Can the Ever-Present One Be Lost? - 9th November 2017

Yesterday I asked: how many of you see that nothing has ever happened to awareness? Then how come you feel that something has happened to you? So there must be a belief that I am something other, this something primal. That's right. The Upanishads say this: just be the witness. Look again. That has been misunderstood, that I personally must be the witness. So I'd rather say you are the witnessing. You can't help it. If you wanted to leave yourself, you couldn't. It is a simple thing to see. But if you look at the world, you find that everyone is looking for themselves in some way or the other. They might be apparently looking for money, they might be apparently looking for a partner, they might be apparently looking for a better body, but they are actually frankly looking for themselves. Because they say, 'I will be more complete if I get my perfect one.' That completion—you are only looking for yourself. Looking for the same. But I say, where did you lose it? If you were not the Self right now, then I would say okay, let's go to the place where the Self is. But it is you.

It's just that we might have picked up along the way, like we did in terms of a long idea about what I am. You picked up the idea that 'I am just this body' and 'I am just this body and this mind.' You might have also picked up the idea of the Self, an idea of God, and yet what is your greatest idea about God? It is ever-present. Nobody says, 'I believe in a God who comes and goes.' So if it is ever-present, where must it be now? That which is ever-present, can it not be here now? If it is here now, where must you look for it? And as I'm using the terminology, I am using God, Guru, Self—in this discussion, it is interchangeable terminology. So now, will you find it if you go with your thought saying, 'Yes, it's a little more, this is a little more, then a little more clear'? No. I am not going to yield to all this. Can it be true that the ever-present one can be lost just because your mind says it is lost? But you have to take a step to go anywhere to find that which is ever-present? What are you now? If you needed a notion to become God, a concept to become God, even the concept of God to become God, then God would not be God.

So then what happened is so simple, it is so obvious. What has happened? Or is it that we keep searching and searching? A simple example is coming to me in the Guru Aarti in the morning that we do. Now there is a verse: 'Jo jan tumre bhakt hain, tin ke dukh harto, ek nimish mein.' A rough translation: In a moment, in an instant, all that we suffer from as your devotees, you can take away. Now we go to the next line: 'Bhay bhanjan, dukh bhanjan.' Okay, 'Sankat...' then the next line is 'Dukh bhanjan,' which is almost synonymous, easy. So now we've been doing this Aarti for quite some time, and what happens? Every time we finish 'Bhay bhanjan,' I still hear somebody saying 'Dukh,' although we know very well that it comes 'Sankat' next. So this is the power of conditioning. You really preach something over and over again—that you are a body, this is your hand, this is your life, you must work hard, you must find the right partner. You think the 'you' has been, the 'I' has been stuck with this limited identity for so long that although we are seeing the truth about ourselves, we are finding what we are. Just like the power of this conditioning, this is continuing to play. That is why we have Satsang every day, Monday to Friday, because I know that in a day you could pick up new conditioning. You could be completely notional from here. Tomorrow you can come back and say, 'Oh, the electricity was on and then this happened, he did this to me or she did that to me.' This thing happens for two hours every day and we say, 'None of this which appears here is on the screen of my being.' So I might leave from here, and yet the power of the old conditioning can come back.

This is the design of this creation. This habit is like that. As I often say, Satsang is the rehab we have for God. From what? From this idea that I am a limited entity, from the idea of the ego. Whose body is it? God's. Because there is only God. God decided to play this game of being an individual person. It wanted to taste itself in the limited form. God, jokingly we can say, was tired of being the unlimited. Then he says, 'There's no way, there's no excitement in this. No, I cannot be hurt. There is nobody other than me.' I will play enough, enough. But even in coming to this, it doesn't want an abrupt end to this movie. It doesn't want the novel to end suddenly. Coming to my Godliness again, so many... okay, whatever it might be. Since you started coming to Satsang, a large percentage of the notions were withdrawn. I'm sure there could be something that still sticks around. It's okay. The sticky ones can still be there for some time. But I don't feel really... you might even have picked up new ones. Satsang notions. But at least this much was withdrawn. If you come openly for some time, many of your notions that you carried when you came in are not there. At least this much has to be done, just to come to this motionless existence.

God is dropping now how it happens. Once Bhagavan had this at fourteen years old—he was extremely young—he had this experience where he felt like he's dying. And he said, 'If I die, I want to be there to experience it. So let me lie down and see what actually happens.' And in seeing that, in the openness to the death experience, it is the same thing what I say: the fear of the unknown. Like the wobbly place, motionless existence. It initially can seem a bit wobbly, but if you just say, 'Okay, let me see what happens,' just go through this and you will see the wobbliness is no big deal for you. But in going through that, some like Bhagavan, all of this conditioning was dropped. But even there, what happened? In my own life, for many years he remained inside that marination. Mythology talks about it. So even to come to that motionless existence, thank God. What is there to speak? What words are needed? And then consciousness itself puts words into that one's mouth saying that, 'Okay, stay in this expression.' But then I want to play as other expressions, coming to this expression to hear what happened to you. 'I just dropped all my concepts of myself.' But what does that mean? What are you believing about yourself? Who am I? Ask yourself. Don't say 'Who am I?' as a robot. Say, is it true that you are who you claim to be? I guess the question for a man is: is there truth to this notion that you might be carrying about yourself, that you are the body? That you are wrong? In asking 'Who am I?' what happens? All these concepts that you picked up about yourself are dropped away.