61. Matter is Consciousness Itself

Teacher will take you to the river, but the crossing is your own. Freedom cannot be gained nor kept without will-to-freedom. You must strive for liberation; the least you can do is uncover and remove the obstacles diligently. If you want peace you must strive for it. You will not get peace just by keeping quiet.

Be free of imagination. You can grow like this, but you must not indulge in forecasts and plans, born of memory and anticipation. It is one of the peculiarities of a jnani that he is not concerned with the future. Your concern with future is due to fear of pain and desire for pleasure, to the jnani all is bliss: he is happy with whatever comes.

There is nothing wrong with the world. What is wrong is in the way you look at it.

It is your own imagination that misleads you. Without imagination there is no world. Your conviction that you are conscious of a world is the world. The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life. Cut off imagination and attachment and what remains?

How different it is when you can see it as it is, not through the screen of desire and fear. Everything moves according to its nature. Where is the need of a policeman?

Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutralises the action. Everything happens, but there is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end it is as if nothing happened. You can distinguish in your life a pattern or see merely a chain of accidents.

Explanations are meant to please the mind. They need not be true.

The moment you allow your imagination to spin, it at once spins out a universe. It is not at all as you imagine. There is only imagination. The intelligence and power are all used up in your imagination. It has absorbed you so completely that you just cannot grasp how far from reality you have wandered.

No doubt imagination is richly creative. Universe within universe are built on it. Yet they are all in space and time, past and future, which just do not exist.

You have all the self-realisation you need, but you do not trust it. Have courage, trust yourself, go, talk, act; give it a chance to prove itself. With some, realisation comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable.