Papaji's favourite form of the Divine Mother

Question: What is your favorite form of the Divine Mother? Will you please tell us a story about her in this form?

Papaji: From the beginning my Mother has been Mother Ganga. She is not only a river, but she is the Mother. Because of her compassion she flows over this soil. I have tread her banks from the Bay of Bengal to Uttarkashi, from 1910 to the present. My family went on yearly visits to Haridwar. I will tell you a story of Ganga Ma which happened when I was at the Maha Kumbha Mela in Prayag, the Mela which comes only once in 144 years.

In the Mela there are so many traditions and centers each trying to promote their own propaganda 24 hours a day. One day it was too crowded for me so I went for a walk downstream to where the Yamuna, Saraswati, and the Ganga flow as one to the Bay of Bengal. After about five kilometers a girl ran up to me and fell at my feet. I looked around but her family was nowhere in sight, which was very strange because a young Indian woman never goes out alone.

'Where are your parents?' I asked. She replied, 'I have no parents, I am alone.' 'Why are you here?' I continued, 'Why don't you go back to the Prayag where the Kumbha is being performed? Why are you alone out here?

Then she said, 'In this Mela everybody comes to remove their sins by having a bath in the confluence of the three Holy rivers. Everybody leaves their sins, but what can I do with them? I have vowed to take the sins away from these people, and I do, but I must leave these sins at the feet of a true Saint and be free of them. I have been searching the Mela for seven days, but I have not found anybody who could take these sins. But now I have found you who are the only person to whom I can release my sins. I am the Ganga!'

Then I looked at her beautiful eyes and knew that they were not human, and I noticed that her body was transparent and that I could look right through it. She stood up and walked out onto the river and slowly became one with the water. I stood there for many hours wondering what had happened and how I could have been so blessed to have seen her in her real form. She had been living in the heavens, but has compassionately come down to earth in response to Sage Bhagirathas penance. Now she blesses all those who see her, or taste her, or touch her. This is the experience of my Mother.

(Excerpt from the book THE TRUTH IS, Bhakti Chapter)

Bring your self into focus

You give no attention to your self. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your self. Bring your self into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and the results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself by inadvertence. By knowing what you are not, you come to know your self. The way back to your self is through refusal and rejection. One thing is certain: the real is not imaginary, it is not a product of the mind. Even the sense ‘I am’ is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek. Just have a good look at it. Once you are convinced that you cannot say truthfully about your self anything except ‘I am’, and that nothing that can be pointed at, can be your self, the need for the ‘I am’ is over -- you are no longer intent on verbalising what you are. All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define your self. All definitions apply to your body only and to its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly.

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused. Just like gold made into ornaments has no advantage over gold dust, except when the mind makes it so, so are we one in being -- we differ only in appearance. We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Effort and penance

The saints and Yogis, by immense efforts and sacrifices, acquire many miraculous powers and can do much good in the way of helping people and inspiring faith, yet it does not make them perfect. It is not a way to reality, but merely an enrichment of the false. All effort leads to more effort; whatever was built up must be maintained, whatever was acquired must be protected against decay or loss. Whatever can be lost is not really one's own; and what is not your own of what use can it be to you? In my world nothing is pushed about, all happens by itself. All existence is in space and time, limited and temporary. He who experiences existence is also limited and temporary. I am not concerned either with 'what exists' or with 'who exists'. I take my stand beyond, where I am both and neither.

The persons who, after much effort and penance, have fulfilled their ambitions and secured higher levels of experience and action, are usually acutely conscious of their standing; they grade people into hierarchies, ranging from the lowest non-achiever to the highest achiever. To me all are equal. Differences in appearance and expression are there, but they do not matter. Just as the shape of a gold ornament does not affect the gold, so does man's essence remain unaffected. Where this sense of equality is lacking it means that reality had not been touched.

Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. The Pandits and the Yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere knowledge when the self is not known? It will be certainly misused. Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no peace.

I AM THAT, Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Self enquiry

The sense of being, of 'I am' is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the 'I am' without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it -- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Awakening

An essential part of the awakening is the recognition of the unawakened you, the ego as it thinks, speaks, and acts, as well as the recognition of the collectively conditioned mental processes that perpetuate the unawakened state.

Eckhart Tolle

Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought 'I am'. The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally without any interference on your part.

Sincere longing for Reality

You need not chase the 'I am' to kill it. You cannot. All you need is a sincere longing for reality. We call it atma-bhakti, the love of the Supreme: or moksha-sankalpa, the determination to be free from the false. Without love, and will inspired by love, nothing can be done. Merely talking about Reality without doing anything about it is self-defeating. There must be love in the relation between the person who says 'I am' and the observer of that 'I am'. As long as the observer, the inner self, the 'higher' self, considers himself apart from the observed, the 'lower' self, despises it and condemns it, the situation is hopeless. It is only when the observer (vyakta) accepts the person (vyakti) as a projection or manifestation of himself, and, so to say, takes the self into the Self, the duality of 'I' and 'this' goes and in the identity of the outer and the inner the Supreme Reality manifests itself.

This union of the seer and the seen happens when the seer becomes conscious of himself as the seer, he is not merely interested in the seen, which he is anyhow, but also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, aware of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings Reality into focus.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Discard every self seeking motive

Discard every self seeking motive as soon as it seen and you need not search for the Truth; Truth will find you.

If you seek Reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking. Even the idea of being a man or woman, or even human, should be discarded.

Some pearls of wisdom from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

True Communication!

True communication is communion – the realization of oneness, which is love. Usually, this is quickly lost again, unless you are able to stay present enough to keep out the mind and its old patterns. Although brief glimpses are possible, love cannot flourish unless you are permanently free of mind identification and your presence is intense enough to have dissolved the pain-body or you can at least remain present as the watcher. The pain-body cannot then take you over and so become destructive of love.

Eckhart Tolle

Awakening

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. For most people it is not an event but a process they undergo.

Even those rare beings who experience a sudden, dramatic, and seemingly irreversible awakening will still go through a process in which the new state of consciousness gradually flows into and transforms everything they do and so becomes integrated into their lives.

Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.Awareness takes over from thinking. Instead of being in charge of your life, thinking becomes the servant of awareness.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The initiation of the awakening process is an act of grace. You cannot make it happen nor can you prepare yourself for it or accumulate credits toward it. There isn’t a tidy sequence of logical steps that leads toward it, although the mind would love that. You don’t have to become worthy first. It may come to the sinner before it comes to the saint, but not necessarily. That’s why Jesus associated with all kinds of people, not just the respectable ones….

Awakened doing is the alignment of your outer purpose — what you do — with your inner purpose — awakening and staying awake. Through awakened doing, you become one with the outgoing purpose of the universe. Consciousness flows through you into this world. It flows into your thoughts and inspires them. It flows into what you do and guides and empowers it. Not what you do, but how you do what you do determines whether you are fulfilling your destiny. And how you do what you do is determined by your state of consciousness.

From the book, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle

The secret of happiness

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now. Ask yourself, “Is there negativity in me at this moment?”Then, become alert, attentive to your thoughts as well as your emotions. Watch out for the low-level unhappiness in whatever form it takes, such as discontent, nervousness, being “fed up”, and so on. Watch out for thoughts that appear to justify or explain this unhappiness but in reality cause it.

The moment you become aware of a negative state within yourself, it does not mean that you have failed. It means that you have succeeded. Until that awareness happens, there is identification with inner states, and such identification is ego.

With awareness comes disidentification from thoughts, emotions, and reactions. This is not to be confused with denial. The thoughts, emotions, or reactions are recognized, and in the moment of recognition, disidentification happens automatically.

Your sense of self, of who you are, then undergoes a shift: before you were the thoughts, emotions, and reactions; now you are awareness, the conscious Presence that witnesses those states.

Eckhart Tolle, Chapter 4 of A New Earth

The ultimate spiritual practice

To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice. If you practice just this one thing, you won't need to read any more books or learn any other meditation techniques. Welcoming whatever arises in this moment, outside or inside of you, brings freedom. The conditioned mind will tell you not to do this, for it believes that by resisting, it will become free. The opposite is true. By resisting, you become even more stuck. When you no longer believe what the mind is saying, you realize that the quickest way for transformation to happen is to welcome what is. In that moment, life is free to move through you. The conditioned mind is no longer obstructing life.

Eckhart Tolle