Press Delete on the False Self

Adi Shankaracharya's Nirvana Shatakam as a practice of negation. Sharada Ma reads the verses one by one — I am not the mind, not the intellect, not the storehouse of memory — and shows that when the name, the form, and the positionalities are dropped, what remains is Chidananda Rupam: I am Shiva, I am Shiva.

In this satsang Sharada Ma goes deeper into what she has been building for eleven years. She begins with the recap — body, mind, and pure Self — and asks whether we have actually practiced staying as the Sakshi, the witness. The intelligence is not the intellect of the mind but the intelligence of the heart: "Heart is thy name, O Lord."

She then shares the counsel that shaped her own sadhana. Newly married with young children and desperate to go deep, she asked her Swamiji what to do. His answer was the parallel path — your wanting of realization and your samsara, carried side by side. You cannot ditch the family; when the house empties you run up to the shrine and sit. She describes the ripening that ends it: like a cucumber on the creeper, when it is ripe it simply drops, without announcement, into a state that is irrevocable.

The heart of the session is Nirvana Shatakam, read verse by verse. I am not the mind, intellect, ego, or the storehouse of memory — and she stops there to insist that everyone is evolving, so judging anyone from memory is already an error. Neither hatred nor attachment leads into being lovingly unattached, and into what surfaces during meditation: the vasanas rising to be released, met not with alarm but with witnessing. Even liberation goes on the shelf. The instruction throughout is computer-simple: press delete on the false notions.

Woven through are the stories — Shankaracharya leaving Kerala at eight and answering his guru's "Who are you?" without a name or a village; the visitor who came looking for the great sage and could not see him in the man with the loincloth wiping up after a puppy.

The final teaching turns to the Ashtavakra Gita: with the tongs of truth I have plucked the thorns of thinking from the innermost cave of my heart — you are both the policeman and the thief, and no guru does this for you. He who believes he is a person is constantly acting, even when the body is at rest. What she asks for is inner renunciation — give up the nonsense within, and the effulgence outside takes care of itself.

A question on discernment — is it a quality of mind, or of heart? — opens the Q&A, and Ma answers that it is the purified mind in the service of the heart, arriving on its own rather than being located. Then Arunachala Shiva and Tejo Maya Vigraha Linga lead into a guided grace-transmission meditation of nearly an hour, and a closing on worship — this body is your worship.