Never Forget

"That knowledge which experienced itself as Krishna, Buddha or Christ has subsided, it has become one with the Whole.

So if you abuse Christ, if you abuse Mohammed, if you abuse anyone, he does not come and ask you: “Why are you abusing me?” because that knowledge, that experience, has mixed with the totality. Similarly, now, you may be a very great person, you might be a dictator of the world, but when you go to sleep you forget what you were—your name, your body, your age, your sex, your nationality, everything. This sense of a separate identity is very limited and not the truth; in fact, it is totally false.

So if that is the situation with Christ, what is the case with you? Or you may be a humble, virtuous person. Whenever you go to sleep, you forget sin, virtue; you forget yourself. What is the basic fact? It is that you forgot yourself as an individual, which gives you deep rest. When you go to sleep, you might have had sex with a hundred women or a hundred men. At that time you were enjoying it. But when you sleep, when you take rest, that sensory experience is not there. So then you don’t have an identity, no weight at that place. Don’t say you are so and so, you are an individual, you are a man or a woman.

Just stay put; from there you can move ahead. That is the truth, that is the fact; from there you can go to reality. And then whatever is manifested, will arise and subside. It is like sunrise and sunset, waxing and waning. That desultory manifestation you cannot be; it cannot be the real You.

Whenever there is a sense of individuality, personality, or a separateness, you have so many wants. You want to see a movie, you want to hear music, you want to play, you want to have sex, you want to eat fancy foods, you want to consume intoxicant, but when that sense of separateness is not there, when you are one with the totality, these things are not desired. And spirituality or what you call “religion” is mainly to understand this: that you don’t require anything, you are a part of the totality, or reality.

When you grasp that, you don’t have any of these needs. But so long as you are separate from things, you need everything. To exist as a separate individual constitutes the entire problem. And all these things, the various sense caterings, all reading, search for knowledge, for pleasure, everything is related to that. Once all that subsides, there is no more problem. Then the bliss you experience is true bliss. The foregoing, however, is not a ban on activities.

Do whatever you want, but never forget the reality, never forget what you really are. You are not the body, you are not the food, you are not this vital air (prana). Whatever has appeared is a state, and as such it has to go."

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, The Ultimate Medicine