
Questioner:: I had an experience early this morning. I awakened and sat for meditation for forty minutes. There were vibration-type things in my head, nothing but bliss; there were no visions. I was the center and I had the sense of
into duality I heard cymbals, and into my perception comes Maharaj dancing, playing the cymbals. I said to him, “We are in the middle of a forest; do you have to play those things all the time?” He continued playing and dancing but there was no longer any sound.
Maharaj: After having this experience would you like to ask something?
Q: No.
M: Experiences take rise in the beingness and in that knowledge again they merge.
Q: There was the experience “I Am,” but another was imposed on it, an attraction to get behind the “I Am.”
M: If the sun can enter into its own light then you can go behind your beingness. You are the one who knows “I Am.” All these experiences flow out of your beingness. There is no gain and no loss out of the experiences. They do not affect you. That beingness will get to that spiritual path when it is in earnest to do so, but so long as a vestige of body identity persists it will fail.
All of you want experiences, but they will not fill you. If the consciousness is getting restless to know the Self it will throw away everything and run to the goal. That is my own experience.
Hundreds and thousands of local people and foreigners have been here. They have become my disciples and gone. I have invited none of theM: it is the hunger of their own soul which brought them here.
Out of the hunger and earnestness of my own soul I came to know my own Self to such an extent that Bhagavan Krishna's philosophy became mine. This Krishna consciousness is my Self, yet I am out of it. Everything is in me, is resting on me.
The Absolute is Paramatman. From this total Reality comes the chidakasha, the wanting to be. From there the physical space, the entire manifestation, comes into being in a fraction of a second. In deep sleep there is nothing, then there is the slightest feeling that I want to be awake, then the entire manifestation takes place within a split second. The manifest has appeared on the Unmanifest and movement started, but the witness is the Absolute.
The experiences that you have—do they give you anything? Are you trying to understand the central point? We call what has happened to you a vision, and that vision is always within the sight.
Q: When I first had this experience I was aware of the witness aspect. When I experienced the sensation “I I”, I asked myself to whom it had come, and it disappeared.
M: Was this temporary or are you in it all through the day?
Q: I am now. The continuation of that feeling I had this morning—there is something within me that is pulling me and at the same time giving me an abstract feeling. It is just very easy for me, right now, to go into the “I Am.” There is a definite feeling that permeates the head as well as the chest, and I can be gone very quickly.
M: You are awake and are seeing the world and the witnessing of your being awake and seeing the world is taking place. How simple this is: in the waking state I am so and so, and this waking state is the witness. When this waking state goes to sleep that awareness is still there. You are the light behind the states. Krishna gave this knowledge to Arjuna. The one who listened to the knowledge wrote; so what has been given is secondhand knowledge written by a third person.
Whether a Vedantist or a novelist writes, it is only through his own concepts. A novelist writes whatever comes into his imagination; most of it is rubbish, trash, which should not have been written. All that dirt within himself has come out. Whatever you had inside yourself during your waking state exhibited itself in that experience you had.
Q: Do you mean that there is a purification process going on, that more dirt will be coming out?
M: You are not the body. Whatever comes and goes is merely projections of the mind or consciousness.
Q: If there is the likelihood of these things coming out now, should I be concerned?
M: Everything which you have heard, every piece of knowledge, every incident in your life, even if you think that you have forgotten, that consciousness has recorded. Every second that consciousness is registering what you are going through. All the five senses are typing incessantly. You can go further and further, getting into deeper and deeper water, pondering over this, but you should go back, reverse, to the source. Where did you come from? Go back to the source, take your stand in your original state.
My dear, you have understood everything, now use it. Stabilize yourself and go.