Surge 86
Are you a Person?
Swami Chidananda
In stillness, pure consciousness, there is nobody. When thoughts arise and memories begin their play, there is ‘the person’ that you take yourself to be. When the person comes in the play, your mind splits. There are the divisions – positive and negative, pleasure and pain and so on. The reflex comes up – to be somebody. In the medium of thoughts, there arises the relationship between personality and personality. There is an object-to-object relationship, and this object – the ‘me’ created by your thoughts – lives for security, recognition. It feels the need to be loved. It asks, demands and suffers conflict.
When the body-mind wakes up in the morning, it is memory that wakes up. Fear, anxiety, reactions and many other residues wake up. There is sensation of the body; you become aware of the body. This body anchors all the thoughts. You may not believe – this body itself is a thought; it is memories. Only the awareness in which it arises is not thought. You are awareness. The person, made of thoughts, arises in this awareness.
Awareness is your true nature, your real home. Hari Om, hurry home, says the teacher. You spend too much time in the artificial nest of memories. Come out and fly in the open sky of awareness, your natural habitat. Move from ‘person’ to ‘no person’. Shift from ‘somebody’ to ‘nobody’. Let your abidance in awareness refresh you, and let it reinvigorate the ‘person’ in you. Like electricity empowers all electrical equipment, let your wisdom of the Self enliven your personality in all your (its) relationships.
They say ‘person’ has its roots in a Latin word, which means a mask. You unmask yourself in the stillness of meditation. The person lives in fear. You, the truth behind the mask of the person, are of the nature of love. Fear is artificial, brought about by conditionings and memories. Love is natural and is ever available within you, waiting to be uncovered. In wisdom of the Self, you unravel the greatest mystery of life. All mysticism is of an inferior order.
What is meditation? A hundred kinds of practice are like preparing the bed. They are not meditation, which is like going to sleep. Lying on the most comfortable bed in an air-conditioned room, some just gaze at the ceiling. Some others go to deep sleep on just a bench, even as mercury soars and there is noise around. Likewise, some claim to practice meditation but are in the tight grip of thoughts and memories. The sense of ‘I am this person’ does not leave them. Some others, blessed indeed, become quiet in very simple settings – perhaps while watching a river or as they are seated in their backyard with a cup of tea in their hand. Meditation happens to them.
What is the way to awareness? Attention is the way to attention, the wise say. To stand apart and watch the mechanical ways in which ‘the person’ is behaving is the essence of the practice. Here you find there is no path leading to awareness. Awareness is the path.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi, March 21, 2012
PS: The first two paragraphs above are based on some observations made by Jean Klein as found in his book Transmission of the Flame (pages 81, 82).