Not Who You Think You Are

 can never forget the first time I read a short sentence in a book of transcriptions from talks of Nisargadatta Maharaj.

The sentence in question was;

"Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person."

At the time when I first stumbled across this sentence, it just knocked all the wind out of my sails.

At one moment I had been riding the high seas, all sails aloft and bloated, full of the winds of living and full of 'myself,' doing the living. The next moment 'I' was a drift on a sea of glass, no wind, and no sails, no 'I'.

"Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person."

This is not a new idea by any means, I had already delved quite deeply, or so I thought, into the writings of Zen, Dzogchen and Advaita Masters and in such writings one often comes across this teaching. But for me, this was one of those 'when the penny drops' moments.

When I read this passage I was in the loft of my little 'tin palace' which is situated in a patch of forest about an hour from the hill station of Darjeeling in the north-east of India.

I have no idea how long I sat gazing out into space. It was not that the words began a whole stream of thoughts that lead to a moment of 'reckoning.' It was rather that those few words cut the mind off completely at the root; at least for a while. They hold that kind of potential, they have that kind of power.

In truth these are words of power, they were uttered by a Master who had gone completely beyond the 'little self' and had been immersed in the 'absolute self,' despite his having lived in the midst of a huge city.

These kinds of utterances are in fact, windows into the 'self.' They are not intended for consideration so much as for freeing us from all our usual pre-occupations and distractions.

Read on in Never Not Ever Here Now

Volume Four in the Series; Shades of Awareness