M: The continuous cannot be experienced, for it has no borders. Consciousness implies alterations, change followings change, when one thing or state comes to an end and another begins; that which has no borderline cannot be experienced in the common meaning of the word. One can only be it, without knowing, but one can know what it is not. It is definitely not the entire content of consciousness which is always on the move.
Q: If the immovable cannot be known, what is the meaning and purpose of its realisation?
M: To realise the immovable means to become immovable. And the purpose is the good of all that lives.
Q: Life is movement. Immobility is death. Of what use is death to life?
M: I am talking of immovability, not of immobility. You become immovable in reticence. You become a power which gets all things right. It may or may not imply intense outward activity, but the mind remains deep and quiet.
Q: As I watch my mind I find it changing all the time, mood succeeding mood in infinite variety, while you seem to be perpetually in the same mood of cheerful benevolence.
M: Moods are in the mind and do not matter. Go within, go beyond. Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind's surface-play affects you very little.
Q: There will be play all the same?
M: A quiet mind is not a dead mind.
Q: Consciousness is always in movement -- it is an observable fact. Immovable consciousness is a contradiction. When you talk of a quiet mind, what is it? Is not mind the same as consciousness?
M: We must remember that words are used in many ways, according to the context. The fact is that there is little difference between the conscious and the unconscious --- they are essentially the same. The waking state differs from deep sleep in the presence of the witness. A ray of awareness illumines a part of our mind and that part becomes our dream or waking consciousness, while awareness appears as the witness. The witness usually knows only consciousness. Sadhana consists in the witness turning back first on his conscious, then upon himself in his own awareness. Self-awareness is Yoga.
Q: If awareness is all-pervading, then a blind man, once realised, can see?
M: You are mixing sensation with awareness. The jnani knows himself as he is. He is also aware of his body being crippled and his mind being deprived of a range of sensory perceptions. But he is not affected by the availability of eyesight, nor by its absence.
Q: My question is more specific; when a blind man becomes a jnani will his eyesight be restored to him or not?
M: Unless his eyes and brain undergo a renovation, how can he see?
Q: But will they undergo a renovation?
M: They may or may not. It all depends on destiny and grace. But a jnani commands a mode of spontaneous, non-sensory perception, which makes him know things directly, without the intermediary of the senses. He is beyond the perceptual and the conceptual, beyond the categories of time and space, name and shape. He is neither the perceived nor the perceiver, but the simple and the universal factor that makes perceiving possible. Reality is within consciousness, but it is not consciousness nor any of its contents.
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