Chapter title: Consciousness

‌Chapter title: Consciousness‌

5 February 1980 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]

The goal of the meditator is to find out who he is. When one goes on enquiring "Who am I?" "Who am I?",slowly slowly, one comes to a point where action, thought, feeling -- all are negated, and there is nothing else left to negate any more. There is only pure consciousness. You cannot negate that. Who will negate it?

You are a pure knower, a seer.

To know this is the real beginning of life.

The lotus symbolises the ultimate flowering of consciousness.

Right now you are just like a bud, closed; hence your fragrance is not being released. Sannyas is a process of opening the petals of the lotus. Sannyas is like sunrise. Being with a master means entering into a sunlit world. And as the sun rises the lotus petals start opening, naturally -- they are not to be forced -- and then great fragrance is released. That fragrance is bliss, peace, celebration. One has come to fulfillment, one has come to be utterly contented because one has given whatsoever was one's destiny, one has poured it into existence. Whatsoever one was capable of contributing, creating, one has done it. That is

the ultimate act of creativity, and naturally after that ultimate act one feels utterly satisfied, contented.

This happens in small activities also. When you do something creative a great contentment arises. When you finish a painting a silence falls over you. You feel fulfilled, meaningful, significant, you have done something. You have participated in God's work. He is a creator and you have been a creator in your own way, a small way of course, but you participated with God, you walked with God -- maybe only for a few steps, but you walked with God.

But the ultimate act of creativity is the flowering of your consciousness. After that you never leave God for a single moment. Then the whole pilgrimage is with him, within him. Naturally it is tremendously fulfilling. There can be not other fulfilment higher than that, greater than that. It is the very peak.

Florian means a flower of beauty. It can only bloom when your consciousness rises upwards.

Roses are beautiful, lotuses are beautiful, buth they are not flowers of beauty. They are beautiful flowers, of course, but not flowers of beauty. Flowers of beauty happen in your innermost core. They happen through inner growth, when you transform your potential into actuality. When you really become a being, when there is no more to life, when you have experienced life in its totality, then something flowers in you. That flowering brings you for the first time a gift from God.

There are many gifts from God -- birth is a gift, life is a gift, love is a gift -- but the ultimate gift is when your consciousness becomes a lotus. When one flower of beauty blooms in you. In Japan they call it satori, in India we call it samadhi. It can be translated as ultimate ecstasy.

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Rebellion can be something on the outside, then it is political, social. But if

rebellion is on the inside then it is religious, spiritual. Every rebellion on the outside has failed, because the people who have not gone through inner revolution cannot bring revolution to the outside.

First the revolutionary has to go through a revolution himself -- and he knows nothing of the inner world and its revolution. He has not moved from the unconscious to the conscious, from the mind to the state of no-mind. He has not yet moved from logic to love. He is still in deep ignorance of his own self. Nothing has happened inside him, and he wants to transform the whole world, change the whole world into a better world. He only creates more nuisance, he only messes things up more than they were before.

The whole credit goes to the revolutionaries. If the world is in such a mess it is because of so many revolutions. Utterly ignorant people, not knowing even the ABC of the inner world, are trying to change the world. With no light inside they are blind, and whatsoever they do is going to harem. Of course their intentions are good but just good intentions don't help. Somebody's intention may be good and he may operate on your appendix knowing nothing of surgery. He may not even be able to recognise the appendix.

His intention is good: you are in pain, he opens your stomach to remove the appendix. But he will do harm, he will kill you. And that's what has been happening in the world.

Only buddhas can bring revolution because they have gone through inner transformation themselves.

But not Marx or Lenin or Trotzky -- these people cannot bring revolution. They don't know anything of inner world. They are utterly blind.

Sannyas is basically, essentially an effort to change your inner world. I am not concerned with the social or the political structure., I am concerned with the structure of your consciousness, how your mind functions and how you can be the master of it. That is the revolution.

Only one revolution has never failed, but that happens very rarely. It happens in the individual heart, in the heart of a Jesus, in the heart of a Buddha. It can happen in your heart too. The thing that brings it is awareness.

The heart can exist either in darkness or in light, either unconsciously or

consciously. When we start changing our energies from unconsciousness towards consciousness the heart goes through a radical change.

It is transmuted, transformed. It is no more the same heart. It is no more human, it is divine. Then god beats in it, then god works through it, flows through it.

Once you are awakened you start living life in a totally different way. Although your life remains the same you are no more the same. Your approach is different, your very style is different. You live more consciously. You don't go on groping in darkness. You live through the heart and not through the head.

Your life becomes love, compassion. It becomes a song, a dance, a celebration. And of course whomsoever comes in contact with you will be infected by it. It is contagious. It is like fire, wildfire: it goes on spreading.

I have chosen the color of fire, wild fire for my sannyasins. We have to surround the whole earth with wildfire. And once your inside rubbish is burned you will create many ripples around, naturally, spontaneously, which will affect the social structure, the economic structure as a consequence, as a by-product -- but not directly.

That is not our concern but it does happen. If many people are changed, it is bound to affect the society on the outside too. But that is not our goal. We are not interested in it.

Our interest is basically the change of your interiority. We have to make it full of light -- right now it is a completely dark continent.

There is a possibility either to fight with outer enemies or to fight with inner enemies. It is easy to fight with the outer enemies because they are visible. It is difficult to fight with the inner enemies because they are not visible and they have become so much a part of you that you don't think of them as separate. They are separate.

People decide to fight on the outside to avoid the inner war. They are afraid of the inner friction. But one grows through inner friction. There are paths which are based only on inner friction, for example, George Gurdjieff's method.

Its whole idea is to create inner friction in you and to help you to go beyond it. For example, if you want to fight then fight with your with your anger, greed. Of

course it is not an ordinary fight and you cannot use ordinary weapons either. You will have to learn different kinds of strategies, you will have to learn a totally 1/08/07

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different methodology. That methodology is meditation, awareness. Gurdjieff used to call it self-remembering. Whenever you are in anger, remember yourself. In that very remembering the focus changes, the gestalt changes. You become more and more centred. Anger remains there just on the periphery of your being, but you know now that it is separate from you. You are not angry, you are only a witness to it. Now it is up to you to choose to be angry or not to be angry. You are no more identified; hence the freedom to choose.

Ordinarily you cannot choose. You don't have enough space to choose. You are so identified that when anger comes you are angry, it is not something separate. It overwhelms you. And so is the case with greed and other kinds of desire.

Sannyas means that the real war has to be fought within. The real victory has to happen within. And the basic strategy of the war is awareness. It is through awareness you will be able to transform all your enemies into your friends. That is true victory. It is not destructive, it is transformative.

And one who is a master of oneself is really a master. His is the kingdom of God.

Kabira is a Sufi name for God; it means the vast one. It is also the name of one of the greatest mystics of the East, the only mystic who comes very close to Jesus, because he was as poor as Jesus.

Jesus was a carpenter's son and Kabira was a weaver's son; both speak the same fiery language, with the same rebellion in their heart. Buddha and Mahavira are soft-spoken; they come from royal families, very cultured. Even if they want to hit they will hit in a very civilised way.

Kabira and Jesus are totally different. They come from the lowest classes. They

are absolutely uneducated, uncultured, very raw but very alive too. In fact because they are so raw they are so alive. Their message simply goes into the heart like an arrow. They are pure fire.

Become a blissful rebel. Revolution is political, rebellion is spiritual. Revolution wants to change something on the outside, rebellion changes your consciousness. And it is only by transforming your consciousness totally that you will become vast, godlike, and you will attain to ultimate bliss, truth, love, freedom.

We can exist either as minds or as no-minds. If we exist as minds we become machines because mind is a machine. It is just a biocomputer... very skilful, very capable and immensely valuable, but if you exist as the mind you lose all freedom. You become encaged in a small mechanism, the mechanism becomes your boundary.

And mind can function only according to the past because mind means past. It is accumulated experience and knowledge, information. And when you function as the past you lose contact with the present, and the present is the only reality. To be in contact with the present one needs to go a little higher than the mind, a little above the mind. You are consciousness, which is a totally different phenomenon.

That's the goal of the meditator: to find out who he is. When one goes on enquiring "Who am I? Who am I?' slowly slowly one comes to the point where body is negated, mind is negated, heart is negated; action, thought, feeling -- all are negated and there is nothing else left to negate any more. There is only pure consciousness. You cannot negate that. Who will negate it?

You are a pure knower, a pure seer. And to know it is the real beginning of life. Then one is truly born, born in God. Then life has a different flavour. It is a dance, it is a song, it is a celebration.

We are not the body and we are not the mind either. Mind is also part of the body. The visible part is called body, the invisible part is called mind. It is a psychosomatic mechanism and we are the witness of it.

We are in it but we are not it.

This is the greatest experience. Once it has happened your life goes through a radical change. Then you are never the same again. It is a breakthrough.

The whole effort here is to bring this breakthrough closer and closer. Every support, every technique and device is provided for this breakthrough so that you can see yourself as a witness of it all, as pure consciousness.

To know oneself as pure consciousness is to be free of all bondage. It is to be free of birth and death, it is to be free of time. It is to become part of eternity, it is to become part of God. And that is liberation, that is nirvana, that is the ultimate goal of life, the summun bonum.

Silence can be superficial. If you cultivate it, it will be superficial. That's what many people go on 1/08/07

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doing; sitting still in a certain posture, trying to force the mind to be silent. If you go on doing it for a long time you create a kind of auto-hypnosis and you start feeling a certain silence. You can use a mantra and you can chant it. That will be again nothing but an auto-hypnotic device. You can visualise Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and that too is nothing but an effort to repress the mind by a certain visualisation process.

In the name of meditation... ninety-nine per cent are auto-hypnotic devices. What Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls transcendental meditation is neither transcendental nor meditation; it is just a non-medical tranquilliser. It helps you to attain a superficial silence. It does not transform you, it cannot -- that is beyond its capacity. For a few days you can play with it and then you start seeing that it is just futile, you are stuck at a point.

Deep silence means silence that comes out of awareness; not by chanting a mantra, not by any visualisation, not by imagination, but just by watching the mind and its subtle ways, its cunning ways, just by being an observer, looking into the matters of the mind, into the very process of the mind -- the way it functions, how a thought arises, how it becomes a cloud around you, how it disappears -- as if it has nothing to do with you. You are just a spectator. And you are not doing anything, no mantra, no technique --

nothing. You are simply watching, a natural process. You are not imposing anything upon the mind, you are not trying to force the mind to be quiet. You are not saying to the mind "Shut up!" You are simply seeing the game, all kinds of games that the mind plays.

It is a multi-dimensional game. Desires are there and memories are there and imagination and the past and the future and a thousand and one projections, hopes, expectations. Just go on watching with no condemnation, neither condemning nor getting identified: just remaining aloof, cool, unconcerned, as if one is standing by the side of the road looking at the traffic. Then one day real silence happens. Suddenly the road is there but the traffic has disappeared. And you have not done anything to make it disappear so it can't be anything forced, cultivated. It has happened on its own, it happens of its own accord.

As your watchfulness becomes stronger, the mind becomes weaker. When the watchfulness is one hundred per cent, the mind is zero. When the mind is one hundred per cent, the watchfulness is zero. It is the same energy -- it can either become watchfulness or it can become the mind, thinking, desiring. When you are watching you are withdrawing the energy from the mind. It is getting more and more involved in watchfulness.

One day when one hundred per cent of the energy has become centred, the mind simply disappears. It is just as dreams disappear in the morning when you wake up. It is an inner awakening. And then you know for the first time what real silence is, what deep silence is.

Only that deep silence can take you to the ultimate, to God, to truth. Only that deep silence can liberate you from all kinds of illusions, from all kinds of despair, miseries.

The only thing in life which is absolutely constant is awareness. Everything else goes on changing. The body changes every moment, the mind changes every split second, the world goes on changing. If you look outside you cannot find anything that is not in a flux. But if you look inside then one centre can be found which is not part of the world of change. That's your awareness, your consciousness.

Consciousness is the only constant phenomenon. To know what consciousness is, is to know God, because to know consciousness is to go beyond time, beyond

change. It is entering into the world of eternity.

Man tries in every possible way to achieve bliss, by accumulating money, by becoming powerful, by becoming respectable, by becoming knowledgeable. But all these ways are doomed to fail. They cannot bring bliss to you. Bliss comes only in one way and that is by your becoming more conscious. The more you are conscious, the more you are blissful; the less conscious, the more miserable.

Ordinarily, if we divide our being into ten parts, then only one part is conscious, nine parts are unconscious. And that's exactly the proportion of misery and bliss in our life. In ten days there is one day when you feel at home, relaxed, happy, joyous. You can feel the beauty of nature. You are more sensitive, more loving, more open, restful, and the world seems to be your home... But it is only for one day and then again for nine days it is hell. Those nine days are too much, and that one day seems to be almost illusory compared to those nine days of misery. If somebody has to live nine days in hell and one day in heaven he is bound to think that that one day must have been a dream. Because the reality is this, that nine days you are in hell. This is real. The proportion it too great.

Being a sannyasin means that now efforts will be made to make more and more parts of your being conscious. Slowly slowly, as consciousness becomes bigger and unconsciousness shrinks, you become 1/08/07

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blissful, more and more blissful. You start opening up like a flower. We are like buds, closed, as bliss comes you become a flower. In the East we say that one becomes a lotus, a one-thousand-petalled lotus. Everybody is carrying the seed, the bud, but great effort is needed to be conscious. Unconsciousness has been our habit for so many lives that it has almost become our nature.

So from this moment try to be more and more conscious in everything that you do, in everything that you think, in everything that you feel. These are the three dimensions. In all these three dimensions you have to be more watchful, more alert, more of a witness. Between these three arises the fourth, the witness and that is your true nature.

Once you have learned how to create the witness you know the secret art, you know the alchemy of transforming the dark continent in your being into light.

Chinmayo means consciousness, pure consciousness. That is going to be your meditation. Walking, walk consciously, as if you are surrounded by danger on every side -- wild animals are there and you have to be very cautious and alert -- as if you are walking on a tightrope: slight unawareness and you will fall. So you have to be alert. Your life is at risk.

And that is exactly the case: we are walking on a tightrope, completely drunk. The whole credit goes to the rope! How does it maintain us? It is a miracle to see people walking and not falling apart into pieces, somehow keeping themselves together, totally unaware. No light inside, no centre inside, no rootedness, still somehow go on dragging.

Walk, but walk consciously and then you will slowly see how you have walked before. Eat, but eat consciously. All small things have to be done consciously and then slowly slowly the last thing can also be done consciously -- that is sleep. And the day that one can sleep consciously the ultimate in consciousness has been achieved. That very day one becomes awakened. Then all sleep disappears forever. I don't mean physical sleep, I mean metaphysical sleep. All unconsciousness disappears forever.

So you are not to make meditation a separate thing in your life that you will do every day for one hour.

No -- it has to spread over your whole life. Cleaning the floor, washing the clothes, cooking the food, taking care of the home -- whatsoever you are doing let it all be meditative, conscious. In this way twenty-four hours a day can be devoted to meditation. And each act that you do with consciousness will become more efficient, more beautiful, more graceful. Naturally, a man who eats consciously cannot eat more than is needed, he cannot eat less than is needed. But the man who eats unconsciously goes on stuffing, he does not know when to stop. He can eat too much, and then he can move like a pendulum to the other extreme. If he eats too much naturally he suffers. Because of the suffering he move to the other extreme; he eats so little that it is not sufficient for his bodily needs. He may start dieting.

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Accidental from the intrinsic, the natural from the artificial, the inevitable from the arbitrary. All this becomes possible only through a single thing, awareness.

So paramhansa simply represents awareness. Become more and more aware so that you can see what is worthless and what is valuable. The moment you start seeing what is worthless, the worthless starts disappearing from your life because you cannot cling to it anymore. In your seeing that it is worthless, it drops from your hands of its own accord. Not that you have to renounce it, not that you have to make an effort to drop it -- it drops easily. You don't feel any regret, you don't repent and you don't brag about it, that you have renounced it.

How can you brag if you see that it is worthless? And the moment you see the worthless you are bound to see that which is really valuable. And to see the valuable is to do it! You can't do otherwise. Seeing becomes doing. Awareness becomes action.

I don't teach character, I teach consciousness, because consciousness character.

[There follows two interviews with: Ma Ananda Vandana and Ma Anand Sarita, which are not included here.]

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If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself Chapter #6

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