Immortality
Extract from an edited transcript, Weekly Meditation Group, Highgate, London, 3 June 1981
Every one of us is here to find our own immortality. You might use other words. You might have heard it called something else. The truth is immortality. When you self-realise, you realise immortality. It cannot be visualised. It cannot be described. And it cannot be said to be survival after death. That just means continuation of the person. To know you survive you have to be the same person, so then you’ve got the same problems; and your problems are infinite. Immortality eliminates all problems, eliminates all self. For immortality to be realised the human mind has to be stilled, made non-existent.
We realise immortality through the experience of life; that is, in the infinite past which is exhibited as us, as we are now. The past is millions of years old and all that is inside us. To realise immortality we have to get rid of past. The question is: In all these years have I suffered and loved enough, have I lost and won enough? Have I experienced life enough to give up the need for experience, which is the need of the past, the need to survive and go on? Can I just give it up now?
What do I imagine I need, which I do not need? For every need is the need to repeat the past. Do I have the strength of being (that means having a very still mind), do I have the stillness, to take over my entire self and say: ‘I surrender all thought, all wanting, all trying’? Yes, I can give it all up if I give up my imagination. The need to keep thinking, examining, trying to find out, this is all done in the imagination.
'Then am I free? Of what?’
Of course you are free. The only freedom is to be free of the past. The truth is within you. Immortality is within you now. It is there for you to feel now in your vitality, in the pure sensation of yourself. You won’t get there if you’re feeling emotion, that stirring of wanting, of trying to change, of being upset by any relationship. But if you can just sit, feeling your sensation inside, without having any concepts, then in your meditation you will get to your own vital being, your vital double. And that is the door to the reality of yourself, your immortality.
The Divine Lover