Give up all questions except one ‘who am I?’ After all the only fact you are sure of is that you ‘are’. The ‘I am’ is certain, the ‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
’I am’ itself is God, the seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor the mind, and the love of the self in you is for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love. What do you love now? The ‘I am’. Give your heart and mind to it, think of nothing else. This when effortless and natural, is the highest state. In it love itself is the lover and the beloved.
The impersonal is real, the personal appears and disappears. ‘I am’ is the impersonal being. ‘I am this’ is the person. The person is relative and the pure being – the fundamental.
By focusing the mind on ‘I am’, on the sense of being, ‘I am so-and-so” dissolves; ‘am a witness only’ remains and that too submerges in ‘I am all’. Then the all becomes the One and the One – yourself, not to be separate from me. Abandon the idea of a separate ‘I’ and the question of ‘whose experience?’ will not arise. On a deeper level my experience is your experience. Dive deep within yourself and you will find it easily and simply. Go in the direction of ‘I am’.
Cling to the one thing that matters, hold on to ‘I am’ and let go all else. This is ‘sadhana’. In realization there is nothing to hold on to and nothing to forget. Everything is known, nothing is remembered.
At the root of everything is the feeling ‘I am’. The state of mind ‘there is a world’ is secondary, for to be I do not need the world, the world needs me.
Beyond the mind there is no such thing as experience. Experience is a dual state. You cannot talk of reality as an experience. Once this is understood, you will no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and separable, like roots and branches of the same tree. Both can only exist in the light of consciousness, which again arises in the wake of the sense ‘I am’. This is the primary fact. If you miss it you miss all.
Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation (nirvikalpa samadhi) nothing is perceived. The root idea is ‘I am’. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas, which in their totality constitute God and His world. The ‘I am’ remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.
The concentration on ‘I am’ is a form of attention. Give your undivided attention to the most important thing in your life – yourself. Of your personal universe you are the center – without knowing the center what else can you know?
My advice to you is very simple – just remember yourself, ‘I am’, it is enough to heal your mind and take you beyond, just have some trust. I don’t mislead you. Why should I? Do I want anything from you? I wish you well – such is my nature. Why should I mislead you? Commonsense too will tell you that to fulfill a desire you must keep your mind on it. If you want to know your true nature, you must have yourself in mind all the time, until the secret of your being stands revealed.
It is right to say ‘I am’, but to say ‘I am this’, ‘I am that’, is a sign of not enquiring, not examining, of mental weakness or lethargy. Practice (sadhana) consists of reminding oneself forcibly of one’s pure ‘beingness’, of not being anything in particular, not a sum of particulars, not even the totality of all particulars, which make up a universe.
Be content with what you are sure of. And the only thing you can be sure of is ‘I am’. Stay with it and reject everything else. This is Yoga.
The one witness reflects itself in the countless bodies as ‘I am’. As long as the bodies, however subtle, last, the ‘I am’ appears as many. Beyond the body there is only the One.
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