
Maharaj: The experience of consciousness comes through the body, and when you start looking at the body, it is nothing but food.
Questioner: There are so many propensities in me—the propensities of food, of the senses, of attachment, of thinking-call it anything you like. I hear Maharaj as a sort of intellectualized music, something which is not intellect, but the music that comes out of the intellect. How can I ignore that? I can’t ignore it, it is there all the time. I know that everything has come out of the food, but what is before me is not food; it is just like a flower.
M: What is it that has these propensities?
Q: As an integrated, social self I hear the music. How can I ignore that?
M: What is that principle which is the substratum for all these experiences? You must find that out.
The moment you awaken from sleep you seem to know the whole world. This passing show, which is in a state of flux the whole time, is thrown like a picture on your beingness. Through an illusion we are thinking that “I” have a separate personality, that “I” am a separate self. The consciousness which is all-pervading does not have this feeling of limited beingness. This all-pervading consciousness has no ignorance and no knowledge, but ignorance and knowledge take birth in it.
When I ignite the cigarette lighter you say that the flame is, when I put it out you say that the flame is not; so also the flame of knowledge is and is not.
Until such time as your words have stopped, there is meaning in the words, and there is nothing in the meaning also. The meaning is itself meaningless.
Q: If the words are meaningless how should we listen to you?
M: Don’t listen to me, you listen to your own Self and find out how much you are in your own company.
Q: We do not know how to be with our own Self. It is so ugly we always run away from it.
M: But you are caught up in it. Even if you call yourself ugly and do not like your own company, can you decide to take your food out of it and leave it?
The seed that is sown is so small, and yet so many flowers, fruits, the tree trunk, and everything has come out of it. I eat all that, and I eat the seed, and the seed is for my strength and contentment and satisfaction. When I become my Self I understand that beingness is with me.
So many desires, so many dreams, come on this body which knows “I am.” That beingness has taken hold of this five elemental body. You must find out what is sustaining itself on the body which is its food.
Birth and death are only terms, names. When death has come it only means that the experience called birth is extinguished.
Q: When we hear Maharaj an idea comes into the mind that death is wonderful and it can come soon and be forever.
M: When the death is forever it means that Eternal Immutable Parabrahman.
Q: Besides listening to Maharaj, is there any other tablet to invite death?
M: If you decide, finally, that you are not this body, the death will be final; death will die. Therefore try just to live without this consciousness of body and mind.
The body is dependent on the essence of food. The food is dependent on the five elements, and the five elements are the life of that one which has no name. If you try to find out your beingness—that source from which you have come— there will be no name, no form, and no identity of your own.
Q: I am trying a new experiment. Whatever I am, I don’t need to describe it, nor name it, nor question anything. Whatever I am, I am, and that’s it. Not looking at whatever is as separate from me, but just to be.
M: If you can manage that, then by all means do. If you get peace and can understand the Truth that way, that is very good.