I am
The freshness of morn rubbing itself against my body, instilling me with fresh perceptions and feelings; sentiments of gratitude for the calm, quiet, fresh Weather are flowing within me. In this fresh weather the echo of new feelings and perceptions is making a sound. It is neither summer’s heat, nor the shiver of cold, neither sunlight, nor the nocturnal gloom. Thus, in a new, fresh atmosphere peaceful beauty began to settle in my inner equilibrium
Suddenly a moment arose from the environment; it came out, thumped my consciousness, and handed an experience over to me that lay contracted within it. Now experience gave a call, “When we feel a harmony with the calm and quiet in nature, only then does this limited ego become capable of seeing limitlessness.”
Note, O Shaheer, note and observe yourself in this way and study your life in such a way that:
This life is not yours, though you are in it.
You are in the body; the body is not in you.
You are not in the world; the world is in you.
And with it, my breaths began to falter, my foot steps halted with my pausing feelings and perceptions, my thoughts too began to subside. I looked at—
~the waving trees,
~the twittering birds,
~the rising Sun,
~the setting star
I felt as though I were taking birth from the buoyant feelings and perceptions of a waving and swaying hilarious life.
In the light of the rising Sun stole forward some delusion like a setting star.
Which thumped at the threshold of my luck; I woke up and perceived—
The fatigue of the season,
The age of years,
The flow of feelings stealing through the echo of moments and providing me relaxation. Then there came the fragrance of satiety from the unrestrained flow of tears. I exclaimed,
“Wow!
Indeed, this is life!
Indeed, this is selfness.”
Self-ness: I sometimes take myself for the body and sometimes I feel I am the mind. Still I go on looking for my true self. I kept thinking about what I was and what life was life, but could reach no conclusion, only kept knocking about and I kept straying—at times in reflections and at times in feelings and passions. These convulsive moments only gave me lonely minutes which began to dry up my feelings and then held and controlled my breaths.
It then became a cinder of consciousness which illuminated my inner sky and which made the flower of my being abloom. At the same time a voice rose which made the whole world ecstatic.
I am this—which is nothing—for it is everything.
I am this—which is everything—because it is nothing.
I see this life hidden in a deep enigma that reveals its secret only in silence and quietude; for—
Silence,
Only silence is the real truth.
And peace blossoms in silence,
Peace provides satiety,
Satiety grants comfort,
Comfort is I because:
The self-ness of I is given birth in silence.
Then words sprout up in silence and start the journey of truth and falsehood, of virtue and sin; it takes within its grasp the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’.
Then the wire of the native and the stranger inbounds us. Then the pain rises out of ‘I’ and becomes a means for self-recognition.
Then I see—I am not the body, the mind, reason,
reflection or emotion—Aha!
I am not experience or consciousness even.
I am only I, my own self.
Despite being ‘I’, I am not ‘I’.
O my attendants, sitting enwrapped in this consciousness of negation is ‘I’ in contracted state. For, I am ‘I’ and ‘I’ alone.
For besides myself, it is I, myself.