- Butter goes with buttermilk and buttermilk goes with butter. If there is buttermilk, there is butter; if there is butter, there is also buttermilk. If there is Atman, there is anatman (non-Atman) too.
- The Naked One (Totapuri) used to teach how to live in one’s own real Self: merge the mind in the intellect and the intellect in the Atman. Then you will be established in the real nature of the Atman.
- If someone burns a bird’s nest, it flies hither and thither, taking shelter in the sky. If one genuinely realizes that the body and the world are unreal, one’s soul attains samadhi.
- When one has a direct vision of the Atman, one accepts all this. All doubts vanish when one has vision of God.
- The Naked One (Totapuri) used to teach how to live in one’s own real Self: merge the mind in the intellect and the intellect in the Atman. Then you will be established in the real nature of the Atman.
- If someone burns a bird’s nest, it flies hither and thither, taking shelter in the sky. If one genuinely realizes that the body and the world are unreal, one’s soul attains samadhi.
- When one has a direct vision of the Atman, one accepts all this. All doubts vanish when one has vision of God.
- Who am I? When you try to discover that, you find God. Am I flesh or bone or blood or marrow – or am I the mind or intellect? Through such reasoning you ultimately see that you are none of these – ‘not this, not this.’ The Atman cannot be touched or grasped. It is without attributes and qualities.
- This does not happen if the mind dwells on ‘lust and greed.’ What joy is there in intercourse with a woman? One feels ten million times that joy from a vision of God. Gauri used to say that in ecstatic love for God all the pores of the skin on the body become mahayoni, the great sexual organ. One feels the joy of union with the Atman in every pore.
- The man established in samadhi sees the upper region filled with Atman, the nether region filled with Atman, the middle region filled with Atman. He sees all filled with Atman.
- As long as you have a body, you have to take care of it. But I see that it is separate from the Self. When you are completely rid of the attachment to ‘lust and greed,’ you realize that the body and the Self are different from each other. When the water in a coconut dries up completely, the shell and the kernel separate from each other. Then you can feel the kernel rattling inside the shell.
Pure Atman
- God revealed to me that the Paramatman, which is described as the pure Atman in the Vedas, is immutable, like Mount Sumeru, unattached and beyond happiness and sorrow.
- The pure Atman is unattached to things of the world. Maya, or ignorance, is in it. This very maya has three qualities: sattva, rajas, and tamas. That which is pure Atman has in it these three qualities, yet it is unattached. If you throw a blue tablet into a fire, you see a blue flame. If you throw a red tablet in it, the flame is red. But the fire has no colour of its own.
- A butcher was carrying a load of meat when he touched Shankaracharya by chance. As soon as Shankaracharya remarked, ‘Hey, you touched me!’ the butcher replied, ‘My lord, neither have I touched you, nor have you touched me. You are pure Self, unattached to anything.’
- The pure Self is unattached, and it cannot be seen. When common salt is dissolved in water, it becomes invisible to the eye.
- That which is pure Atman is Mahakarana, the cause of causes. There are the gross, the subtle, the cause, and the Great Cause (Mahakarana). The five material elements are gross. Mind, intellect and ego are subtle. Nature or the Primal Power is the cause of everything. Brahman or the Atman, the pure Self, is the cause of the cause.
- This pure Atman is our true Self. What is spiritual knowledge? Knowledge of one’s real Self, and keeping the mind in it. This is knowledge of the pure Atman.