Our real nature is always experienced

Question: What is the truth that I have to attain? Please explain it to me.

Bhagavan: What we have to attain, and what is desired by everyone, is endless happiness. Although we seek to attain it in various ways, it is [usually incorrectly looking] to something to be sought or attained as a new experience. [However] our real nature [in its purity] is the "I" feeling, which is always experienced [inwardly] by everyone. It is within us and nowhere else. Although we are always experiencing it, our minds are wandering, always seeking it [outside of us], thinking in ignorance that it is something apart from us. This is like a person saying with his own tongue that he has no tongue.

Question: If this is so, why did so many spiritual practices come to be created?

Bhagavan: The sadhanas (spiritual practices) arose only to get rid of the thought that it (the Self) is something to be newly attained. The root of the illusion is the thought that ignores the Self and thinks instead, "I am this body." Once this thought rises, it expands in no time into several thousand thoughts and conceals the Self.

Why do people act this way?

"People are, as is our consciousness of them."

Tune in correctly and results arrrive

"Suppose it is seven o'clock and you want to catch a certain

television program coming on at eight. You can tune your set

to the correct channel _now_. Then, all you need do is wait for

it to come to you. You can relax in the knowledge that you are

correctly tuned in, that the program _must_ eventually be yours

to experience. You need have no care nor responsibility for

its arrival. Finally, of its own accord, and at the right

time, your desire appears. [Mental Picture 2]

Likewise, with rich results - as long as we are correctly tuned

in, by using Mental Pictures, we need not concern ourselves at

all with results. They arrive all by themselves, easily and

naturally."

                         Psycho-Pictography, p. 26

Your Supreme Existence

"Your supreme existence is as close as your remembrance of it.

Once more, your supreme existence is a close as your remembrance

of it. So we’re going to have to study what it means to recall who

we really are."

   from a talk given 2/2/1992

 Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 33, talk 812, track 8