Net of Jewels from an Advaita Master

Ramesh Balsekar

The universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is only the reflection of all the others in a fantastic interrelated harmony without end.

Self-Realization is effortless. What you are trying to find is what you already are.

Enlightenment is total emptiness of mind. There is nothing you can do to get it. Any effort you make can only be an obstruction to it.

If you but cease from useless conceptualizing, you will be what you are and what you have always been.

Seeing truly is not merely a change in the direction of seeing, but a change it its very center, in which the seer himself disappears.

The only ultimate understanding is that nothing is, not even he who understands.

For enlightenment to happen the perceiver must turn right around and wake up to the fact that he is face to face with his own nature - that HE IS IT. The spiritual seeker ultimately finds that he was already at the destination, that he himself IS what he had been seeking and he was in fact already home.

Concepts can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to remove another, and then be thrown away. Only in deep silence do we leave concepts behind. Words and language deal only with concepts, and cannot approach Reality.

Between pure Awareness and Awareness reflected as consciousness there is a gap which the mind cannot cross. The reflection of the sun in a drop of dew is not the sun itself.

Ceasing to conceptualize means ceasing to perceive objectively, which means perceiving non-objectively. It is to see the universe without choice or judgement and without getting into subject-object relationship. What happens then? Nothing, except that you are what you were before you were born: everything.

When the apparent but illusory identity called a person has disappeared into the awareness of total potentiality that it is and has always been, this is called enlightenment.

Manifestation may adopt any number of forms but the substratum of all the myriad forms is Consciousness, without which there cannot be anything whatsoever.

Nothing can have any meaning, or even any existence, except in terms of something else.

The man of wisdom is devoid of ego even though he may appear to use it. His vacant or fasting mind is neither doing anything nor not doing anything. He is outside of volition, neither this nor that. He is everything and nothing.

Your doubts will never be totally destroyed until perception has gone beyond mere phenomenality, and such perception is not a matter of will but of Grace.

Only that which was prior to the appearance of this body-consciousness is your true identity. That is Reality. It is here and now, and there is no question of anyone being able to reach for it or grasp it.

The same Consciousness prevails at rest as the Absolute and in motion as duality. When the sense of "me" disappears completely, duality vanishes in ecstasy.

To any conceptual problem there cannot be any valid answer except to see the problem in perspective as an empty thought, and that there is no such thing as a "problem" which is other than merely conceptual.

An experience is never factual but only conceptual. Whatever an experience may be, it is nonetheless only a happening in consciousness.

The manifest phenomenal aspect of what we are and the unmanifest noumenal Absolute are not different. Phenomena are what we appear to be. Noumenon is what we ARE.

The essential basis of self-realization is the total rejection of the individual as an independent entity, whether it comes about as a spontaneous understanding or through an utter surrender of one's individual existence.