Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

"I Have Nothing, I Am Nothing"

THE state is that of utter commonplaceness. The feeling that I am doing Yoga, that I am something and have a special work to do, that something has to be achieved, that life has a purpose etc., etc. all that has left and left a blank, a void inside and an absolutely mechanical automaton outside. I do the most ordinary things of life, as any other common man, like the routine work of a machine; I know nothing and have no impulse to know or to plan as to what I should do, how I am to move or why is it all like this. A great tranquility and silence possess the whole being. There is no “I”, no person to refer to in the consciousness: individuality has been totally abolished, a sweep of universality passes through the consciousness and makes it as it were a no-man’s-land. The mind has laid down its burden and says it is free now and obedient to the call that may come to it. The vital too submits its adherence and awaits the order: it has no inclination or choice of its own. The physical is likewise wholly docile.

This state of supreme blankness and passivity borders on the experience of illusion – the illusoriness of the world and the vanity or hollowness of life. Creation does seem like an empty shell, with no meaning or purpose and no real truth of existence even: it is a shadow play that rests on nothing and vanishes into nothing. The great exponents of Illusoriness must have had an experience of this kind and considered therefore that – Nothing – as the ultimate truth and mystery of existence.

Now when all sense of personality – not only the sense but even the fact itself – totally dissolved, the voice of the Supreme Divine was heard and His impulsion recorded. The Prayers and Meditations hereafter were written through such an impulsion;

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it was truly automatic writing – the instrument did not know what it was writing and even did not understand the meaning of the recorded words, it was merely a copyist, it looked at the writing as a third person would.

The whole being in all its parts acted thus like a recording or transmitting agency. It was under such conditions – at the zero point of human personality and consciousness – that the instrument which so long lived apart and behind, concerned with itself more or less, was made to come forward and take up the work that the Divine demanded of it. The vessel that was completely empty, a universal and transcendental shape, came gradually to be filled, with the Divine's own will and its own formations.

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