Everyone is made up of the Self only in this world, nobody wants anything else. When you ‘want’ something, you are asking for your ‘Self,’ and nobody else. It is nobody else because it is identified with you and thereby it has ‘become’ you. The intensity and the percentage with which it has become you is also the percentage of the Self which is there. So, this is a kind of Self-Realisation, indeed. But when a seeker, a sadhaka, a searcher of Truth, says that he is after Self-Realisation, is this the kind of Self that he is seeking, the mortal self of artificial identification with that which one is not? Naturally, no sensible person will say that this is the Self that he is asking for. So, it is not the gaunatman, the secondary, foisted self that we are in need of. It is not anything in this world that you are referring to when you want the ‘Self.’ It cannot be anything that is in the world because everything that is in the world is outside the perceiving consciousness. It is in space, in time, it is located somewhere and therefore it is an object and it cannot be a subject. Thus, when you say, “I want Self-Realisation,” you are definitely not asking for anything in this world; it becomes clear from this analysis. It is not something in this world that you are asking for; what else are you asking? There is nothing else that you can conceive in your mind. If this is not the world that I want, and when I say, “I want Self-Realisation,” I am not asking for anything in this world, what on earth am I asking for? Well, you may say, like a child, “I am asking for my own Self.” This is a child’s answer. Why is it a child’s answer? Because it is involved in a great difficulty about which we have made some reference previously. When you say “my own self,” what do you mean? Here we come to another concept of Self, in philosophical parlance called the mithyatman, or the false self. Whatever I have been telling you, all this is concerning the secondary self, the gaunatman, the objective self, the foisted, shadowed self in the world as things loved or not liked. Now there is another difficulty before us. While it is sensible to believe that most seekers are honest enough to realise that they are not asking for anything in this world when they want Self-Realisation, they may not be clear as to what else they are asking for. They have always something simple to say—’it is my ‘within’ that I am seeking for.’ We easily say that the Self is within, and if the Self is not anything that is outside in the world, it has naturally to be that which is ‘within me.’ I have tried to explain to you last time how this idea of ‘within’ is very eluding; because we cannot easily know what we mean by this notion of the within. I repeat again what I told you last time. It is a ‘within’ every blessed thing, within me, within you, within X, Y, Z and A, B, C, D. So, inasmuch as it is within the sun and the stars and the moon and the earth and the human beings and this and that, we may say that it is a ‘withinness’ without a ‘withoutness.’ It is a kind of within, no doubt, because it is inside everything; accepted. But the fact of its being within everything precludes there being anything without it. Hence, the word ‘within’ also is not wholly applicable to the concept or the notion of the Self. Therefore, it becomes necessary for us to be a little cautious when we say that we want the Self which is ‘within.’ What sort of ‘within’ are you thinking of, should be clear. You may ask me, why is this need felt for a clarification of this kind? The necessity arises because it is easy to slip into the trap of what psychoanalysts call an ‘introversion’ of the mind or, sometimes they even use a worse word, ‘narcissistic introversion,’ a purely western psychoanalytic term which has its own morbid implications, a locked-up psychic personality, limited to purely subjective psychic operations within the skull of one’s own self, limiting the notion of the self to the operations within the physical body only. Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst of Zurich, made a discovery indeed when he classified human beings into the extroverts and the introverts. This classification is not unknown to Indian psychologists. Patanjali has said this before Jung was born. However, we know this only when it became pronounced and announced to public knowledge by psychoanalysts of this kind, who belong to the circle called ‘analytic psychology’.

While we may be austerely and religiously guarded from identifying our objective in life with anything that is in the world, we may get into the cocoon of a self-centred limited notion of the self, and we may become introverts as opposed to what they call extroversion. This difficulty of a possible or apparent contradiction—in reality there is no contradiction—between the introverted and the extroverted attitude in life, this difficulty has also been the cause of the war between what people call jnana and karma, knowledge and action. There are people fanatically clinging to the doctrine of anti-action, only knowledge, knowledge opposed to action. There are others who are extroverts, who believe not in any kind of ideational concept of knowledge, but believe in work, action, doing something materially, practically. We have the controversy between knowledge and action, jnana and karma, from ancient times, in India, and this is seen among mystical circles in Europe, also. Contemplation and action are the two sides of the proposition in spiritual outlook. Now, the Bhagavadgita, particularly, has been a great breakthrough in solving this problem of the apparent antagonism between knowledge and action. The Isavasya Upanishad has already mentioned it—it was earlier than the Bhagavadgita—when it said that avidya and vidya, two terms which it uses in one place, seem to be opposed to each other. While you are a great success and an achievement in your abrogation of attachment to outside things by renunciation, living the life of an ascetic or a monk, you may be caught by the introversion-complex where you may be a hater of things, a despiser of the world and a condemner of creation itself as an evil, and religious outlooks are not unknown in this world where the world is dubbed as Satan’s realm so that you cannot look at anything in the world, you have to close your eyes to everything. This is one extreme. The other extreme is already mentioned—a total absorption in matter and destroying one’s self thereby. Either way mistakes can be comntitted. While the gaunatman, or the externally motivated objective self, is to be guarded against, we have also to guard ourselves against identifying ourselves with any kind of psychoanalytic, or, rather, psychopathological condition of introversion in the sense of pure physical subjectivity, because the ‘Self’ is not locked up in the body. So, you cannot say, I want the ‘Self,’ and I care a hoot for anybody else. This kind of statement loses sense in the light of the fact that the Self is not within one person only. The extrovert and the introvert conditions are ruled out completely in the true concept of the Self, because in this withinness of the Self, the withoutness is rooted out totally. It is not a going within as opposed to reaching without. When you go within yourself, it does not mean that you are going further from the world,—it is not. Both extremes meet finally. There is no distance in the Self. Moving within and moving away are words which have to be taken with a pinch of salt. They lose sense here, in this realm of distanceless existence.

What do you want, when you say, “I want Self-Realisation?” You will be finding yourself in a maze of difficulty, psychologically. I cannot complete this discussion today, because there is something else which I would like to say as an interim explanation of a difficulty which is the cause of our not being able to concentrate on the true notion of the Self. This interim difficulty , is our unpreparedness for this practice. We have been too very enthusiastic but unbaked pots, as people generally say, which cannot contain much water. The unpreparedness of ourselves for this task ahead consists in our subtle longing for empirical values in life, in the heart of our hearts. We are, at the recesses of our hearts, not free from a little liking or interest in that which the Self is not. This little lurking, a feeling of ‘why not have it,’’let us have it if it comes,’ this little root of the longing for that which the Self is not, the possibility of the rise of that, is the barrier before us. A complete conviction that the Realisation of the Self includes every blessed thing we call the joys of life is not easy to obtain. We have a subtle difficulty created by our own selves. What is this subtlety, you may ask me. Even the best of people cannot escape from this ‘strait gate,’ because somehow, some voice, whose voice we do not know, will tell us that we are losing something when we are gaining the Self. That is enough for us, and we do not want to hear anything further. I am losing something simultaneously when I gain the Self. And who would like to lose a penny, as it is a valuable something? Now, is there any penny-worth value in this world? We find not merely pennies but heaps of Pounds, and who can dare say that these values are not seen in life? No use merely saying, ‘I see not,’ for you see, and the heart has to say whether it sees or not. To what extent are you able to convince yourself that the values of the world are contained in the Self, and your asking for the Self is not an asking for that which is outside the world, thereby losing something of the world, but that which occupies everything in the world, contains everything that is in the world in a transmuted and highly rarefied form, so that the gaining of the Self is not a loss of the world, but a gaining of that which is more than the world? Who can become convinced to such an extent? Intellectually, rationally, philosophically we are convinced, but the heart is a terrible friend and it is not going to listen to things so easily. Because fear grips us when we are encountered with the possibility of leaving this world of sensory experience. Death is a fright. Who would like to die? Why are we afraid of dying? Here is an example before us. To what extent we attach value to things here, to this body, and to everything connected with the body? Death is fearful. It is fearful because we lose a value, the greatest value, this body and everything that is related to this body, also. Where comes the Self here? Why cry for the Self? These are impediments on the way meanwhile, which they call the dross of the mind. Vairagya, which is always considered as a necessary prerequisite for Self-Realisation, is not to become a monk in the ordinary sense, or to become a nun. It is not a social change that you have to bring about in your outward conduct. Rather, it is a transvaluation of values within and the conviction of the reason that it has grappled actually the substance of the whole world in grappling with the Self is essential. When you grasp the Self, you have grasped the universe. Therefore, you do not lose anything that is worthwhile. Life and death lose meaning, neither life nor death has any sense, in this great universal adventure of the grappling of the spirit by the spirit, but this is a terror. Therefore, Arjuna cried: “Come down, come down, enough, enough, I do not want this any more. Whatever be this grand Form here, I had enough of it. I shall have the old thing only; please come down, O Lord!” Whatever be the majesty and the beauty and the grandeur of this goal before us, for a long time we cannot sustain it. We say ‘okay,’ but sufficient for the time being,—let us have a little smaller thing also. These are the little calls of the smaller self within us. They may be little. But the finger which is not even half of an inch in breadth can, when it is placed before the eyes, obstruct the vision of the large orb of the sun himself. You will not be able to see the huge sun which is some thousand times bigger than the earth, merely because a little petty finger has been placed on the eyes. We should not be under the impression that these are small matters and little difficulties, and that we are above. We are not so easily above indeed. They are difficulties so annoying as a little sand particle on the retina of the eye. The unpreparedness of ourselves is due to the impurity of the psychic operations.