Maharaj continued: The basic cause of the confusion is the mistaken belief that there is anentity, an autonomous, objective entity, to experience the happenings — called 'birth' and 'death',and the duration between the two, called 'life'. In reality, all these are mere conceptual images inconsciousness, which have as much substance as images on the television screen or in a dream.
Do try to understand, he continued, what phenomena are — all phenomena. They are only appearances in consciousness. Who perceives them? Consciousness itself, through the mechanism of the twin concepts of space and time, without which appearances would not have a perceivable form and could not be cognized. And the cognition itself takes place through a division of the mind (mind being the content of consciousness) into subject and object; and the reasoning and selecting process based on the duality of the inter-dependent opposites — love and hate, happiness and unhappiness, sin and merit etc.
Once this process is correctly observed, it can be easily understood that there can be no actual individual to be born, to live or to die. There is a manifestation, an appearance in consciousness, generally known as 'being born' — an illusion in space. When this manifested appearance goes through its temporal span and comes to its end, there occurs another illusion in temporality that is known as 'dying'. This simple process cannot be perceived as such so long as one persists in the notion of a 'live-er' of a life and 'die-er' of a death.
Maharaj then concluded: That 'material', or 'chemical', which was conceived in the mother's womb and which spontaneously grew into the body of a baby, grows by itself to its maximum limit, then starts decaying and finally ends by merging into the original 'material'. The breath leaves the body and mixes with the air outside; the consciousness within merges with the Impersonal
Consciousness and the process of that particular 'happening' is over.
What-we-are is neither 'born', nor 'lives', nor 'dies'. ••
Meditation: The real point is, he continued: Did you find any need of any knowledge a hundred years ago? That, which you do not know and cannot know is your true state. This, which you think is real because it can be objectified, is what you appear to be. Whatever knowledge you are now seeking about your true state is unknowable, because you are what you are seeking. All that you can get as
knowledge is at a conceptual level — the knowledge that you would get as an objective appearance. Such 'knowledge' is in no way different from 'ignorance', because they are inter-related counterparts at the conceptual level. In other words, comprehension at the mind level means only conceptualization and, therefore, is totally illusory. Do understand please, the difference between such conceptualized knowledge and the intuitive apperceiving which is not at the conceptual level. Indeed, apperceiving is whole-seeing or in-seeing, which is vitally different from mere intellectual seeing. Once there is apperception, the duality of counterparts, the basis of mere intellectual comprehension, totally disappears. There is no question of any 'one' thinking that he has understood something by the use of reasoning and logic. True understanding is spontaneous apperception, intuitive and choiceless, and totally non-dualistic. Meditate on what I have said.
On Enlightenment:
It is sheer nonsense to think of an individual's need for enlightenment. Basically, there is only 'I'; there is no 'me', or 'you', to be enlightened.
How can a phenomenal object, which is only an appearance, be transformed by enlightenment' into something other that what it is, i.e. a mere appearance?
When 'enlightenment' occurs, there is an apperceiving that what we believe to be our normal condition — that of a phenomenal object — is merely a temporary condition, like an illness, which has come over our normal true state of the noumenon. It is suddenly realized that what was being considered 'normal' was not really normal. The result of such apperceiving is a sort of instantaneous adjustment from an individual existence to just existence as such; volition disappears and whatever happens seems right and proper, One takes one's stand as the witness of all that happens, or rather only witnessing remains.
Meditation: The real point is, he continued: Did you find any need of any knowledge a hundred years ago? That, which you do not know and cannot know is your true state. This, which you think is real because it can be objectified, is what you appear to be. Whatever knowledge you are now seeking about your true state is unknowable, because you are what you are seeking. All that you can get as
knowledge is at a conceptual level — the knowledge that you would get as an objective appearance. Such 'knowledge' is in no way different from 'ignorance', because they are inter-related counterparts at the conceptual level. In other words, comprehension at the mind level means only conceptualization and, therefore, is totally illusory. Do understand please, the difference between such conceptualized knowledge and the intuitive apperceiving which is not at the conceptual level. Indeed, apperceiving is whole-seeing or in-seeing, which is vitally different from mere intellectual seeing. Once there is apperception, the duality of counterparts, the basis of mere intellectual comprehension, totally disappears. There is no question of any 'one' thinking that he has understood something by the use of reasoning and logic. True understanding is spontaneous apperception, intuitive and choiceless, and totally non-dualistic. Meditate on what I have said.
On Enlightenment:
It is sheer nonsense to think of an individual's need for enlightenment. Basically, there is only 'I'; there is no 'me', or 'you', to be enlightened.
How can a phenomenal object, which is only an appearance, be transformed by enlightenment' into something other that what it is, i.e. a mere appearance?
When 'enlightenment' occurs, there is an apperceiving that what we believe to be our normal condition — that of a phenomenal object — is merely a temporary condition, like an illness, which has come over our normal true state of the noumenon. It is suddenly realized that what was being considered 'normal' was not really normal. The result of such apperceiving is a sort of instantaneous adjustment from an individual existence to just existence as such; volition disappears and whatever happens seems right and proper, One takes one's stand as the witness of all that happens, or rather only witnessing remains.
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