The True Center...

Paul Brunton: "If he has succeeded in holding his mind somewhat still and empty, his next step is to find his centre." (23.8.6 & Persp. p. 340


AD: There is no center. The center here means that he finds himself to be an infinite and egoless being. That is his center. In other words, when you meditate and penetrate and realize yourself in the heart, if you go one more step beyond that, then you aren't anyplace. You can't locate yourself. That's your center. That's your true center. But if you think that you are this body, and you say my center is here, then that's not it. One's real center is a state where there is no reference to any center. That's what you really are like. How could the mind have a center anyplace? Is it some kind of a thing?


Sometimes he-- In another quote he used that, he spoke about the circumference and the center. I forgot the quote. Sometimes he'll use a paradoxical statement to get you to wake up to what he's saying. It's an experience that's also--this experience of the center--we could state it in another way: When THERE IS NO CENTER in the brain, in other words, there's no observer there who refers to himself as a referent, in other words, when your brain has no one to refer to, then you experience a state of being without any referent.

As long as the brain is busy, it keeps saying "me, me, me." It refers everything to itself. You speak of a center. Take away that center, take away that referent to itself all the time, and you get this feeling of an impersonal being that you are, this egoless being that you are. Let that referent come back in and you'll see that everything gets centered again in this dualistic way. But as long as you're referring to yourself as the center, you're going to have the opposite, the non-center. As long as you refer to this as the "I am" or the "me", there's the "not-me" out there. I'm sure he has other quotes like that, which would clarify what he means by center.


-Anthony Damiani