Pleasures of consciousness || On Advaita Vedanta (2019)

Throw out concepts like ‘I am virtuous’ or ‘I am a sinner’. What is the entity that senses this? Body-consciousness will not lose its grasp on you with the thought that your well-being is the result of some spiritual activity. All you need is to keep observing yourself.

Do not befriend anything that is visible to you. If you have to act at all, do only this: please your consciousness. It is very merciful. It will show you all that is, directly.

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Questioner (Q): How is it possible to please the consciousness without getting pleased in turn? Moreover, the sense of correlation between spiritual activity, like listening to talks or reading spiritual books, and the sense of well-being and peace is obvious. Why does Nisargadatta say that one must get rid of all that?

Acharya Prashant (AP): The pleasures of consciousness are not the pleasures of the body. The body has its pleasures, and consciousness has a totally different dimension of pleasure. That which pleases the body is not that which pleases consciousness, but the two become one because our consciousness is body-consciousness.

Consciousness not entangled with the body seeks a destination of a totally different nature. And as far as the body is concerned, it is seeking pleasures of its own kind. In some ways, the saint is also a pleasure-seeking individual, so is a greedy or lustful man. It’s just that the pleasures that the two are seeking are widely separate.