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The seed of consciousness
Ramesh Balsekar was one of the interpreters for his guru Nisargadatta Maharaj and in his first book ‘Pointers’ he illustrates examples of Maharaj’s teachings. This is an extract from the book.THE SEED OF CONSCIOUSNESS
He looked fidgety and agitated. His movements were jerky and he was obviously bursting with impatience. This was a middle-aged European, slim and physically very fit. It was his first visit to Maharaj. His restlessness drew everybody’s attention to him.
As Maharaj looked at him, tears suddenly welled up in his eyes. A compassionate glance from Maharaj seemed to compose him a little and he gave the usual preliminary information about himself in a few words. He said he had been a student of Vedanta for at least twenty years, but his search for truth had proved abortive. He was deeply despondent and disillusioned and he could not continue the frustrating pursuit any longer. A flash of hope had come to him when he read Maharaj’s book ‘I Am That’ and he knew that he had found the answer. Immediately he had got together the minimum amount of cash needed for the journey and he had just arrived in Bombay. In a choked voice he said: “I have now arrived. My search is over.” Tears were flowing freely from his eyes and he could hardly control himself.
Maharaj listened to him gravely and sat still for a few minutes with his eyes closed, perhaps to give him time to compose himself. Then he asked him whether he was firmly convinced that he was not the body. The visitor confirmed that it was quite clear to him that he was not merely the body but something other than his body, and, as was clearly explained in the book, that something must be the knowledge ‘I am’, the sense of being. But, he added, he could not understand what was meant by the suggestion that he should remain continuously with this knowledge ‘I am’. What exactly was he supposed to do? “Please sir” he told Maharaj“I am now unbearably tired of words. I have read and heard them in millions and have not gained anything.Give me the substance now, not mere words. I shall be eternally grateful to you.” “Very well” said Maharaj, “You will have the substance now. Of course, I will have to use words to convey it to you.” Mahara then proceeded: “ If I say, reverse and go back to the source of your beingness, will it make any sense to you?”
In reply, the visitor said that his heart intuitively accepted the truth of Maharaj’s statement, but he would have to go deeper into the matter.
Maharaj then told him that he must understand the whole position clearly and instantly; this he could do only if he went to the root of the matter. He must find out how the knowledge ‘ I am’ first appeared. The seed is the thing, said Maharaj. Find out the seed of this beingness and you will know the seed of the entire universe.
Maharaj went on: As you know, you have the body and in the body is the Prana, or the life force, and consciousness (or the beingness) or the knowledge ‘I am’. Now, this total phenomenon of the human being, is it any different from that of the other creatures,or even the grass, which sprouts up from the earth? Think over it deeply. Suppose a little water accumulates in your backyard; after a time, the body of an insect forms itself there; it begins to move, and it knows that it exists. Then again, suppose a piece of stale bread is left in a corner for some days; a worm makes its appearance in it and begins to move, and it knows that it exists. The egg of a fowl, after being hatched for certain length of time, suddenly breaks open and a little chick appears; it begins to move about, and it knows that it exists. The sperm of man germinated in the womb of woman, after the nine-month period, is delivered as a baby. The sperm developed into the form of a full-grown infant, goes through the states of sleeping and at waking carries out its usual physical functions, and knows that it exists.
In all these cases – the insect, the worm, the chicken and the human being – what is it that is really born? What is it that has ‘supervised’ the process from conception to delivery? Is it not the knowledge ‘ I am’ that has remained latent from conception to delivery, and in due course, is ‘born’? This beingness or consciousness, identical in all the four cases, finding itself without any kind of ‘support’, mistakenly identifies itself with the particular form it has assumed. In other words, what is really without any shape or form, the knowledge ‘ I am’,just the sense of beingness (not being this, or being that, but consciousness generally), limits itself to only one particular form and thereby accepts its own ‘birth’, and thereafter lives in the constant shadow of the terror of‘death’. Thus is born the notion of an individual personality, or identity, or ego.
Now, do you see the source of I-amness? Is it not dependent on the body for its individual existence? And is not the body merely the germinated sperm, which has developed itself? And, importantly, is the sperm anything other than the essence of the food consumed by the father of the child? And, finally, is not the food something thrown up by the four elements (ether, air, fire and water) through the medium of the fifth element, the earth?
The seed of consciousness is thus traced to nothing but food and, the body is the ‘food’ of consciousness; as soon as the body dies consciousness also disappears. And yet, consciousness is the ‘seed’ of the entire universe! Every single individual, whenever he dreams, has identical experience of a world being created in consciousness. When a person is not quite awake and consciousness is just stirring, he dreams; and in his dream in that minimal spot of consciousness, is created an entire dream-world similar to the ‘real’ world outside – all in a split –second – and in that world are seen the sun, the earth, with hills and rivers, buildings, and people (including the dreamer himself, behaving exactly like the people in the ‘real’ world. Whilst the dream lasts, the dream world is very real indeed, and the experiences of the people in the dream, including the dreamer himself, appear to be true, tangible and authentic, perhaps even more so than those of the‘real’ world with all its ‘realities’ that then existed, collapses into the consciousness in which it was created. In the waking state, the world emerges because of the seed of ignorance( Maya, consciousness, beingness, Prakriti, Ishwara, etc.) and takes you into awaking-dream-state! Both sleep and waking are conceptual states in the living-dream. You dream that you are awake; you dream that you are asleep – and you do not realise that you are dreaming because you are still in the dream. Indeed, when you do realise that this is all a dream, you will have already ‘awakened’! Only the Jnani knows true waking and true sleep.
At this stage., when the visitor was asked by Maharaj if he had any questions on what he had heard so far, he promptly asked: “What is the principle, or the conceptual mechanism behind the creation of the world?”
Maharaj was pleased that the visitor had correctly used the words ‘conceptual mechanism’, because he often reminded us that the entire creation of the world is conceptual, and that it is most important to remember this fact and not to forget it in the midst of all the profusion of words and concepts. Maharaj then continued: The original state – the Parabrahman – is unconditioned, without attributes,without form, without identity. Indeed, that state is nothing but fullness ( not an empty ‘void’ but ‘plenum’) so that it is impossible to give it any adequate name. For the sake of communication, however, a number of words have been used to ‘indicate’ that state. In that original state, prior to any concept, consciousness – the thought ‘I am’-spontaneously stirs into existence. How? Why? For no apparent reason – like a gentle wave on an expanse of water!
The thought ‘ I am’ is the seed of the sound Aum, the primordial sound or Nada at the start of the creation of universe. It consists of three sounds: a, u, and m. These three sounds represent the three attributes – Satva, Rajas, Tamas- which have produced the three states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep (also named consciousness or harmony, activity and rest). It is in consciousness that the world has emerged. Indeed, the very first thought ‘ I am’ has created the sense of duality in the original state of unicity. No creation can take place without the duality of parenthood principle – male and females. Purusha and Prakriti.
Creation of the world, as an appearance in consciousness has a tenfold aspect – the parent principle of duality; the physical and chemical material, being the essence of the five elements (ether, air, fire, water and earth) under mutual friction; and thethree attributes Satva, Rajas and Tamas. An individual may think that it is he who acts, but it is truly the essence of the five elements, the Prana, the life force, which acts through the particular combination of the three attributes in a particular physical form.
When creation of the world is viewed in this perspective, it is easy to understand why the thoughts and actions of one differ so much in quality and degree from those of the millions of others. Why there are Mahatma Gandhis at one end and Hitlers at the other. It is a well-established fact that fingerprints of one person are never exactly similar to those of any other person; leaves of the same tree are found different from one another in minute details. The reason is that the permutations and combinations of the five elements, plus the three attributes in their millions of shades, would go into billions and trillions. Let us by all means admire what we think is admirable and love what we think is loveable, but let us understand what it is that we really love and admire – not the conceptual individual but the wonderful acting abilities of consciousness, which is able to play simultaneously millions of roles in this dream-play that the world is!
To avoid being lost in the bewildering diversity of the play of Maya (Lila) said Maharaj, it is necessary at this stage not to forget the essential unity between the Absolute and the relative, between the non-manifest and manifest. Manifestation comes into existence only with the basic concept ‘ I am’. The substratum is the noumenon, which is total potentiality. With the arising of ‘ I-am-ness’ it mirrors itself into the phenomenal universe, which only appears to be exterior to the noumenon. In order to see itself, noumenon objectifies itself into phenomenon and for this objectivisation to take place, space and time are the necessary concepts (in which the phenomena are extended in volume and duration). Phenomenon, therefore, is not something different from noumenon, but it is noumenon itself, when objectivised. It is necessary to understand – and never to forget – this essential identity. Once the concept ‘ I am’ arises, the fundamental unity gets notionally separated, as subject and object, in duality.
When impersonal consciousness manifests itself and identifies itself with each physical form the I-notion arises, and this I-notion, forgetting that it has no independent entity, converts its original subjectivity into an object with intentions,wants and desires, and is, therefore, vulnerable to suffering. This mistaken identity is precisely the‘bondage’ from which liberation is to be sought.
And what is ‘liberation’? Liberation,enlightenment, or awakening, is nothing other than understanding profoundly,apperceiving – (a) that the seed of all manifestation is the impersonal consciousness, (b) that what is being sought is the unmanifested aspect of manifestation and (c) that, therefore, the seeker himself is the sought!
Summarising the discourse Maharaja said: Let us get it all together once again. 1.In the original state prevails ‘I am’, without any knowledge or conditioning, without attributes, without form or identity.
2. Then, for no apparent reason (other than that is its nature to do so), arises the thought or concept‘ I am’ the Impersonal Consciousness, on which the world appears as a living-dream.
3. Consciousness, in order to manifest itself, needs a form, a physical body, with which it identifies itself and thus starts the concept of ‘bondage’, with an imaginary objectivisation of ‘I’. Whenever one thinks and acts from the standpoint of this self-identification, one could be said to have committed the ‘original sin’ of turning pure subjectivity (the limitless potential) into an object, a limited actuality.
4. No object has an independent existence of its own, and therefore, an object cannot awaken itself from the living-dream; yet – and this is the joke – the phantom individual (an object) seeks some other object, as the ‘Absolute’ or ‘Reality’ or whatever.
5. If this is clear, one must reverse and go back to find out what one originally was (and always has been) before consciousness arose.
6. At this stage comes the ‘awakening’ that one is neither the body nor even the consciousness, but the unnameable state of total potentiality, prior to the arrival of consciousness (in consciousness, that state, with whatever name, can only be a concept),
7. And so the circle is complete; the seeker is the sought.
In conclusion, said Maharaj, understand profoundly that (the seed of which is consciousness) is a temporary one, like a disease or an eclipse on one’s original changeless condition of noumenality, and all that one can do is to go through one’s allotted span of living, at the end of which the eclipse of phenomenality is over and noumenality prevails again in its pure unicity, totally unaware of its awareness.
Through all this exposition the visitor sat still, as if under a spell. He made an unsuccessful effort or two to talk, but Maharaj quickly stopped him with a firm gesture, and he sat there in perfect peace until after other visitors had paid their respects to Maharaj and left, one by one.
RAMESH BALSEKAR
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