Evolution of love

EXTRACTS FROM PARAMAMRITA

First, convince yourself about your true nature as has been expounded so far, and then adopt the regular practice as follows: find a quiet spot, sit quietly, calm and relaxed; check the outward flow of thoughts. With an attitude of renunciation towards all that is manifest, the mind should be turned inwards, away from the sense objects, to the core of the Heart.

Then give up gradually your identification first with the gross physical body and then with the subtle body and the causal body, and let your mind be one with space.
Release your attention, smoothly and effortlessly, from the gross senses and let it merge with Consciousness. Whenever one’s attention strays, it should again be brought back into the vacant mind smoothly and gradually, so that with patience the period of concentration becomes longer and longer.

Whatever object the mind becomes attracted to, let your discrimination reject it as illusory and worthless. It is only in this manner that the mind will soon give up its flights of fancy and remain inquietude.

Until the mind naturally remains in Consciousness, persistent but gentle persuasion is necessary to make it drop whatever it tends to get involved in and return to its Source. As you keep watching your mind and discover yourself as the witness, nothing else can appear on the screen of your Consciousness: two things cannot occupy your mind at the same moment.

When you understand that anything with a shape and form is, by its very nature, a hollow shell without substance and that what is real is formless – the light of Consciousness – you will be immersed in the depth of Reality. When the mind gets absorbed in Consciousness, all objects disappear from the mind.

Do not put yourself in the position of the person who suddenly wakes up in the deepest dark of the night and thinks he has become blind. Do not get yourself enveloped in the darkness of ignorance, see all manifest phenomena as an illusion, and remain peacefully in Reality. Dive within and find out where thoughts arise. Seek the source of all thought – it is this Source, Consciousness, which must seek and acquire Self-knowledge: it can only happen.

Imagine for a moment that everything that is now manifest, including one’s own body, has suddenly disappeared. Where precisely is it that the resulting nothingness would be registered? All that remains is “I”-Consciousness: inside and outside, there is nothing other than the nothingness of the Void, which is the fullness of Being. That on which Consciousness has arisen must surely be prior to Consciousness. Understand beyond any doubt that it is this Source of Consciousness that you are in Reality. It is in Consciousness that everything appears including your sentience – the “I Am” sense of presence and the internal organ consisting of mind, intellect, discrimination and the ego. Once this fact is clearly apprehended, nothing can remain other than the Self.

Whenever you think, it is the mind that does the thinking; when the “me” is involved in the thinking, it is the ego; when you are quiet, the very quietude is in Consciousness itself.
Consider this: if you could have remained absolutely quiet, would any mnemonical recollection have ever sprouted? Would there have been any wish, any desire? If you could have remained absorbed in the Consciousness, would you have been troubled by thoughts? Would there have been any cause then to identify yourself with the body as a separate individual?

Therefore, my friend, that wherein all ignorance disappears is a totally different dimension. If there were not something called pure knowledge, the Totality of all possibilities, where would the ego have arisen? This pure and perfect knowledge – neither knowledge nor non- knowledge – is not aware of itself. It becomes a witness only when a movement in Consciousness presents some manifestation to witness.
Giving up your identification with the body if you would remain quietly absorbed in the sense of the Totality – in the “I AM” – without attachment, you will know all that is to be
known. When you thus remain immersed in Consciousness, the personal, identified consciousness having lost the power of maya, will itself take you to its Source, which is what you Are – Reality.

In that state, there is no duality of any kind, all interrelated opposites have been naturally superimposed into nothingness. All there is, is pure knowledge, pure Being, pure Subjectivity. One cannot hold it, one cannot drop it, one cannot say it is, one cannot say it is not. Indeed, it cannot be something to be felt to BE and to remain in.
Hold on to the sense of “I AM” to the exclusion of everything else. The mind being thus silent, will shine with a new light and vibrate in the Totality. When you keep “I AM” feeling in the focus of awareness and watch yourself ceaselessly – when there is continuous witnessing of all movements in Consciousness – the conscious and the unconscious will for a time play the game of hide and seek until finally the two become one and the one becomes the Totality. The individual then merges in the witness, the witness in pure Being – who is there then to take a measure of that ecstasy?