50. Self-awareness is the Witness

Life Answers: A Complete Audiobook Reading of Sri Nisargadatta Maharajah's I AM THAT

You say: You tell us that we can be considered under three aspects, and you then use three sanskrit terms for these aspects which, as far as I can tell, comes from a root verb meaning to smear (as in pigment or make-up). So when smeared around a self, we get a personal, or identity-focused human consciousness (vyakti). Another mode of being is that of the non-personal (vyakta): the smear suggesting that which the senses perceive as some thing, or object, or some kind of boundary. Finally there is a smear that doesn’t define or contain any one distinct entity, the Ultimate Smear, the Universal, the Real, pure I. The non-personal is the Ultimate Smear’s reflection in consciousness as ‘I am'. The personal is also the totality of physical and vital processes. Within the narrow confines of the present moment, person-focused states of consciousness are aware of themselves both in space and time; not only as individual people, but as a long series of people strung together on the thread of karma. The personal is a witnessing consciousness as well as the residue of these accumulated experiences, the seat of memory, the connecting link. It is part of our character which life builds and shapes from birth to birth. The Universal, however, the Ultimate Smear, is beyond all name and shape, other than what it imparts to consciousness as an echo. But it is ultimately beyond consciousness and character: pure unselfconscious being. Have I summarised your views as you see them? Life answers: On the level of the mind — yes. Beyond the mental level not a word applies. You say: I can understand that the person is a mental construct, a collective noun for a set of memories and habits. But, this consciousness to whom “the person” happens, the witnessing centre, is it mental too? Life answers:The personalised being needs a base, a body to identify itself with, just as a colour needs a surface to appear on. The seeing of the colour is independent of the colour — it is the same whatever the colour. One needs an eye to see a colour. The colours are many, the eye is single. The personalised being is like the light in the colour and also in the eye, yet simple, single, indivisible and unperceivable, except in its manifestations. Not unknowable, but unperceivable, un-objectival, inseparable. Neither material nor mental, neither objective nor subjective, it is the root of matter and the source of consciousness. Beyond mere living and dying, it is the all-inclusive, all-exclusive Life, in which birth is death and death is birth. You say: The Absolute or Life you talk about, is it real, or a mere theory to cover up our ignorance? Life answers:Both. To the mind, a theory; in itself — a reality. It is reality in its spontaneous and total rejection of the false. Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination. To see that all knowledge is a form of ignorance is itself a movement of reality. The witness is not a person. The person comes into being when there is a basis for it, an organism, a body. In it the absolute is reflected as awareness. Pure awareness becomes self-awareness. When there is a self, self-awareness is the witness. When there is no self to witness, there is no witnessing either. It is all very simple; it is the presence of the person that complicates matters. See that there is no such thing as a permanently separate person and all becomes clear. Awareness — mind — matter — they are one reality in its two aspects, immovable and movable, with three attributes of inertia, energy and harmony. You say: What comes first: consciousness or awareness? Life answers:Awareness becomes consciousness when it has an object. The object changes all the time. In consciousness there is movement; awareness by itself is motionless and timeless, here and now. You say: There is suffering and bloodshed in Ukraine at the present moment. How do you look at it? How does it appear to you, how do y