70. God is the End of All Desire and Knowledge

All desires must be given up, because by desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state. You can not know perfection, you can know only imperfection. For knowledge to be, there must be separation and disharmony.

You can know what you are not, but you can not know your real being. You can be only what you are. The entire approach is through understanding, which is in the seeing of the false as false. But to understand, you must observe from outside.

You only know that you react. Who reacts and to what, you do not know. You know on contact that you exist -- 'I am'. The 'I am this', 'I am that' are imaginary.

Self-limitation is the only problem. But you cannot run away from yourself. However far you go, you come back to yourself and to the need of understanding this point, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything.

Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea.

You create the world and then worry about it. Becoming selfish makes you weak. If you think you have the strength and courage to desire, it is because you are young and inexperienced. Invariably the object of desire destroys the means of acquiring it and then itself withers away. It is all for the best, because it teaches you to shun desire like poison.

Whatever may be the desire or fear, don't dwell upon it. Try and see for yourself. Here and there you may forget, it does not matter. Go back to your attempts till the brushing away of every desire and fear, of every reaction becomes automatic.

You have to give up everything to know that you need nothing, not even your body.

Your needs are unreal and your efforts are meaningless.

You imagine that your possessions protect you. In reality they make you vulnerable. realise yourself as away from all that can be pointed at as 'this' or 'that'. You are unreachable by any sensory experience or verbal construction. Turn away from them. Refuse to impersonate.

The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental. You are already perfect, here and now. You imagine yourself to be what you are not - stop it. It is the cessation that is important, not what you are going to stop. See your own condition, see the condition of the world.

Leave it all behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The Absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don't be half-hearted. All else is neither true nor false. It seems real when it appears, it disappears when it is denied. A transient thing is a mystery.

The real is simple, open, clear and kind, beautiful and joyous. It is completely free of contradictions. It is ever new, ever fresh, endlessly creative. Being and non-being, life and death, all distinctions merge in it. In reality there is only perception. The perceiver and the perceived are conceptual, the fact of perceiving is actual.