Oh lotus-eyed one, sweet of touch, when singing, seeing, tasting, be aware you are and discover the ever-living.
- While doing ANYTHING — eating, bathing, singing, walking — suddenly remember you ARE. Not who you are (no name, religion, country) — just naked existence, the bare sense of ‘you-areness’ with no label attached.
- Do NOT verbalize ‘I am’ — the instant you say it inwardly you have slipped into mind and missed. FEEL it, don’t think it. Consciousness then becomes double-arrowed: aware of the world AND of the one who is aware. (Mind, a mirror, can reflect every object but never you, the subject, because you stand behind it.)
- Discover the ever-living: the moment you feel ‘you are,’ you are thrown into the deathless current. Only the unreal — name, form, label — dies; the fear of death is fear for the unreal. The bare existence you touch is eternal.
- No special place or time needed, and no excuse possible — do it sitting, walking, eating, anytime.
- You will lose it in seconds — thoughts recapture you automatically (a robot-mechanism built over lifetimes). Don’t be sad: only ONE moment is ever given, and if you can be aware in this one you can be aware for life. Return, again and again.
- One route (Gurdjieff’s self-remembering, derived from this sutra): Ouspensky’s 3-month sealed experiment — 27 of 30 fled in week one feeling they were going mad. The persisting three progressed: month 1, glimpses of ‘I am’; month 2, even ‘I’ drops, only ‘am-ness’; month 3, even ‘am-ness’ dissolves — only being remains, and then you know.
- Other route (Raman Maharshi): ask ‘Who am I?’ ceaselessly; reject every answer the mind supplies (all come from conditioning, society, scriptures — the unreal). When no answer comes you are near; when even the question drops, you know.
- Q&A: society’s discipline (obedience-training, punishment, reward) pushed your real center into the unconscious and built a false ego-center on the periphery. Self-remembering re-roots you in the real center; the ego survives as a social convenience you USE as a tool, no longer enslaved to it.
- Q&A marker of completion: if remembering is sustained all day it seeps into dreams, then into sleep itself — you remember ‘I am’ even while the body sleeps (this, not sleeplessness, is what ‘the yogi is awake while all others sleep’ means). The remembering must become effortless, shadow-like.
- Q&A: the false center can only ACCUMULATE (knowledge, wealth) — never grow. You can know much about love yet not love. So before loving or praying, first remember you are; from the false center both are only pretence.