You are He-Teachings of Shri Ranjit Maharaj

Commentaries

On

the

Teaching

of

Sri

Ranjit

Maharaj

Andrew

Vernon

You

Are

He

Golden

Day

|

iii

Preface: How to Use This Book

Sri Ranjit Maharaj called the way of understanding, or Self-enquiry,the bird’s way, in contrast to meditation, which he called the ant’s way. The ant goes very slowly and, if it tries to climb a forest tree, it may diebefore it reaches the destination. The bird, on the other hand, flieseasily from branch to branch. Maharaj always taught that you are your-self the reality, and so you are already free, free as a bird, without lim-its. You are He, the reality, right now, only you do not know it withcertainty. To have that understanding of who you are, you must get ridof the false notion that you are something other than that reality.

Meditation, chanting a mantra, and various kinds of physical and men-tal disciplines may be useful to prepare the mind for understanding,but the end of seeking is not reached until there is Self-knowledge. The solution has to involve Self-knowledge because the problem isone of Self-ignorance. No spiritual practices that you undertake cansolve that problem. You can meditate six hours at a stretch and enjoy blissful states, but as soon as you stop that activity, you are back inignorance again! You have to find the answer to the question “Whoam I?” When you know that, ignorance disappears and you know everything that you need to know. That is what the Way of the Bird is all about. It means taking the timeto think deeply about the teaching, not accepting it blindly, but experi-encing everything and verifying everything for yourself.I wrote these commentaries on Maharaj’s teaching because some peo-ple have said that they find his ideas difficult to understand and wouldlike additional explanation. The commentaries attempt to provide thisexplanation, or at least offer some ways to think about the conceptsinvolved.

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1.2 “The body is dead at this moment.”

The body is like an appliance that works when electricity is connectedto it and which ceases to function when the power is disconnected. The body itself, like the appliance, is an inert thing—it doesn’t haveany life of its own. The life that animates the body is a power thattranscends the sense of individual existence. What is the nature of thatpower that gives life to all that lives? That power is pure knowledge oruniversal consciousness. As long as that power is connected, what wecall life is there. It is there even when the body and mind subside intothe state called deep sleep (dreamless sleep), which is proven by thefact that when you wake up in the morning, you say “I slept well.”Such knowledge would be impossible if power had not been continu-ous during the sleeping state. The power prompts two living cells: male and female, to unite andform the gross physical body in the first place, and continues to makeit grow to maturity. It remains for the span of time allotted to thebody, and in the end drops the body. Where does the power go? Itdoesn’t go anywhere, because it is all-pervasive. The body disinte-grates, returning to the gross elements from which it was formed.

1.3 “Be always courageous. Say that nothing is true.”

If you say “nothing is true,” that is an act of courage because you haveto make that statement without any support from the world. If youread the newspaper, ask your relatives, or look anywhere outside, you will not find any evidence to support it. Worst of all, there is no sup-port from your own perceptions either—your own eyes see the worldas a collection of separate objects and your mind generally takes it tobe true. Yet Maharaj said that one who takes the world to be trueremains an aspirant, while one who does not take it to be truebecomes a realized person! This is why faith is so important.Only faith in the Master allows you to keep returning to the thoughtthat his point of view is correct. You have to rely on faith until yourealize the truth of what he says for yourself. As an aspirant, faith in

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the Master is really the most powerful weapon that you have. It is notdifferent from grace. It can break down all the barriers that illusionplaces in the way of your aspiration and can dissolve the veil of igno-rance. Where there is faith, the power to accept and understand theMaster’s teaching is there as well.

1.4 “The world is only thought.”

Imagine what would happen if you suddenly found yourself withoutthought and without the possibility of thought. How would the worldappear to you then? Would you see any world of separate objects?Could you recognize this room, this page, these words? Could youexperience emotions? You would not recognize any separate objects, and you would not seeanything apart from yourself. Your own awareness would constitutethe whole of reality. The so-called objective world; that is, the worldthat is apparently full of separate objects, is really an illusion. It existsonly as names and forms. The mind is not the cause of that world-projection; it is only the mechanism through which the divine power(pure knowledge or universal consciousness) is working. That con-sciousness is all-pervasive and so it is the underlying reality of theapparent objects, including the apparent person who perceives them.

1.5 “Have fear of nothing and no one, for everything isnothing.”

In the vision of a realized person, there is nothing apart from the Self.Compared to that reality, everything that appears is nothing but apassing show. Absence of fear comes from the knowledge that whatyou are will not perish. This is why Maharaj gave the example that if someone comes and holds a revolver to your head, you should be ableto say “That’s OK. It’s only the name and form that dies. I don’t die.” This may seem extreme, but is a statement that indicates what the goalis. As long as you are an aspirant, of course, it would be natural forfear to arise in that situation, because the certainty that you are not the

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body is not there. Certainty means that you know the answer to thequestion “Who am I?” beyond any doubt. Fear of death is therefore aclear indication that you still have to find the answer to that question.

1.6 “All the ornaments are nothing but gold.”

In India, when gold ornaments are sold, the value is calculatedaccording to the weight of the gold. For example, five bangles are 100grams of gold, and a necklace is 100 grams of gold as well. The formcan be one thing or another thing; the underlying substance is whatmatters. This analogy means that all the various forms in the world arenothing but

Brahman

, the all-pervading consciousness. There is really nothing that separates one ornament from another as long as you arelooking just at the gold. In the same way, there is nothing to distin-guish one form from another if it is understood that there is one real-ity underlying them all.

1.7 “The body is only a covering on me.”

In Vedanta, the body is actually only one of five coverings, or

kosas

. All these coverings, from the most subtle to the most gross (which isthe body) are only an appearance on the screen of reality. If you takethe body to be something that has some independent existence, youare making a mistake. (Saint Tukaram said “I committed a criminalmistake, taking the body as true.”) The body is an illusion. It comes,stays for a while, and then goes. Problems arise only when you takeyourself to be that illusion. If you see the illusion as illusion, there isno problem; it can remain there without doing any harm.

1.8 “When the breath goes, nothing remains.”

Knowledge of your existence as a living being depends upon the pres-ence of the gross physical body. The food eaten by the body is pro-cessed and the most refined product of that process is the knowledge“I am.” That knowledge is what allows you to experience everything in this world and to act in it. According to

Vedanta

, the number of

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breaths that the body will take is predetermined and, when that num-ber is reached, the body falls away. At that point, there will indeed benothing remaining, because knowledge depends on the body, and the whole appearance of the world depends on knowledge. If you haveidentified yourself with that concept of “I,” then you will fear death,because death is the end of that “I.” With Self-knowledge, however,you understand that your true being is beyond knowledge. You alsoknow that it will not be affected by the disappearance of the “I” con-cept, anymore than it was affected by its appearance.

1.9 “Say what is true is true, what is not true is not truealways.”

One way of looking at the fundamental problem of living is to see thatyou feel a lack of completeness, of wholeness. You then try to find thesolution to the problem by seeking happiness in external things. Thiserror is based on the unquestioned assumption that the world is true.Maharaj therefore urged his disciples to constantly question thisassumption and to go against it by asserting its opposite. The purposeof this assertion is to establish a habit of correct thinking to replacethe old, wrong thinking. There are of course limitations to thisapproach. The fundamental problem is a problem of Self-ignorance,and it can only be resolved by Self-knowledge. Right thinking, in thesense of repetition of the correct ideas, is not an end in itself, but only one of the means, another way to make the mind subtle and to pre-pare it for the understanding of ‘Who am I.”

1.10 “Everything is nothing.”

What kind of logic makes “everything” equal to “nothing?” “Every-thing” here means every object that can be perceived, including thoughts and feelings as well as gross objects. All of it taken togetheris referred to in the Upanishads as “this” (

idam

), as opposed to reality, which is referred to as “that” (

tat

). “Nothing” means not having inde-pendent existence. Note that “nothing” does not mean “having noexistence of any kind.” It means that the existence that objects have is

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only apparent (

mithya

in traditional Vedanta teaching). The appearancedepends on the underlying reality, just as the waves depend on theunderlying ocean. The waves do not exist by themselves. They exist inone sense, because there is the concept-word “waves” that we use tolabel them, just as we also label the “ocean” that the waves are part of.However, neither waves nor ocean are really anything but water.

1.11 “Nothing happens and nothing is true.”

Think about the events that happened to you ten years ago. Whatremains of all that occurred, all the suffering and heartbreak, all thejoy and affection? Where has it all gone? It has disappeared just asthough it had never existed. The same thing is happening to yourexperience today. This very moment has arrived, bringing with it itsparticular experience, only to disappear almost instantly. When deathcomes to the body, what will the whole life have amounted to? What will be the sum total of reality that has been accumulated throughthese passing experiences? The answer is zero. Nothing happens andnothing has ever happened. It was all a dream. Only the unchanging background, against which all these experiences appear and fade, isreal. Shakespeare wrote in

The Tempest

:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.

1.12 “Be indifferent to things because they don’t exist.”

Suppose you were to wake up in the middle of a dream and find your-self moving and acting in it. You see all the scenery and all the people,including yourself. However, at the same time, you remain aware of yourself as the one in whom the dream is taking place. Wouldn’t youthen be totally indifferent to the objects and the circumstances of thedream? This is the kind of indifference that the realized person has.

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1.18 “As long as duality is there, no happiness ispossible.”

Duality appears together with the sense of individual existence. It’s apackage deal. As soon as you subscribe to “I am this,” you automati-cally get “I am not that” as well. When duality operates in this way, thesense of separation from everything else, that is everything that is per-ceived as “not-I,” is inevitable. Actually, you even conceive of the Self, which you always are, to be something separate from you. You thenthink of it as an object to be attained and start to search for yourself! What could be more ludicrous? In duality, everything becomes wrong.It goes without saying that happiness, other than the most fleeting taste, is not possible in these mixed-up circumstances.

1.19 “The wheel of suffering happens because you sayit’s mine.”

The concept of “mine” only makes sense in the context of duality andseparation. In Oneness, there is nothing that is mine, just as there isnothing that is not mine. The suffering of separation from the worldand from oneself, happens because you accept the concept of “I.”Because you have taken delivery of that concept (as Sri NisargadattaMaharaj said), you also have to take delivery of all the other conceptsthat come with it: “I suffer,” “I am lacking something,” “I need totake care of what is mine,” and so on. The wheel of suffering contin-ues to turn until the I-concept is rejected as false.

1.20 “Duality makes you.”

The very nature of the illusory life as an individual human being isduality. The whole world appearance is based on the notion that “I”am here and there is the world out there. This division is a conceptand has no basis in reality, which is One. Where does the notion of duality come from? It is built into consciousness itself. Every living being is a form of consciousness and has the sense of “I am,” inhumans as a thought, and in other sentient beings as the sense of indi-

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vidual existence. That is the nature of manifest consciousness. Youcannot avoid duality, because to be conscious of yourself as “I”means that you have to be conscious of the “not-I” that is everything else. This condition is transcended by the understanding that “I” doesnot refer to the separate individual but to the non-dual reality thatunderlies it.

1.21 “Anything you see is not there. It is space, it is zero.”

Twentieth century atomic physics demonstrated that all matter isnothing but energy. This evidence appeared a few thousand yearsafter the sages of ancient India expressed the same truth in the Upan-ishads! The physical eyes of the human body of course cannot seeobjects as space or energy. Because of the limitations of visual percep-tion, we see objects as colored forms with edges that appear to sepa-rate them from other forms. This is no more a “correct” way of seeing solid, three-dimensional objects than if one was to see them asluminous, amorphous, animated beings. However, it is what we areaccustomed to. Vedanta states that the objects of the world are “

namarupa

” only.

Nama

means name and

rupa

means form. The forms and their namesgo together in the mental process of perception and recognition. Bothare projections on the non-dual reality, in the same way that imagesare projected on a screen. The images are only colored light, the lightitself is uncolored. Objects, although they appear to have form, andare recognized by their names, are still non-separate from the spacethat pervades them. Space allows all the forms of the world to appear.But reality is subtler than space, because it is aware of it.

1.22 “Truth always remains the truth. What is not truenever existed.”

What does it mean that something is true? It means that it exists, it isreal. Truth is not an idea or a set of ideas but is a word-pointer to that which never comes and never goes away, that which can always be

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relied upon. The words reality, truth, existence are all pointers to that which always remains. Truth has permanent being, or existence. That which is not true, on the other hand, does not have any reality andcannot exist, has never existed.

1.23 “All is illusion, but to understand the illusion, illusionis needed.”

Meeting the Master and accepting the Master’s teaching occurs in illu-sion; like an encounter in a dream. However, to understand that illu-sion is illusion, it is necessary to go through the phase of acquiring knowledge and applying it to oneself. The knowledge that the Masterprovides in the form of teaching is ultimately not true, in the sensethat the teaching is essentially just a system of ideas or set of conceptsoffered to the aspirant as a way to make sense of his or her experi-ences. Ideas and concepts, however useful within the illusion, are still within that illusion and so are not true. Acceptance of the Master’s teaching happens because of the faith thatthe aspirant has in the Master, even though that separation betweenMaster and aspirant is also ultimately false. Despite it all, understand-ing and self-realization do occur for the aspirant. Once that realizationhas occurred, the Master’s teachings are no longer needed, just as when you reach the shore, you leave the boat at the water’s edge.

1.24 “If it is not true, just let it be. Why to harm or demolishwhat is not?”

Generally speaking, it is not necessary to do anything about the exter-nal circumstances of one’s life. When you are an aspirant, you need tomake sure that you have the qualifications needed to receive andaccept knowledge from the Master. Apart from that, you can simply let life continue, while focusing free time and energy on understanding the teaching. Trying to demolish the ego or force the mind to stop itsflow of thoughts is counter-productive. Such “efforts” only strengthen the sense of doership of the ego. After realization, it is very

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“wisdom of the world” traps almost everybody. In Vedanta, it is saidthat millions of lives may pass before there is a human birth in whichthere is a longing for God and all the necessary qualifications to seek Him. Only when that longing is there will someone start running inthe right direction.

1.27 “What you know is nothing. If it is true, you cannotknow it.”

It is characteristic of the ego that it believes that it knows everything itneeds to know. Many people speak and act as though they know exactly what the world is like, the right way to live, the correct way tobehave. They never question the validity of their opinions. Scientists,materials, atheists, as well as believers in one or the other of the estab-lished religions, all feel that they have the inside track to the truth. And yet all of this scientific and worldly knowledge is knowledge of nothing. Knowledge of objects does not last. It disappears altogether when the knower goes to sleep. That which truly exists, the Self, can-not be known because it is not an object. Can the eyes see themselves?Can the tongue taste itself? Can the knower know itself? The Self is what you are. You cannot get outside of it in order to know it.

1.28 “The illusion cannot give something more to reality,because reality is at the base of everything that is.”

All the fascinating places and magnificent scenery in the world, all thebeautiful plants and flowers, the enormous variety of species of ani-mals and the multitudes of human beings—none of them have any effect on the Self. They do not add anything to reality when they appear and they do not take anything away from reality when they goaway. Reality, the Self, is the base of all that appears, the source. Itremains full and complete in Itself if there are a billion worlds, and itremains full and complete if there is no manifestation at all. The San-skrit prayer at the beginning of the

Isha Upanishad

expresses this greattruth:

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