Questioner: I have noticed a new self emerging in me, independent of the old self.
They somehow co-exist.
The old self goes on its habitual ways; the new lets the old be, but does not identify itself with it.
Maharaj: What is the main difference between the old self and the new?
Q: The old self wants everything defined and explained.
It wants things to fit each other verbally.
The new does not care for verbal explanations -- it accepts things as they are and does not seek to relate them to things remembered.
M: Are you fully and constantly aware of the difference between the habitual and the spiritual.
What is the attitude of the new self to the old?
Q: The new just looks at the old.
It is neither friendly nor inimical.
It just accepts the old self along with everything else.
It does not deny its being, but does not accept its value and validity.
M: The new is the total denial of the old.
The permissive new is not really new.
It is but a new attitude of the old.
The really new obliterates the old completely.
The two cannot be together.
Is there a process of self-denudation, a constant refusal to accept the old ideas and values, or is there just a mutual tolerance?
What is their relation?
Q: There is no particular relation.
They co-exist.
M: When you talk of the old self and new, whom do you have in mind?
As there is continuity in memory between the two, each remembering the other, how can you speak of two selves?
Q: One is a slave to habits, the other is not.
One conceptualises, the other is free from all ideas.
M: Why two selves?
Between the bound and the free there can be no relationship.
The very fact of co-existence proves their basic unity.
There is but one self -- it is always now.
What you call the other self -- old or new -- is but a modality, another aspect of the one self.
The self is single.
You are that self and you have ideas of what you have been or will be.
But an idea is not the self.
Just now, as you are sitting in front of me, which self are you?
The old or the new?
Q: The two are in conflict.
M: How can there be conflict between what is and what is not?
Conflict is the characteristic of the old.
When the new emerges the old is no longer.
You cannot speak of the new and the conflict in the same breath.
Even the effort of striving for the new self is of the old.
Wherever there is conflict, effort, struggle, striving, longing for a change, the new is not.
To what extent are you free from the habitual tendency to create and perpetuate conflicts?
Q: I cannot say that I am now a different man.
But I did discover new things about myself, states so unlike what I knew before that I feel justified in calling them new.
M: The old self is your own self.
The state which sprouts suddenly and without cause, carries no stain of self; you may call it 'god'.
What is seedless and rootless, what does not sprout and grow, flower and fruit, what comes into being suddenly and in full glory, mysteriously and marvellously, you may call that 'god'.
It is entirely unexpected yet inevitable, infinitely familiar yet most surprising, beyond all hope yet absolutely certain.
Because it is without cause, it is without hindrance.
It obeys one law only; the law of freedom.
Anything that implies a continuity, a sequence, a passing from stage to stage cannot be the real.
There is no progress in reality, it is final, perfect, unrelated.
Q: How can I bring it about?
M: You can do nothing to bring it about, but you can avoid creating obstacles.
Watch your mind, how it comes into being, how it operates.
As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher.
When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher.
The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge.
That source alone is.
Go back to that source and abide there.
It is not in the sky nor in the all-pervading ether.
God is all that is great and wonderful; I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing.
Yet all comes out of me -- the source is me; the root, the origin is me.
When reality explodes in you, you may call it experience of God.
Or, rather, it is God experiencing you.
God knows you when you know yourself.
Reality is not the result of a process; it is an explosion.
It is definitely beyond the mind, but all you can do is to know your mind well.
Not that the mind will help you, but by knowing your mind you may avoid your mind disabling you.
You have to be very alert, or else your mind will play false with you.
It is like watching a thief -- not that you expect anything from a thief, but you do not want to be robbed.
In the same way you give a lot of attention to the mind without expecting anything from it.
Or, take another example.
We wake and we sleep.
After a day's work sleep comes.
Now, do I go to sleep or does inadvertence -- characteristic of the sleeping state -- come to me?
In other words -- we are awake because we are asleep.
We do not wake up into a really waking state.
In the waking state the world emerges due to ignorance and takes one into a waking-dream state.
Both sleep and waking are misnomers.
We are only dreaming.
True waking and true sleeping only the jnani knows.
We dream that we are awake, we dream that we are asleep.
The three states are only varieties of the dream state.
Treating everything as a dream liberates.
As long as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave.
By imagining that you are born as so-and-so, you become a slave to the so-and- so.
The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have past and future, to have history.
In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop, nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.
Q: What benefit do I derive from listening to you?
M: I am calling you back to yourself.
All I ask you is to look at yourself, towards yourself, into yourself.
