SWAMIJI: There are various higher selves—not one. Your mental self is higher than your physical self, your intellectual self is higher than your mental self, your spiritual self is higher than your intellectual self, and the Absolute Self is still greater than all these lower selves—yet they are all degrees of yourself only. You yourself are rising, rung by rung, on the ladder of evolution, upward. You are climbing on your own shoulders, gradually.

Sarah: And a soul, higher self, ten rungs above me (just to give an example, ten), what is it that stops it from being on the hundredth rung?

SWAMIJI: Yes; many, many rungs are there. The cessation is the reaching of the infinitude of it, because beyond the Infinite nothing can be. When you reach the endlessness of that dimension, it stops because nothing can be beyond endlessness. That is what you call the Absolute, and there the evolution ceases, as the river stops moving when it reaches the ocean. What stops the lower from rising to the higher is the feeling of self-sufficiency of the lower.

Sarah: Is it gradual, or is there a point that it is then ocean?

SWAMIJI: It is gradual—very spontaneous and gradual, not an abrupt movement.

Sarah: And going the other way down? How can the Absolute, which is so infinite, even going down, down, down, down—how can it come down to this physical body?

SWAMIJI: It does not actually come down—it looks as if it is coming down. As I told you in an analogy, the block of stone does not become a statue, and it does not come down to the level of a statue. There is no statue inside it, but it can be imagined to contain all the statues, and in that sense you may say it has come down to the level of the statue. The stone never becomes a statue; yet, you can imagine all the statues inside it. The Absolute has never become things, but you can imagine that it has become, because all the potentialities of becoming are in it. It never becomes anything, because what ‘becomes’ is perishable.

Sarah: Then how can we go up?

SWAMIJI: The going up is also a part of the conceptual process, comparable to dream. Actually the process does not exist at all. It doesn’t take place, but your consciousness is involved in such a peculiar form of network that it looks as if there is a gradual movement. As I told you, there is neither a tiger in dream, nor the man who sees the dream, and yet it looks as if there are two things. The whole process is a play of consciousness, appearing solidly real at every stage, because consciousness is also existence.

Larry: If the analogy of the stone containing all the statues is used, then even when one wakes up, by necessity, the dreamer must still be in the stone. The dreamer must always be dreaming.

SWAMIJI: “When one wakes up” means what? Who wakes up?

Larry: The Absolute wakes up.

SWAMIJI: It will never dream again, once there is the waking; that is what the scriptures say. The dream will end forever. If you say that It again dreams, then you are bringing in the question of cause and effect, that It is going to cause something to become the effect. That It has caused an effect is a conceptional necessity. In the Absolute, the concept of cause ceases, and it will never take place again.

That there is a possibility of its coming up again is a thought that arises in the bound mind because you have decided that it has already taken place. It is an involvement in the mind due to the feeling that a cause is already there, and that, once again, it can take place, but the point is that it was not there, and so it will not be there. The causal relation is the direct corollary of the very structural pattern of all thinking, the very law of phenomenal perception.

Larry: So, if it is not there, it is not there now, either?

SWAMIJI: It is not there even now, but you cannot accommodate yourself to that thought; therefore, you have to move through the process of imagining that there is a cause. You have to accept that there is a tiger, as in dream perception. It will cause your waking, though it is not there finally. You can gain assistance from even non-existent things, provided that you believe that they are existing there, as in the case of an x in a mathematical equation.

Larry: But to suggest that one will wake up means a continuance of time—means change.

SWAMIJI: The waking up is a part of your process in time only, but time negates itself when it reaches infinitude; then the dream vanishes. The process of time will cease when it reaches All-ness. That is why I am saying that your meditation should be on an infinitude of consciousness, so that the time process will cease and a timeless experience ensues.

Larry: Then, there never was a world.

SWAMIJI: There never was a world, and there can never be one. It is difficult to reach God. It is grand to hear all these things, though it appears to be so difficult. You will find finally that there is nothing so difficult as God-experience, and yet nothing so simple as attainment. In a trice you will understand what it is. It is simple because it is yourself, and it is also difficult because it is yourself. Nobody can be so difficult as yourself. Everybody else is simple; you are the difficult thing. The nearer is a thing to you, the more difficult it becomes to comprehend. You can understand the stars and the moon and all these, astronomically, but you cannot understand yourself because of the absence of distance between that which knows and that which is known. It is a quandary that you yourself are a problem and yet you cannot be a problem to yourself.

Larry: If one person wakes up…

SWAMIJI: There is no question of one person. When you wake up from a dream, all the friends that you saw in the dream also have woken up. They are not sitting there separately in your erstwhile dream, once you are awake.

Larry: Yesterday, you said that we are all like drops in the ocean.

SWAMIJI: Yes; all those friends that you saw in dream, you may consider are in the ocean of your dream.

Larry: But then that is my question: Is the ocean only in my mind? Or is it there by itself?

SWAMIJI: There is no question of my mind. Who was it that was dreaming that there are many people? Was it the friend’s mind dreaming or you are dreaming?

Larry: I am dreaming.

SWAMIJI: What about that friend’s mind, who also saw a friend in the dream? Do you think he has no mind? Or he may be dreaming that you are dreaming him!

Larry: No, I imagined him to have a mind.

SWAMIJI: Why don’t you think that he is imagining you? He is as real as you are.

Larry: Because it is my dream.

SWAMIJI: It may be his dream! You may be in his dream.

Larry: That is what I mean. So, if he is a separate drop in the ocean. . .

SWAMIJI: Actually, the dreamer is neither your mind nor his mind. It is something collective—a total mind, which includes both you and others. It is not your mind that is dreaming, nor the mind of the person who you are seeing. It is something connecting all things put together, including the mountains, etc. There is a total mind, an all-mind working, whether in dream or waking. All thought is a gestalt, a total.

Larry: Then, it is not a question of me waking up; it’s a question of the Absolute waking up.

SWAMIJI: It is not ‘me’ in the sense of ‘one’ person. It is a total mind waking up continuously, and all that you see there is within the total framework, including the dreamer. It is a holistic rising, not one single individual separately waking.

Larry: Then, the effort that I make to wake up is…

SWAMIJI: This ‘I’ is a tricky word that you are using, for it can mean many things.

Larry: All right, the effort that my ego…

SWAMIJI: No; even when you say ‘ego’, carefully you have to use that word. Your ego is not sitting inside your body. It has already touched that about which you are talking, and it is connected with that which you are seeing with your eyes, and it is inseparable from that which you are knowing when you are speaking, so that you cannot say that your ego is inside the body. If it were inside the body, it could not even know that there is something outside it. So, even in ordinary language, in common parlance, there seems to be a mistake that one is making in thinking that the ego is within oneself. If it is totally inside, how will you know that there is something outside? It is not just inside; it is outside also to the extent of the location of that which it is thinking or knowing. Even now you are outside yourself, without which phenomenon you would not know that there is a thing outside you.

Larry: Am I not, is my ego not, aware that there is something outside of myself because of the senses?

SWAMIJI: The ego is unconsciously connected to all things that it knows, but consciously it feels that it is only inside the body. There are levels of mind, conscious and unconscious, both. If it is totally inside, you will be locked up within the prison of your body, and you will not know that you have even your skin.

Larry: So if one drop in the ocean has…

SWAMIJI: Actually (unfortunately!) the drop is connected to all other drops in the ocean. So, anything happening to one drop will be like happening to all the drops together. They are not isolated drops. Again, it is a holistic totality.

Larry: So if one person achieves God-awareness…

SWAMIJI: The idea—one person, many persons—will not arise. The Cosmic Mind wakes up when you reach God. There is only one mind operating in the whole universe. There are not many minds. It is not you that reaches God; it is the Cosmic Being that attains God-universality. The idea of ‘you’ and ‘I’ is to be transcended.

Larry: But some saints and sages have achieved this knowledge, this realisation.

SWAMIJI: This is because you are still thinking from the point of view of an isolated human being, and not from the point of view of that which they have reached. They will not see the world afterwards. It is again the same question of your friends in dream imagining that one man has gone up to waking and others are still in dream only. You have woken up from dream, but the friends that you saw in dream, are they still there having lunch? Is it like that? They have also gone with you. A very complicated involvement of the mind is all this, hard to think in a casual manner.

Larry: Very entertaining!

SWAMIJI: I think now we shall not talk much on this subject, because these people seated here may go crazy afterwards, not being able to swallow these bitter pills. Let them all have peace of mind. What do you say? Better to maintain peace a little bit. Anyway, you have taken down all this in this recorder. You can hear it again, and that will be good enough.

Larry: Just one point of clarification: If the friends are in my imagination, and so if I imagine a Swami or a saint reaching, achieving, this knowledge, this is only…

SWAMIJI: That Swami is one of the persons whom you have seen in dream, including yourself as the so-called dreamer. Forget not to think totally.

Larry: He is just a dream object.

SWAMIJI: Yes, that is all. But you, too, though looking like the dreamer, are a dream object to that which is the ‘Total Dreamer’. Beware!

Larry: So, are there other drops in the ocean or are there no drops in the ocean?

SWAMIJI: There are no drops in the ocean. They look like drops. It is a total whole that is acting, the whole ocean thinking itself as all the drops of which it is organically constituted.

Larry: So, there are no friends, there are no dream objects.

SWAMIJI: Only you yourself are there, inclusive of all things. The Alone goes to the Alone. You are there as the Total Whole of conceptional universality.

Larry: So when I die, when one dies…

SWAMIJI: When one dies, nothing happens except a push towards self-materialisation. Only when you attain Self-realisation something happens, seriously.

Sarah: What happens?

SWAMIJI: Dying is an ordinary causal process of effectuation of karma potencies. You will maintain your individuality even after death, but in Self-realisation, individuality will not be maintained. We are now not discussing death, but Self-realisation—the merging of individuality in the Universal Whole. But that merging does not take place in death; the ego continues, the attachment continues, and the rebirth takes place. There is no virtue in dying. It is no good—like waking up from sleep and being the same person every day. There is no purpose served by that, except experience of one’s own thoughts and deeds.

Larry: So, the dream does not end when one dies.

SWAMIJI: Dying has no such meaning. It should be death of the ego-personality, not death of the body merely. The dream ceases in God-realisation, not merely by physical death.