
Questioner: How can I achieve what Maharaj speaks about?
Maharaj: Remember your beingness. The knowledge that “I Am” has come to you out of your satva guna; that is beingness. Satva, rajas, and tamas: three gunas are playing here in the manifestation. The quality of the satva, the essence, is to know that you are, and to provide you with that basis on which to act. Rajas is the motivating factor, it makes you move about, and tamas is inertia, consolidation. This knowledge “I Am” comes to you after your body is born; after that the body of childhood grows on its own and becomes old. What is left after all the ambitions, all the desires, have been fulfilled, all the actions have been done in accordance with the natural disposition?
What remains in the end is only one thing, “I Am.” So all through life you have to remember to investigate who is this “I Am”; otherwise birth and death will have no meaning for your beingness, because that beingness also will be dissolved after the death of the body.
Q: Beingness will be dissolved after the death of the body?
M: This beingness is the quality of the essence of the food body. Actually, that beingness is living on the food that is your body. All bodies are food. That feeling of beingness appears in the body and is dissolved when the body drops off.
Beingness means loving that feeling of self. Love is included in the beingness and that love grows as the body grows. For more and more love to be given to that beingness, so much manifestation, so many other things are required in order to satisfy that love. “This I want for that comfort/’ comfort of the body and that beingness, the love to be. In order to satisfy that craving you must have a wife, you must have a house, you must have clothes and other comforts, and this goes on. This beingness only creates karma. Actually, nobody is born and nobody dies. The fact is that beingness appears and beingness disappears.
Q: How could karma act from life to life, and what about God?
M: The one who understands the meaning of the word God is himself God.
Q: What remains after the knowledge of beingness dissolves?
M: See, the cigarette lighter is lit, now it is extinguished, but does it mean that it is dead? That beingness, when extinguished, is dissolved into Brahman, from where it came.
Q: If beingness is dissolved then there is no karma?
M: If that beingness is not there, can there be actions? When the beingness is there the manifestation is there, and the actions happen in the realm of that consciousness. There is no doer. We erroneously claim to be the doer.
That “I Amness” is like a seed of the berry. In that berry seed all the forest of berry trees is already present in potential condition. Likewise, this “I Amness” is the seed of manifestation in which actions happen, and there is no doer. How is the seed formed in a fruit? Out of the essence of the juice of that fruit the seed is formed. What does it mean when the seed is formed? It is recording all the images of the formation of the tree already recorded in the tree itself, which will again, in due course, proliferate into another tree, but all this is recorded in the seed only. The same thing applies to the human seed. When the seed is planted, when does it record the image of the parents, so that that particular seed assumes the image of the father or mother, gets a particular body form? What is the principle?
Take for example the TV screen. On the screen you see all the images acting. These images are already recorded somewhere and are being played now. So, they will not stop even if we shout and ask them to. That is one not very good example. The human or natural seed recording out of which the same or similar images grow is spontaneous, while the TV recording is out of the skill of the human intellect.
Q: In the Buddhist teaching there is not a full solution. There are remaining aggregates that will form a new being.
M: Whatever Buddha’s philosophy is, these are all various ideas, various concepts. In each person the ideas are sprouting and when they spontaneously come out, he behaves accordingly. He follows those ideas because he likes them, they have come out of him.
I am not inclined to follow various ideas or the judgment of others. Among the judgments, the best is given by Lord Krishna. He says we have to get out of our own judgment, our own concepts about ourself. Do not depend on anybody else.
Now you listen to these talks and realize your own ultimate position. Your true position, which you will not lose again. You stabilize there. My Guru also indicated to me my ultimate destination and I have stabilized myself in it.
It occurs to one’s attention that one is. When it was not in the attention of that one, was the principle not there? It was. That principle is unblemished and without attention. In non-attention it prevails. Eternally.
And what does it mean—whatever acquired is surrendered in oblations to the Brahman? All this knowledge, this knowingness, is offered to Brahman.
Q: If the body is food for beingness, we shall feel insecure for the body. It will not be peace, quietness, because we shall be anxious for the beingness, through the body.
M: When you leave your body who is the customer for that peace?
Q: Even if I am not identified with the body, but I know that it is food for the beingness, I feel anxious.
M: It is good that you are careful and anxious to preserve the body, but remember that this manifested body is dependent on the essence of the food that you eat.
Out of the essences or juices of vegetation all species are formed: insects, animals, human beings, etc. This quality of beingness is in the juices, the vegetation, in a dormant condition. In each species that knowingness is there. The principle-just to know. It is not a question of whose knowingness, only beingness or knowingness is there.
Q: Are there different kinds of beingness?
M: The expression of consciousness through different bodies is different. The body shape is different, the voice is different, ideas are different, sound is different, tastes are different. It is infinitely varied.
Q: How can the beingness be different? Beingness is only one.
M: Sound as such is the same, but its expression through different instruments is different. Out of the same consciousness, with the formation of a Krishna body a Krishna is born; a donkey also is formed accordingly. Consciousness is the same.
Q: Are the gunas dependent on the food you eat, or are they already there?
M: In the initial stage, it is all right for you to understand that everything potentially is this food value. You start with this food value and vital breath, this combination and that “I Amness”; but later on, you have to investigate and understand how this “I Amness” has come. You have to go to the root, root means mula, mula means a child. How has that child formation taken place? In the process, when you go to the source itself, you will realize that “I Amness” contains this manifested universe, like a seed. To understand more clearly, take the example of the dream world. You are in deep sleep and suddenly you feel “I Am/’ and that “I Amness” creates a dream world. Similarly this manifest world is created by that “I Amness.” You will realize this later in the search for the truth. The last progress will be for you to transcend this “I Amness” also and get stabilized in the Ultimate.
Don't presume that having understood all this word-ly knowledge you are full of wisdom. To think that will be something like being severely constipated. Whatever I have expounded to you is to be realized by the Self.
Before this beingness came to you, you were all the time there, but you were not conscious of it. The Absolute doesn’t know Itself at all. Our true state is not of knowledge, but prior to knowledge.