Delve down into That which only is

My dear friend Duraiswami, who knew [Bhagavan] for years as one of his inmates, told me this: once he was expressing his admiration for the sage's power of concentrating day and night on his sadhana, when the other cut in smiling, "Sadhana? Who did sadhana? What did I know of sadhana? I simply came and sat down in the temple or elsewhere in Arunachala and then lost all count of time."

To me he said the same thing in a slightly different way with his characteristic irony. "People call Him by different names, but He came to me with no name or introduction so I know not how to define Him. What happened was that my desires and ego left me, how and why I cannot tell, and that I lived thenceforward in the vastness of timeless peace. Sometimes," he added with a smile, "I stayed with closed eyes and then, when I opened them, people said that I had come out of my blessed meditation. But I never knew the difference between no-meditation and meditation, blessed or otherwise. I simply lived a tranquil witness to whatever happened around me, but was never called upon to interfere. I could never feel any urge to do anything except to be, just be. I see that all is done by him and him alone, though we, poor puppets of maya, feel ourselves important as the doers, authors and reformers of everything! It is the ineradicable ego, the I-ness in each of us, which is responsible for the perpetuation of this maya with all its attendant sufferings and disenchantments."

"What then is the remedy?" I asked.

"Just be" he answered. "Delve down into That which only is, for when you achieve this you find: 'That am I'; there is and can be nothing but That. When you see this, all the trappings of maya and make-believe fall off, even as the worn-out slough of the snake. So all that you have to do is get to this I, the real I behind your seeming I, for then you are rid forever of the illusive I-ness and all is attained, since you stay thenceforward at one with That which is you; that's all."

~ Forever is in the Now, edited and complied by A. R. Natarajan (account by Dilip Kumar Roy)