Letter from the Field: Hearing Maharaj
Dear Fred,
Could not resist sharing this! Thank you for speaking this same truth week after week.
Listening to last Sunday’s Satsang made me think that all interactions in the world reinforce the false story that you are a person in the world. No matter how much we try to perfect the story of the character, something falls short. The two hours of formal Satsang and engaging the teaching as much as we can gives us rest. Seeing freshly that there is no person lifts the fatigue from our efforts. Vigilance is really the price of freedom. I really appreciate the much needed help I get to be vigilant in Satsang.
♥️
Meera
[She included the text below.]
What a bad joke has been played on you!
In your original state of unity and wholeness you didn’t even know you existed. Then one day, you were told that you were born, that a particular body was ‘you,’ that a particular couple were your parents. Thereafter, you began accepting further information about ‘you,’ day by day, and built up a whole pseudo-personality, but only because you had accepted the charge that you had been born, although you were fully aware that you had no experience of being born, that you had never agreed to be born, and that your body was being thrust upon you.
Gradually the conditioning became stronger and stronger and grew to such an extent that not only did you accept the charge that you were born as a particular body, but that you would at some future date ‘die,’ and the very word ‘death’ became a dreaded word to you, signifying a traumatic event.
What a bad joke has been played on you. Now, not only do you fail to see that you are merely an actor playing a role in this farce, but you go on to assume that you have a choice of decision and action in the play, a play which must obviously unfold strictly according to the pre-written script. And when events thus take place naturally in the ordinary course, this conceptual entity takes responsibility for them and lets himself get affected, and suffers.
But all suffering is nothing but the acceptance of a false arrest, allowing the impersonal, subjective, timeless, universal beingness to be apprehended and bound up into the mistaken identity of the personal, objective, temporal, limited phenomenon.
When you get some inkling of this farce then you start thinking of ‘liberation’ and release from ‘bondage’.
What is liberation? Liberation is seeing life as a play and perceiving that the ‘you’ who is without the slightest touch of objectivity cannot be an entity in any shape, name or kind. Liberation is the realization that sentient objects are part of the manifestation of the total phenomena, without separate identities… that what you are is the sentience in all sentient objects… you are the conscious presence.
Liberation is apperceiving that you, the Absolute, in your phenomenal expression are the functioning, the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, the tasting, the thinking, without the presence of anyone else or anything, other than you.
There was never a subject that saw another as an object, there was only you, the seeing, functioning spontaneously as an aspect of your noumenal potential.
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.
September 9, 2017 @ 2:43 pm
Thank you, Meera, for the dose of Nisargadatta. I love his irreverent attitude toward life. He sometimes would say about this experience of being born into a body: I never asked for this. One hundred years of suffering all for the sake of a few moments of pleasure for two people!
But happily, as he taught, we weren’t ever really born!
? Kathleen