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Give up all questions except one: 'Who am I?' After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The 'I am' is certain. The 'I am this' is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not.
Discover all that you are not -- body, feelings thoughts, time, space, this or that -- nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.
The clearer you understand on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realise that you are the limitless being.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
When we speak about not being this and not being that--the body, the thoughts, the mind, the emotions--it is not the whole truth. It is a partial truth in order to make a point.
The truth, according to the Veda, is that there is only one thing. There is nature. Nature as Absolute, Unboundedness, the field of all possibilities, the Unmanifest; and nature as all of this we see and are, this Relative world of form and function, apparent separation and individuality. These two things together, the Absolute Unmanifest and the Relative world, this is the truth. This is Totality. There will come a time when we know this and are able to experience this within ourselves.
When we speak of 'not this and not that'--NETI NETI is the Sanskrit term for this practice of noting what we are not--we are counter-balancing a lifetime of limited identification.
Everything I think of myself as, everything I use to define me, is a limitation; because every 'thing' carries along with it the idea of what it, or I, am not:
I am a man, a Caucasian, an American, a meditator, a dog owner, a coffee drinker, a heterosexual, a father, a son, a husband, a trombone player, an iPhone user, a writer, an actor, a Los Angeleno, an English speaker, etc.
All of these things could be used to describe me, who or what I am, but each also implies this much larger world of what I am not.
Most of us have spent our lifetime trying to figure out what we are so that we know where we belong--'I'm a Laker fan.' 'I'm a surfer.'--and indeed, belonging to a group can be a profound experience.
(In 1980 I was a cab driver. The day after John Lennon was killed, everyone in Hollywood was playing his music. Those of us driving all had our windows down. Many of the people on the street were carrying boom boxes. We all would look at each other and nod to each other, sadly, profoundly, knowingly. That identity as people suffering a common loss, for that day at least, trumped the other identities of separation: sexual, racial, economic, religious, drug user or not, criminal or mark, taxi driver or customer. The next day, that was over and we were back to the status quo.)
The point is that we do not need practice dividing ourselves into groups. Identifying as the Relative world. We're taught this from the earliest age. What we can use practice with is the other side of things--identifying with and as Unboundedness. That place of pure Being that underlies all the apparent differences. This is the experience we have in meditation, touching upon this place of unchanging Being. In order to benefit most fully from that experience, we also want to begin the process of understanding this thing we are that is not so easily felt, that is not practiced by most of us most of the time. We want to come out of ignorance; and this is really the point. If Absolute and Relative together is the whole truth, then by definition at those times I am identifying only as one of these limiting ideas of myself, I am ignoring some large part of the truth. I no longer wish to live in ignorance. I've done that long enough. I'm ready to have it all, to know it all, to enjoy it all.
Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is bliss. It lives there in the place of pure Being. And as I know it there, as I cease to ignore it there, I begin to have access to it here in the Relative world as well.
Today I will remember at least once that I am something other than my limiting ideas of myself.
Red Doorway, West Broadway, Soho, NYC
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Kober
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