The 'I Am' as the Gate to the Absolute,
and Love as the Gate to the I Am
Just go deep.
Deep inside, as deep as you can go.
This is not a talk. This is Satsang.
It is just you and me. And I want to tell you things you have not heard in other places.
You know, Robert was never very popular. At the top of his game, maybe forty or fifty people came to Satsang. He only had three people that stayed with him the entire seven, eight years that I knew him.
The way he taught Self-inquiry is very, very difficult. To just dive deep and keep going deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Because it is so easy to get lost that way. Just get lost in the emptiness and wander around in the emptiness for twenty years, like Moses in the desert.
Looking for the ‘I.’ Looking for the source of the ‘I.’ And the source is you. But how to find you?
Then Nisargadatta came along with an entirely new way of doing Self-inquiry. Rather than looking for the ‘I’ or the ‘I thought’ and following that to the source, he said find the ‘I am’—that feeling that you are alive, that sense of your presence. The energy that is you. The totality of your felt existence.
He said to stay there with that. Stay there with the ‘I am.’ For the ‘I am’ is the gate to the true you—the Absolute. Beyond heaven and earth. Beyond existence. Beyond your humanhood. Even beyond God. For the ‘I am’ is God, and you are that also.
But he admitted it is not easy for a lot of people to find the ‘I am.’ He would call it the Bala Krishna—the baby Krishna. A lot of people write me in the blog and emails, “How do I find the ‘I am?’ How do I find the ‘I am,’ the baby Krishna? How do I get a hold of my sense of presence? How do I find that? Because I don’t even know that.”
But just as the ‘I am’ is the gate to the Absolute, the ‘I am’ itself has a gate. And that gate is love.
The most open, the widest, the most attractive, the stickiest gate of all, is love. It takes you right to the ‘I am,’ just like most of you found it last night, almost instantaneously. It is so easy that way—love and beatific chanting.
So there is a new way in town—the Loveji way!
(A little humour, you can laugh.)
Which is to follow your heart. Feel the energy of divine chanting, feel the energy of your heart, and instantaneously find the ‘I am’, and carry it with you after satsang, into the next day if you can.
‘I am.’
My presence.
I exist.
And so, this new method demands a new technique. First we will have chanting as last night to invoke the ‘I am’ in you, and we will work with that for a while. When you are in the ‘I am,’ I will talk about the ‘I am,’ as well as that which is beyond ‘I am.’ So you will be close to the Absolute. Maybe you can hear better who you really are.
Okay, can we have the same chant as last night?
[Music starts—chanting—Arati Sadguru]
Make it as loud as possible for yourselves, so that you can get carried away by the chanting.
[Music continues]
This is a chant of joy, a celebration of the guru. I want you to join that guru, the ‘I am’.
[Music continues]
Move to the chant and music. Feel it arising within you. It is coming from your heart—let it come out.
[Music continues]
Let the music call to your heart.
[Music continues]
Is there any way to turn the volume up?
[Music continues]
Feel the music play through you. Coming up from below your heart, through your heart, upwards, and move to it. It is singing to you. It is singing to Bala Krishna, your true nature.
[Music continues]
Think of someone you love. Put him or her in your heart. Sing to that person, along with the music.
[Music continues]
Sing along with the music, in your heart.
[Music continues]
Come on Tina, move. Move with the music.
[Music continues]
Feel that joy. That joy is you!
[Music continues. Chanting ends.]
Okay, Jo-Ann. Put on the real love song next, the Yogananda one.
Jo-Ann: “I Will Sing Thy Name”?
Edji: Yes.
[Chanting—I Will Sing Thy Name]
Tina, move a little, huh? Get with the music, with the program!
[Edji sings along.]
[Chanting ends.]
Now just sit in your heart. In the silence. In your sense of presence.
Go down deep, within that sense of presence.
Feel your connection with everything.
This is the ‘I am.’
This is God.
However slightly you feel it, or greatly you feel it. This is the gate.
[Long silence]
[Edji reads some quotations from the Nisargadatta Gita, compiled and annotated by Pradeep Apte]
“Worship the knowledge ‘I am’ as God, as your Guru, the message ‘I am’ is there, the mind-flow is there, stay in the ‘I am’ and realize you are neither.” [verse 51]
“Who has the knowledge ‘I am’? Somebody in you knows the knowledge ‘I am’, ‘you are’, who is it?” [verse 66]
Who?
“Who can know the illusory state ‘I am’? Only a non-illusory state can do so, it’s the Awareness, the Parabrahman, or the Absolute.” [verse 67]
“The primary concept ‘I am’ is dishonest, a cheat, it has deceived you, into believing what is not, sharply focus on the ‘I am’ and it’ll disappear.” [verse 68]
“The knowledge ‘I am’ means consciousness, God, Guru, Ishwara, but you the Absolute are none of these.” [verse 99]
“Meditation is this knowledge ‘I am’, this consciousness, meditating on itself and unfolding its own meaning.” [verse 127]
[Long pause]
Who are you, who hears my voice? What are you? Do you think you are human? Or all the way beyond?
You who knows the coming and going of the waking state, the dream state and sleep—also called Turiya—the ‘I am’ that is God. But there is something in you that knows even the coming and going of God and these states, and you are that.
[Long pause]
Have you any idea who you are, really?
Do you want to know?
Stay in that ‘I am.’ And then one day you might inquire, “Who is it that witnesses the ‘I am’?”
There is only one witness for all of us—one and the same. Even in the ‘I am,’ there is only one of us. The ‘I am’ is universal.
Everyone perceives it the same; from the smallest ant and insect, to the human being, to an elephant, to a whale. We all have that sense of presence, that sense of energy, that sense of existence. We all feel it—dogs, cats, mice—we are all the same. And also in the Absolute we are all the same.
The ‘I am’ is the manifestation, but your deepest nature is beyond that as the noumena, that sustains everything. Each one of us is an individual manifestation of ‘I am.’ But there is only one ‘I am,’ in the sense that all is generic, and there is only one witness, which by going deep enough we find as ourselves.
[Long pause]
As the comedian Bill Maher says, “New rules”.
We are going to have dialogue now, and pretend that it is just you and me here, nobody else. So no matter what anybody else says, you are not listening. Do not talk about others and their states. Let us talk about your state and my state.
Or the stateless states. Or any kind of bullshit you want.
[Private dialogue removed]
Just be quiet now, and let us go within.
Can we play “Oh My Guru, Come to Me” once again? We do not have a wide variety of chants right now.
[Chanting—I Will Sing Thy Name]
Feel it inside yourself.
[Music continues. Edji sings along. Chanting ends.]
Try to feel that sense of presence within you.
It reaches everywhere within and without.
It is you. It is God. It is the ‘I am’, the gateway to beyond, to the Absolute.
[Long silence]
[Edji reads more quotations from Pradeep Apte’s Nisargadatta Gita]
“Worship the knowledge ‘I am’ as God, as your Guru, the message ‘I am’ is there, the mind-flow is there, stay in the ‘I am’ and realize you are neither.” [verse 51]
“Presently you are sustaining the memory ‘I am’, you are not that ‘I am’, you are the Absolute prior to that ‘I am’.” [verse 52]
“Who has the knowledge ‘I am’? Somebody in you knows the knowledge ‘I am’, ‘you are’….” [verse 66]
Who is it, Janet?
Who is it, Tina?
Who is it, Sharjeel?
Who, Alan?
Who, Ted?
Who, Joan?
Who is it, Jo-Ann?
Who hears my voice?
Something in you recognises me, hears me. Who is that?
Who is that, Tim?
“When the body dies the ‘I am’ goes into oblivion, only the Absolute remains, stay put there, nothing happens to you the Absolute.” [verse 75]
“How were you prior to the message ‘I am’? In the absence of the message ‘I am’ only my eternal Absolute state prevails.” [verse 82]
“A true devotee, by abiding in the knowledge ‘I am’,” in God, “transcends the experience of death and attains immortality.” [verse 84]
“The knowledge ‘I am’ means consciousness, God, Guru, Ishwara, but you the Absolute are none of these.” [verse 99]
Remember, meditation is this knowledge ‘I am’. This is consciousness meditating on itself, and unfolding its own meaning.
Each one of you has your own meaning. Just you. Nobody else.
Each of you is an individual manifestation of consciousness in your body-mind, and yet we are all alike in every way. The sentience is always the same. We are all sentience, we are all life. We should love and guard and protect each other. Each and every one of us, guard and protect each other. Love each other.
That is what “We Are Sentience” is about—loving each other, guarding each other, protecting each other. And then one day, we go beyond.
But the carrier is that love. The feeling of protection. The feeling of guarding. That feeling of wanting. Even the yearning. It is all love, the glue, the glue of consciousness.
But then we have to go beyond that.
[Long silence]
Now, wasn’t that beautiful? I think that we can just sign off now, and just stay in that state as long as you want. I love you all so much, and I know you love me. We love each other, our satsang, our family. Stay there now for a while.
very timely.
ReplyDeleteThank you
Isaac
The “I AM” is the gate to Turiya, or God. Sinking and sinking in the black hole of heart is the gate to the Absolute. Ramana spent three years and got a good result, no?
ReplyDeletesc
There is no where else to go, no more teachings to learn, no more practices to practice(just the I AM), no more books to read, no more videos to watch(except satsang). Its up to me. It took nisargadatta 3 years once he became a devotee, having only one teacher and one teaching.
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