Inner
Reality
“…There
is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the
outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is
outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you
take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is
entirely a projection of your psyche. This is the basic confusion and no new
explosion will set it right. You have to think yourself out of it. There is no
other way.”
Nisargadatta
Maharaj (I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)
Sri Nisargadatta
Maharaj was a Hindu teacher in Mumbai, India. He died in 1981. One of his teachings
was about our expectations that something dramatic and profound, which he referred
to as a “wonderful explosion,” will herald our awakening. Instead, he taught
that the explosion happened when we were born; when we realized ourselves as “being,
knowing, feeling” human beings. Expecting a huge revelation, he said, simply
holds us back, and hinders our arriving at self-realization.
His
words about mistaking the inside for the outside remind me of Jesus words in
the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what
you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” If we are what we think, then
our world view is a product of our thinking. In modern terminology, “what you see
is what you get.” The way we see the world reflects our own inner world. Our
mistake is assuming that there is objective reality, when there is only our
personal analysis of what we see and what it means. That is why any two people
can observe the same scene and walk away with two different interpretations of
what occurred.
Our certainty
that we know what we see and that there is only one explanation for it is the
mistake. It is like Jesus words to the Pharisees in Luke 17:21, when they asked
him when the Kingdom of God would come. He told them, “The kingdom of God comes
not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for the
Kingdom of God is within you.” Instead of saying, I’ll believe it when I
see it, we should be saying that we’ll see is when we believe it.
The
description of reality as being what we interpret it to be must be a universal
truth that we simply do not want to accept. It is taught in all religions and by
all the elders in the wisdom circles of this world. You interpret reality as
you see it, and that does not mean it is objective reality—only a reflection of
your inner reality. Wonder what would happen to all our squabbles and divisions
if we allowed that profound understanding to sink in? Could we think our way out
of them?
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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