Insight Is Truer Than Clarity About Concepts - 10th January 2018

It's just continuing what you just said. When you earlier said "I am," some obsessive thought came to me and it doesn't leave me. That "am" is somehow... it's just "I." There is no "am." And when you said self-awareness, also there is no awareness, there is just Self.

Sometimes it is the word which could seem to be causing some trouble. There is just the Self. But even to see there is just the Self, it needs to be aware of itself, otherwise it is just an idea. So, is it just an idea or is it an insight? "There is just the Self." Now, we cannot know it as a concept. "There is just the Self" is as useless as any other concept. I say often that if you have the notion "I am a person" and then we pick up the notion "I am the Self," both are just as painful. In fact, just the idea "I am the Self" would be even more suffering.

So, this report "I am the Self" must come from a deeper insight about yourself. When we say "Who am I?" and we find I am this—whether we say Self, do we say Brahman, we say awareness—we see that it is empty of all phenomenal qualities. Yet the knowingness, the awareness, the primal witnessing there is not "who" anywhere; it just is. So we can see that this awareness is the essence of the Self, or we can say that it is the Self itself. It doesn't make so much difference whether we say awareness is the essence of the Self or we say that it is the Self itself. The pointer still works either way; they are just different words.

So this is very beautiful because all these words that we are using in Satsang also are... using thorns to remove other thorns, and then all the thorns are thrown away. Including... you don't have to, as you are already dropping all distinctions, all words. Nothing is needed. There are some who have some conditioning about some words, so we have to use some words too.