You Are Beyond Space and Time, Nisargadatta

From “I Am That”, Nisargadatta, Chapter 94  

 

You are Beyond Space and Time

 

(Continuation…)  

 

Q: What you say reminds me of the dharmakaya of the Buddha.

 

M: Maybe.

 

We need not run off with terminology.

 

Just see the person you imagine yourself to be as a part of the world you perceive within your mind and look at the mind from the outside, for you are not the mind.

After all, your only problem is the eager self-identification with whatever you perceive.

Give up this habit, remember that you are not what you perceive, use your power of alert aloofness.

 

See yourself in all that lives and your behavior will express your vision.

 

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world, which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage, or a picture on the screen, admiring and enjoying, but really unmoved.

 

As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, actually existing in time and space, short-lived and vulnerable, naturally you will be anxious to survive and increase.

 

But when you know yourself as beyond space and time — in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable — you will be afraid no longer.

 

Know yourself as you are — against fear there is no other remedy.

You have to learn to think and feel on these lines, or you will remain indefinitely on the personal level of desire and fear, gaining and losing, growing and decaying.

 

A personal problem cannot be solved on its own level.

 

The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow.

 

The world is an ocean of pain and fear, of anxiety and despair.

 

Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, rarely come, quickly gone.

 

A man of low intelligence believes, against all evidence, that he is an exception and that the world owes him happiness.

 

But the world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness.

 

It cannot be otherwise.

 

We seek the real because we are unhappy with the unreal.

 

Happiness is our real nature and we shall never rest until we find it.

 

But rarely we know where to seek it.

 

Once you have understood that the world is but a mistaken view of reality, and is not what it appears to be, you are free of its obsessions.

 

Only what is compatible with your real being can make you happy and the world, as you perceive it, is its outright denial.

 

Keep very quiet and watch what comes to the surface of the mind.

 

Reject the known, welcome the so far unknown and reject it in its turn.

 

Thus you come to a state in which there is no knowledge, only being, in which being itself is knowledge.

 

To know by being is direct knowledge.

 

It is based on the identity of the seer and the seen.

 

Indirect knowledge is based on sensation and memory, on proximity of the perceiver and his percept, confined with the contrast between the two.

The same with happiness.

 

Usually you have to be sad to know gladness and glad to know sadness.

 

True happiness is uncaused and this cannot disappear for lack of stimulation.

 

It is not the opposite of sorrow, it includes all sorrow and suffering.