All effort at controlling thoughts, appetites and desires cannot but strengthen them along with the ego. Whatever has to go must fall off by itself. All that you are concerned with, all that you are, is the impersonal functioning of understanding. So let that understanding work through witnessing without judgement, knowing that there is nothing else that you can do. Meditation and all such methods and efforts are distractions from simply abiding in the natural state which is one's limitless, real being.
can possibly lead to enlightenment. On
the contrary, what is necessary is to rest helpless in beingness,
knowing that we are nothing - to be in the nothingness of the no-mind
state in which all conceptualizing has subsided into passive
witnessing. In this state whatever happens will be not our doing but the pure universal functioning to which we have relinquished all control.Ramesh S. Balsekar
"Being the source of both, the self is beyond both knowledge and power. The observable is in the mind. The nature of the self is pure awareness, pure witnessing, unaffected by the presence or absence of knowledge or liking. Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person."
~Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
is a passive rather than an active process.
Mind is allowed to subside into its source even while
engaged in normal activity, which then becomes an
undercurrent of witnessing that gradually extends
throughout all waking hours and begins to pervade
all one's activities without intruding on them or
interfering with them.
~Ramesh Balsekar
All questions and problems go POOF! right now in this present, spontaneous moment of being, in which there is nothing at all but awareness watching. Every moment is brand-new, free of all content. Right now, the whole world is brand-new. Nothing ever existed before this very second. An independent "you" seems to exist, as a few disconnected thoughts float in - an image here, a memory there - and they glom together and you start believing a story that there is a whole person. And then in the next moment, a different image, a different memory, and they glom together, and a wholly different "you" is thought of. You think they are all the same "you," but they are obviously not. "You" changes every moment, as different thoughts of "This is me" arise, and form different patterns. So who are you? In every moment there are different thoughts arising and forming your idea of who you are. You might insist that you have a lifetime history, but as you recall it right now, you'll only be recalling tiny glimpses of it, flashes, distorted memories. The stored "history of you," even if it did exist as a whole somewhere in the brain (and it does not - those memories go through changes as they recede in time), you can only be recalling any tiny portion of it at a time, a few brushstrokes, like an impressionist painting. So where is this solid story of you? Is it really real? So what is being pointed to is this - that you do not exist as a solid, discrete entity as you believe, and ALL your questioning and suffering and problems refer to this NON-EXISTENT entity. You ask: What am I not getting? Why are you getting it and I'm not? There is no difference between what's going on for you and what's going on for me, what I "get" and what you "get," because neither of us has ever "got" anything. Both of us are in the same boat. That boat is: right now, there is awareness going on. - Annette Nibley
