) are blending totally into one another. Sometimes this means that surrender shows discrimination is no longer necessary, and sometimes this means that understanding prevents you from making the mistake that your surrender is submission to the transient forms themselves. Surrender is right only when it is surrender to That which is permanent.
“First, I have seduced Maya, and once the Maya surrendered to me, I had no other use for Maya so I threw her out.”9
The Dynamic Aspect of Consciousness
Noticing the body sitting here, for instance, could be called ‘knowingness’. This knowingness is in fact Knowing as such, and this is the liberating element, because knowingness is literally the expression of the Absolute, as said in the quote above. Absolute Consciousness or Knowing* expresses itself as
‘knowing something’. So ‘consciousness’ and ‘the Absolute’ are not two different things, as is often imagined on the basis of many of Nisargadatta’s statements. There is only one Consciousness (or Awareness; it depends on the language-framework of the speaker or translator which term is considered ‘correct’). It has an Absolute aspect and a dynamic, living, experiencing aspect, the ‘touch’. The only thing needed to see is that a vibration is always the knowing of that vibration, and that the knowing itself is Absolute Knowing; that there is not any separation in there. Within the Absolute there is just nothing to know, hence Nisargadatta calls this the ‘state of no-knowingness’ or ‘nomind’, the state in which attention is dissolved in itself.
“There is only one state, not two. When the ‘I am-ness’ is there [which means ‘consciousness’], in that consciousness you will have many experiences, but the ‘I am’ and the Absolute are not two. In the Absolute the ‘I am-ness’ comes, and then the experience takes place.”10
; When Nisargadatta referred to ‘I am’, he often used the term chetana, which has been translated by the word ‘consciousness’. This word remains tricky, because most Advaita teachers use the term ‘consciousness’ to precisely refer to the Ultimate. Because of this difference, when we use the word consciousness in translating Nisargadatta’s texts, we should always clearly understand that we are referring to ‘consciousness as-meant-by-Nisargadatta’. Nisargadatta sometimes defined this consciousness as “that which gives sentience to the person”.11 On another occasion, he used a synonym “the primordial experience”12 (as being different from ‘an experience’ – by which he meant: “an event becomes an experience only when I am emotionally involved”13). He described the proportion between the different levels as follows:
“There can be no experience of the Absolute, as it is beyond all experience. On the other hand, the Self is the experiencing factor in every experience and thus, in a way, validates the multiplicity of experiences.”14
In other words: the Absolute is uninterruptedly the case. Although it cannot be experienced, it constantly bestows reality to everything that is being experienced. This bestowing quality is in a way being ‘transmitted’ by the Self, the ‘primordial Experience’, which in its turn bestows temporary reality to the manifold experiences.
The Marriage of Two Qualities (Sattva And Rajas)
Being strongly influenced in his linguistic usage by the Samkhya tradition, an ancient Indian school of Dualism, Nisargadatta sometimes explained the process of becoming bound by using the terms sattva, rajas and tamas, borrowed from Samkhya. These are the three gunas, the qualities determining and colouring all our actions (rajas is the exciting, the restless, that which incites to activity; tamas the inert, the solidifying, obscuring; and sattva the quality keeping the balance, the quality of beingness, knowingness, stillness and lucidity).
Nisargadatta described the transition proceeding from sattva as follows:
“During the waking state, to know that you are [sattva] is itself a misery; but since you are preoccupied with so many other things, you are able to sustain that waking state. This quality of beingness [sattva], the knowledge ‘I am’, cannot tolerate itself. It cannot stand itself, alone, just knowing itself. Therefore, that rajas-guna is there. It takes the beingness for a ride in various activities, so that it does not dwell only in itself; it is very difficult to sustain that [sattva] state. And tamas-guna is the basest quality. What it is doing is that it provides one with the facility to claim authorship for all the activities – the feeling ‘I am the doer’. Rajas-guna takes one into all the activities, and tamas-guna claims authorship or doership for those activities.”15
One could say that in fact the power of rajas originally is a rather free power, which in itself does not necessarily need to hook on to something. It is only the effect of tamas that makes things glue together. This quality causes us to be fixated, that we are attached to something, that we isolate ourselves, that we worry, etcetera. Because of tamas we come to stick a personal story or history onto a spontaneous activity.
One could interpret Nisargadatta’s advice as follows: you cannot but allow rajas to arise, because it is inherent to the spontaneous creative power – just welcome her and keep on recognizing the starting point, the very first ‘touch’ (which Nisargadatta also called the ‘pinprick’). The advice is ‘recognize the experiencing of the touch’. The touch or pinprick is what I called ‘the mouth of the fountain’: at that place you are as it were witnessing the marriage of sattva and rajas.* It is a marriage between stillness and vibrating power. Remain in stillness (sattva) in the vibrating and splashing power (rajas).
‘I’ Is Term For all Levels
By dedicating yourself to this, by honouring this pinprick, this ‘consciousness’, your search ceases to exist. Here you can let go of the ‘doing’, the attempt to let yourself pass beyond this consciousness, because really that won’t help.
“You can never isolate yourself from the consciousness unless consciousness is pleased with you and gets rid of you. Consciousness opens the gate for you to transcend consciousness. There are two aspects: one is conceptual, dynamic consciousness which is full of concepts, and the other is transcendent consciousness. Even the concept ‘I am’ is not there. Conceptual, qualitative Brahman (Saguna Brahman), the one that is full of concepts and is qualitative, is the outcome of the [reflection of Awareness (Nirguna Brahman or Para Brahman) in the] functioning body.”*
So although it initially is important and correct to distinguish between consciousness (chetana) and Consciousness (or Awareness; Chit), it makes sense at a certain moment just to embrace consciousness in its being ‘the touch’, so that all resistance melts away, and with it all duality. Awareness is always already in harmony or peace with Its present object. The touch is the Helper which anoints you in your and Her surrender; it shows you that you have always been unaffected and unimpaired, free and unseparated, without the need to strive for it. So on the one hand Maharaj emphasizes:
“I, the Absolute, am not this ‘I am-ness’,”16 but on the other hand:
“Understand that this ‘I’ is not different at different levels. As the Absolute, it is the ‘I’ which in manifesting needs a form. The same Absolute ‘I’ becomes the manifested ‘I’, and in the manifested ‘I’ it is the consciousness which is the source of everything. In the manifested state it is the Absolute-with-consciousness.”17
It is striking that here, as in many other places, Maharaj keeps on using the word ‘I’ as a word for the Ultimate. Apart from calling himself very often “I, the Absolute”, he for instance says: “Nothing exists except me. Only I exist”,18 and “When the state of beingness is totally swallowed, whatever remains is that eternal ‘I’.”19
So ‘I’ appears to be the term for us on all three levels: the person thinks and feels ‘I’, the touch of beingness is the experience of ‘I’ without thinking (without ‘mine’), and the Ultimate is ‘I’, without experiencing it. This means that the Real which we are, is always so already, and now already. Also, in the midst of identification with a certain form, there is the invitation to recognize the most nearby, namely ‘I’, in its essential nature.
Is ‘I’ a door? The Teacher answers:
“There are no doors to Para Brahman, dear son.”20
* The term ‘supreme principle’ is in translations of Nisargadatta-texts always designation for the ‘I am’ principle, not for the Absolute.
* See footnote on page 59 for clarification on Nisargadatta’s use of the term atman.
* In the next chapter this will be elucidated. An illustration of a pill will be used, for demonstrating the two aspects that need to be distinguished. See page 54. Many of the terms used by Nisargadatta for both aspects are depicted, to show where in his opinion difference is relevant, and where not.
* In the English language it is very hard to find a word for this Knowing-as-such, this Knowing in which ‘no thing’ is known. The term ‘knowledge’ seems always to remain associated with a content, so a better term for this Knowing-as-such in fact could be ‘No-knowledge’. The paradox is, this No-knowledge state or No-beingness state does ‘know’. In the language of (one of the translators of) Nisargadatta: “The no-beingness state, the no-consciousness state alone knows that there is a consciousness.” (Seeds, p. 27). See also the discussion on terminology in The Experience of Nothingness, p. 18-21. Nisargadatta argues there that the point is: the word ‘knowledge’ does bring in the qualities (gunas).
* ‘Marriage’ is also the term Nisargadatta used for the relationship between Shiva and Shakti. See for this: Medicine, p. 122 and Prior, p. 26.
* Consciousness, p. 97. The addition between brackets is made in order to accentuate the connection between consciousness and Awareness (or Consciousness). This is made on the basis of numerous comments in the old Advaita tradition, and on the basis of I am That, p. 65: “consciousness (chetana) appears by reflection of Awareness in matter”. See also I am T
hat, p. 274; and Seeds, p. 170.
FOUR
The Medicine (‘I am’ is a door)
After having considered the view on ‘I’ by the Big Three of twentieth-century Advaita, it would be useful to conclude this with a kind of summary. I would like to do this on the basis of the concept ‘I am’, which was described in the last chapter. As far as I know, Nisargadatta Maharaj never pronounced “‘I’ is a door.” Yet he did, in fact, say a few times: “‘I am’ is a door.”1 As described in the last chapter, Nisargadatta considered ‘I am’ as something very specific, some ‘level’ between the levels of the Absolute and the individual. From the perspective of the Advaita tradition, this might be called revolutionary: it is true this concept had already been given to him by his teacher, Siddharameshwar Maharaj, however, neither Ramana Maharshi nor Atmananda for example, interpreted the expression ‘I am’ this way. Ramana for instance said:
“You say … ‘I am speaking’, ‘I am working’, etcetera. Hyphenate
‘I am’ in all of them. Thus I-AM. That is the abiding and fundamental Reality. … If [the mind] is turned within, it becomes still in course of time, and that ‘I-AM’ alone prevails. ‘I-AM’ is the whole Truth.”2
I is a Door Page 4