20. The Supreme is Beyond All

The person is never the subject.

You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

Personality is so contradictory! See different faces of personality as they are - mere habits of thoughts and feelings, bundles of memories and urges. Stop identifying yourself with them.

Once you realise that whatever appears before you cannot be yourself, and cannot say 'I am', you are free of all your 'persons' and their demands. The sense 'I am' is your own. You cannot part with it, but you can impart it to anything, as in saying: I am young. I am rich etc. But such self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness.

To know the source is to be the source. When you realise that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility.

Absolute is not an object to be recognised and stored up in memory. It is in the present and in feeling rather. It has more to do with the 'how' than with the 'what'. It is in the quality, in the value; being the source of everything, it is in everything. It gives birth to consciousness. All else is in consciousness.

The objective universe is in constant movement, projecting and dissolving innumerable forms. Whenever a form is infused with life, consciousness appears by reflection of awareness in matter.

The world is full of desires.

Everybody wants something or other. The desirer is not the person but the self. All desires, holy and unholy, come from the self; they all hang on the sense 'I am'. All desires aim at happiness. Their shape and quality depend on the psyche.

Where inertia predominates, we find perversions. With energy, passions arise. With lucidity the motive behind the desire is goodwill, compassion, the urge to make happy rather than be happy. But the Supreme is beyond all, yet because of its infinite permeability all cogent desires can be fulfilled.

Desires that destroy their objects or do not subside on satisfaction are self-contradictory and cannot be fulfilled. Only desires motivated by love, goodwill and compassion are beneficial to both the subject and object and can be fully satisfied.

To know itself the self must be faced with its opposite - the not-self. Desire leads to experience. Experience leads to discrimination, detachment, self-knowledge - liberation. And what is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream.