‘I am’, the present moment of consciousness and it’s contents
It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is I am not ‘this’ , I am not ‘that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’, it just makes no sense. What you can point out as ‘this’ or ‘that’ cannot be yourself. Surely you can not be something else. You are nothing perceivable or imaginable. Yet, without you, there can be neither perception nor imagination. You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting: the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. Can there be perception, experience without you? An experience must belong. Somebody must come and declare it as his own. Without an experiencer, the experience is not real. It is the experiencer that imparts reality to experience. An experience which you cannot have of what value is it to you?
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj ‘I am’
If you have never read or heard of the above words, they come in the first chapter of the seminal book on consciousness and the experience of reality called ‘I am’, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. From being a simple shop keeper in Bombay (present day Mumbai) he became a Guru of sorts to many a westerner and many a Hindu. His lucidity of thought around what it means to be a person is astounding in its clarity and simplicity.
The premise of the book is delicately summed up in the title, ‘I am’:
You are not your body.
You are not your thoughts.
You are not even your mind.
These are all things that are observable by whatever it is that notices that you have a mind, or that you are having thoughts. So rarely do you even become aware of the continuous stream of thoughts that loop both in a positive and negative direction that the very idea that we are not them is hard to comprehend until it’s explained with such simple logic. It bitch-slaps you in the face for not noticing it sooner.
As he aptly mentions, if you can, in fact, notice that you are having thoughts, then you clearly can not be your thoughts. How can you be your mind, when there is absolutely no continuity between your thoughts? One second you are thinking of an Orange and then you are thinking of a Donkey. I just got you to picture both of those things in your minds-eye, didn’t I? So can they be you? I put them in your head, so for that moment at least, you sense of self-was nothing but the words that I said. Your sense of self was actually hijacked.
So what are we?
Consciousness? Awareness? God?
Maharaj is not tied down to definitions and for a Guru, he seems to have a pretty sober view on religion and God. He does not subscribe to God being a person or an omnipotent force. If anything he simply believes that whatever you want to call the awareness that notices we are thinking, that we have a body etc, is what people call God. There is no creator, because there is no such thing as being born or dying and that these are simply things that we are creating in our heads to make sense of what seems to be the physical world.
Each person has a different idea on what the physical world is, what it looks like, what it sounds like and he points out that you no one has any idea what an experience is from anybody’s point of view but their own. So the very nature of reality is therefore up for debate and extremely subjective.
‘I am’ is the only thing you can say with absolute certainty in our shared experience.
So much suffering in the world is born of the search for more, the search for a definition of who we are, who we were or what we might become. If only we could have this one type of experience or meet this one type of person, then they might help us discover who we are. Any happiness we have in life is in the moments where for only a fleeting second we let go of this search and we simply get lost. We lose track of time, space, our hunger and our worries and we simply let go.
So what do we do then? Perhaps for you, it’s Meditation or Yoga, or laughing with your children or friends, or is it simply taking a walk in nature? We must try to expand these moments bit by bit and be as present as possible in the moment. Your money and your work are only important insofar as they allow you to enjoy your life in present awareness or allow others to pursue the same.
