
Maharaj: What country are you from and who directed you here?
Questioner: I am from America. I have been visiting some Ashrams and some people I met told me about Maharaj and so I came. I have been studying the different philosophies for years.
M: Learning all these different philosophies has no meaning whatsoever. Unless you have a mirror in which you can see yourself, what is the good of it?
Q: A mirror is what I am looking for.
M: Those mirrors that you have had so far are all useless.
Q: No, they are not useless. They are just parts of the mirror that I can combine into one real big mirror.
M: Are you capable of carrying all that?
Q: No, not really.
M: You have the constant irritation in you that “you are.” That itching is causing all the trouble, because you don’t know exactly what you are. That is why you are roaming from place to place, in search of nobody. You must first find out when that itching started. Just sit here and listen awhile and then ask questions.
Q: Maharaj has said that everything is out of the food, and also that I am the creator of everything. Now I do not know whether I am the creator of everything or am something which has come out of the food.
M: Without asking anyone, whatever knowledge you have gained about yourself is absolutely correct.
Q: I experience difficulties.
M: It is beyond all difficulties. He who knows the difficulties is beyond them.
Q: A sense of great happiness arises in me when I hear the words of Maharaj.
M: This momentary happiness is of no use to you at all.
Q: Maybe I have not found it, but I am happy to hear about it.
M: All these ideas of yours are binding you. Once you understand that there is no knowledge, that it is all ignorance, you are on your proper level.
You have the idea that I have the knowledge; this is only an idea. Honestly speaking, there is no knowledge whatsoever. It is beyond all imagination, It has no attributes. It cannot be imagined at all.
Without the knowledge I am really very happy. By entertaining the idea “I have all the knowledge/’ it increases day by day, but that knowledge has no peace, no pleasure whatsoever. With several attributes that knowledge is violently spinning about, but I am not that knowledge. Every human being is told that it is his bounden duty to gain knowledge, but he will come to understand that this knowledge is of no use at all to gain his ultimate goal.
Q: What is God?
M: Everything you see is all Iswara [God].
Q: Around me I see the world.
M: Everything is Iswara, even the smallest atom is Iswara. In a large city like Bombay the gutters are full of dirt and litter that create a smell around you for some time; then it is gone, into the sky. The sky is ever there, it has no smell at all, it is pure and clean. The human body is dirt only. In course of time this body will go, that dirt will smell no more, it will be all pure sky, nothing will remain. But you are binding yourself, day by day, by your conceptual ideas: “I was born,” “I will have rebirth,” etc.; and you remain in all the misery.
Q: How can I get out of it?
M: How are you going to get out of it unless you know what you are?
Q: We see that the sky and the sun take care of the earth’s dirt. Who is to say what will take care of my dirt?
M: You won’t take delivery of any knowledge whatsoever. The storehouse is full of those concepts and ideas. All of them are dirt, and that is how you are binding yourself to the wheel of birth and death.
Q: Not all the concepts are dirty; some are very beautiful.
M: Remember that they have taken rise in you, who are ultimately the product of dirt.
Making a bundle of your concepts, you are busy in the world. You are not that “I” which is going about in a determined fashion that “I am so and so.” You are behaving on the basis of that “I” which was absent before the birth, and will be absent after the death, of the body. That “I,” limited by time, you have taken for granted. Go beyond the concepts and become idea-less.