Who Am I?

  M: The daily life is a life of action. Whether you like it or not, you must function. Whatever you do for your own sake accumulates and becomes explosive; one day it goes off and plays havoc with you and your world. When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous. " Q: How is one to work then? M:" Neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work's own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning. Make nothing a means to something else. Bind not. God does not create one thing to serve another. Each is made for its own sake. Because it is made for itself, it does not interfere. You are using things and people for purposes alien to them and you play havoc with the world and itself. "

Question: A day must come when the show is wound up; man must die; the universe comes to an end. Maharaj: "Just as a sleeping man forgets all and wakes up for another day, or he dies and emerges into another life, so do the worlds of desire and fear dissolve and disappear. But the Universal Witness, the Supreme Self never sleeps and never dies. Eternally, the Great Heart beats and at each beat a new universe comes into being. " Q: Is He conscious ? M:" He is beyond all that a mind conceives. He is beyond being and not being. He is the Yes and No to everything beyond and within, creating and destroying, unimaginably real. " Q: God and the Mahatma, are they one or two? M:" They are one. Q: There must be some difference. M: "God is the All-Doer, the Jnani is a non-doer. God himself does not say 'I am doing all''. To Him things happen by their own nature. To the Jnanis, all is done by God. He sees no difference between God and natu...

Nisargadatta Maharaj Visitor: I am a painter, and I earn my money by painting pictures. Has it any value from the spiritual point of view? Maharaj:' When you paint, what do you think about? " V: When I paint, there is only the painting and myself. M:" What are you doing there? " V: I paint. M:" No, you don't. You see the painting going on. You are watching only, all else happens. " V: The picture is painting itself? Or, is there some deeper 'me', or some God who is painting? M:" Consciousness itself is the greatest painter. The entire world is a picture. " V Who painted the picture of the world? M:" The painter is in the picture. " V: The picture is in the mind of the painter and the painter is in the picture, which is in the mind of the painter, who is in the picture! Is not this infinity of states and dimension absurd? The moment we talk of a picture in the mind, which itself is in the picture, we come to an endless succ...

The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don’t seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day. There is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. Most philosophical problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point where you see that such questions as “Why this universe?” are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as me...

I’ve been thinking about your line of Blake, which I strangely haven’t encountered before despite his works being more to my taste than more overly religious writing. I had a look on line and found this  https://uh.edu/engines/CD-EnergyIsEternalDelight/track1.html  which I don’t find satisfactory. I would prefer to read someone like Aldous Huxley on the subject as he would interpret the C18th language and idioms in a way that resonates more with me.  Ayako at her family shrine  I quoted the line to Ayako and of course she agreed with it immediately - though she is tempering her Chi Gong exercises these days as she - I think - correctly understands that excessive energy is hard to control and that one can be swept away with delight (in particular, spiritual pride is always waiting to carry us down). We talked of the harmonious balance of ying and yang -  ‘the still point of the turning world’ - and the dangers of religious fervour. She still abhors the proslytizi...