You Can Do Something

What is here is so obvious – the power of universal consciousness! Shining, spontaneous, alive – this is what you are. Why do we overlook our true nature and go into our monkey minds and make problems for ourselves?

When you first awaken in the morning, what is here? Consciousness! It returns to you from who knows where, and who knows why. From a state where nothing is, suddenly there is consciousness appearing. How incredible that this happens!

When you wake up in the morning, before you start thinking, it is like being born. It is the same as the moment you were born. When you were a brand-new baby, you were fully aware, totally aware that you were...here! Simply here. There was no doubt to you that you were here.

I didn’t say “no doubt in your mind,” because you were not making any such differentiations yet. You didn’t know you had a mind. You didn’t know what a thought was. And yet you knew that you were. This also happens in the moment when you first awaken each day, before the mind starts moving. You know you are.

As a baby, you knew yourself to be all of it. There was nothing telling you that you were separate from anything, and so everything you saw, felt, and sensed, you knew to be nothing other than yourself. It is your natural state to know yourself as everything, but you have learned to be ignorant of that. You have taken on ignorance. Luckily, you can unlearn ignorance just as easily.

Everything that makes you suffer now, or be afraid, or be desirous of something to fix your problems, has been learned. You learned you were separate, you learned you were vulnerable, you learned you were unhappy, but those things are not true. All unhappiness is learned! And it can be unlearned. You can unlearn the false idea that you are separate from the universal power of life, and reclaim your true Self-knowledge. You can remember that you are the universal power of life.

Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj (Nisargadatta’s guru) said that it is through thinking that ignorance has become firmly established in one’s Consciousness, and it is through thinking that ignorance can be completely dispelled.

Do not be tricked into complacency by something you have learned that says, “There is no me. There is no one who can do any of this. There is no me who can unlearn.”

This is a false idea that is keeping you from knowing your true self. It is dishonest of you to repeat it. It is always dishonest to repeat something you learned without fully understanding it. And there is no way one can say “There is no me.” Because if you really understand that to be true, you would never say it. You wouldn’t need to. It would have no meaning to you. So if “There is no me” still has meaning to you, you don’t really believe it.

Admit that you still believe, at some level, in “me.” Admit it! So, use the “me-ness” that you still believe in. Don’t shun it, don’t be ashamed of it. Up until the last moment, it is your friend, and then it is gone. Your mind is the tool that discovers it never was. And then it is no more. But until then, it is necessary!

When you arrive at the gate and walk through, you turn around and see that there was no gate. But until you have arrived and walked through, there is a gate. The gate is there, until you walk through it. Don’t proclaim too soon that there is no gate, or how are you ever going to walk through it?

So just allow yourself to ponder these things. Allow yourself to delve deeply into your mind for clues. Use the power of discrimination. Use the power of thought, and investigate into the nature of your true Self. The sages will tell you this – Siddharameshwar, Ramana Maharsi, Nisargadatta – you will find this in their talks and writings. You will not find any of them saying there is nothing you can do. Never!

Yes, it unfolds like a lotus blossom. You can’t rush it. You can’t force it. But you don’t have to be passive. Use the tools at your disposal. Use the power of mind to unlearn what was learned. Find out what you have taken on as “me” that is not really that, so that you can unload it.

And above all, keep looking at the shining aliveness of this moment of consciousness, lighting everything in its way. Watch all thought, feeling, and sensory content simply floating across that screen of bright, vibrant consciousness. Let the attachment to the floating content of thoughts and feelings lessen. Inquire into why there is an attachment to fleeting clouds such as these.

The clouds, the content, the thoughts, forever arising – they only take on meaning by referring to other clouds! It is all totally illusory, clouds finding meaning in clouds. Passing disturbances like ripples on a pond. And you are there, unchanged.

Keep your eye on the living background upon which it all appears. You will discover it is the only Reality, and so then, what can you be but that?