
Questioner: Does the quality of your relationship with another person depend only on you or on both persons?
Maharaj: It depends on both. It is entirely the identity with the body that makes you feel there are two.
Q: Do the flowers have relationships?
M: They also have the essence of the five elements in them, and that knowledge of beingness is the essence of the five elements. If you water them they are pleased and they bloom, but if you don’t water them they are displeased and angry; but we can speak while they don’t have the power of speech.
Q: I’d like to know the meaning of language. Why do we talk and the flowers do not?
M: You will not know even if they are talking among themselves.
Q: What is the meaning of our language then?
M: Our words create chaos, but whatever meaning they have is only momentary; it has no lasting meaning.
Q: Small children don’t speak.
M: That’s why their behavior is better than yours.
Q: The kind of relationship we have with children is very different from what we have with grown-up people.
M: Because children are so innocent. You can take anybody’s child and fondle it.
Q: It’s a pity that first they have to learn to talk and later learn not to talk.
M: Learning to talk is done for the child's well-being. You shape the child as something is shaped from gold. Sometimes the labor charges for molding a piece of gold are more than the value of the product.
Q: I would like to know about artists. How does it happen that some person creates?
M: It is the quality of that great knowledge “l Am" that creates.
Q: Can you be an artist if you are not free from the body-mind concept?
M: It is an aid to the artist that we are in the body. The body is the support of that beingness. The moment that beingness was planted the formation of this body was taking place. The world is created for it. In the womb that knowingness is ignorant of its existence; the “I Am" is not present but the “I Am'* principle is started there. All things happen unknowingly, but even to understand that is very difficult; it is beyond our comprehension.
Q: Does one become nothing?
M: In your nothingness you are perfect, you are total, and in your knowingness you are imperfect.
Q: One should give up one's self-importance then?
M: Just understand that there is no self-importance at all; realize that you have done nothing all along.
When you identify with the body-mind you become separate, you are not one with anybody. When you are the “I Amness" you are everything. To help you to understand various concepts are given, like Prakriti and Purusa, but actually there is nothing. Even such concepts form a trap. The first trap is the love to be.
Q: Is the eternal of the Absolute the eternal of the relative?
M: The Absolute is permanent, illusion is impermanent.
Q: Has it ever been pure Absolute without the impermanent change?
M: The Absolute is always. When we talk about the coexistence of the Absolute and Maya there is no question of time. The Absolute is not time-bound; beyond illusion there is no such thing as time. You cannot think whether the Absolute was without illusion because time does not exist there at all. It is not even one hundred thousandth of a second that this illusion is born, while scientists talk of this world's billions of years.
Q: When I think of the Absolute as the ocean, the waves are not the ocean, but they are still there. That’s why the question came up.
M: You are not to study objectivity, the ocean and this body, the illusion. You have to understand for yourself. If you have dived deep into the sea, where are the waves? When you come out of the ocean the waves appear.
When you have no feeling of happiness or misery and no feeling of “I Amness" you are in the state of Nirguna. Recede back, prior to the thoughts.