Thank you Ralph!
Original Text
On 25 Jun 2026, at 7:02, he wrote:
You have decided that you want mental silence and you are working towards it, making a great effort to make the mind quiet. You have chosen to strive for a state which you call “silence”. You have decided that silence is desirable, so you put in a lot of effort to try and reach that desirable state. But I say, “If you are choosing and striving, then you are still living in the mind.” The efforts you are making are mental, and the goal you have set yourself is also mental. The experience of a state you have chosen and striven for will be a mental experience only.
If you want eternal rest, if you want the state of real silence, then you have to be choiceless. Your true nature is choicelessness. As long as you choose and strive, the experience of your true nature will be hidden from you.
If you want real silence, you have to give up all ideas about attaining it or striving for it. You have to give up all your searching. And having
given up all your searching, what will be left? I will tell you. What will
be left will be That which was already there before you started running around looking for It. It is so easy. In just a single moment all inner dialogue stops. And why does it stop? Because you stopped making any effort to stop it. In the moment of no effort you become aware of the substratum, that place from where mind rises. You didn’t do it before because you were too busy making efforts to control the mind. It was you who was making it complicated.
It’s very simple. Keep quiet, don’t make any effort, and don’t speak. Then you will understand what I am talking about.
You don’t have to go anywhere nor jump anywhere. For jumping you need two locations – the place where you are starting from and the place you are planning to jump to. There is no diving board nor swimming pool. You don’t have to start from one place and jump somewhere else. This is just your concept. When there is no jumper, no diving board, no swimming pool, then what are you going to do? Where will you jump?
Don’t give rise to the thought, “I have to jump into silence.” But if it
does arise, find out where it comes from. Follow it back to the depths, to the place from where it originally arose. If it has arisen, it must have come from somewhere. Everything you speak of and think of must come from somewhere. Where is that “somewhere”? Where do all your desires come from – “I like this”, “I don’t like that”, “I have to jump”, “I am in a state of unease.” All these are just thoughts. Find out where they all come from. Turn the mind backwards and simply look at the Source from which they came. That’s all you have to do.
Real knowledge can only be of your own Self. You have gone to school and your teacher has given you knowledge which he himself has acquired from somewhere else. But what I am talking about cannot be learned or acquired. No one has ever learned it from anyone else. It has been there since the creation of the world.
Everything rises from the same Source. Everything is a manifestation of that same Source. What is there, between the projector and the object of projection, in between you and another? What separates them? Empty space.
Nothingness is all around you. In your immediate vicinity you have to
admit that there is only Nothingness, Emptiness. So, why do you exclude yourself from It? Why do you think that there is someone in the middle of the Nothingness? You think that what is seen is separate from the one who sees it. Isn’t that so? You think that the subject who sees is different from the object that is seen. I am telling you to find out who the Seer is. Find out who is the one who is seeing objects. You look at your body and it becomes an object of your sight. But who is the Seer of the body?
If the Seer is consciousness, then you yourself must be consciousness. You are not the object which is seen and you are not the body which is seen by the Seer. You are the Seer Itself, not an object of the senses. That means that you cannot be the body or anything else which you can see, hear, feel, smell, touch or even think about. You are the Witness of all the objects that are perceived, but you cannot be the objects themselves. You
have to find out who is the Witness, who is this character who is seeking peace of mind. Nothing else needs to be done.
Ai generated, from the previous text
In this discourse, the teacher [H.W.L. Poonja, a.k.a. Papaji] challenges the common misconception that spiritual peace is a goal to be achieved through labor, arguing instead that striving and choosing are mental activities that actually obscure our inherent nature. True silence is not a destination to be reached through effort, but a pre-existing substratum that reveals itself only when we abandon the search and stop trying to manipulate the mind. By turning our attention away from perceived objects and back toward the source of thought, we discover that we are not the body or the mind, but the eternal witness or Seer of all experiences. Ultimately, the text serves as an invitation to relinquish all effortful concepts and recognize that we are already the formless consciousness in which everything arises.
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