Blessedness opened its mouth to wisdom and said: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs" (Mt. 5:3).
All angels and all saints and all who were ever born must keep silent when the Wisdom of the Father speaks, for all the Wisdom of the angels and of all created beings is mere folly before the unfathomable Wisdom of God. It has said that the poor are blessed.
Now there are two kinds of poverty. There is an external poverty, which is good and is greatly to be esteemed in a man who voluntarily practices it for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he himself used it when he was on earth. I do not now want to say anything more about this poverty. But there is a different poverty, an inward poverty, and it is of this that we must understand that our Lord is speaking: "Blessed are the poor in spirit."
Now I beg you to be disposed to what I say; for I say to you in everlasting truth that if you are unlike this truth of which we want to speak, you cannot understand me1. Various people have asked me what poverty may be in itself and what a poor man may be. Let us try to answer this.
Bishop Albert says that a poor man is one who does not find satisfaction in all the things God created; and this is well said. But we can put it even better, and take poverty in a higher sense. A poor man wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing. Let us now talk about these three points; and I beg you for the sake of God's love that you understand this truth, if you can, and if you do not understand it, do not burden yourself with it, for the truth I want to expound is such that there will be few good people to understand it.
First let us discuss a poor man as one who wants nothing. There are some people who do not understand this well. They are those who are attached to their own penances and external exercises, which seem important to people. God help those who hold divine truth in such low esteem! Such people present an outward picture that gives them the name of saints2; but inside they are donkeys, for they cannot distinguish divine truth. These people say that a man is poor who wants nothing; but they interpret it in this way, that a man ought to live so that he never fulfills his own will in anything, but that he ought to comport himself so that he may fulfill God's dearest will. Such people are in the right, for their intention is good. For this let us commend them. May God in his mercy grant them the kingdom of heaven. But I speak in the divine truth when I say that they are not poor men, nor do they resemble poor men. They have great esteem in the sight of men who know no better, but I say that they are donkeys who have no understanding of divine truth. They deserve the kingdom of heaven for their good intention, but of the poverty of which we want to talk they know nothing.
If someone asks me now what kind of poor man he is who wants nothing, I reply in this way. So long as a man has this as his will, that he wants to fulfill God's dearest will, he has not the poverty about which we want to talk. Such a person has a will with which he wants to fulfill God's will, and that is not true poverty. For if a person wants really to have poverty, he ought to be as free of his own created will as he was when he did not exist. For I tell you by the truth that is eternal, so long as you have a will to fulfill God's will, and a longing for God and for eternity, then you are not poor3; for a poor man is one who has a will and longing for nothing.
When I stood in my first cause, I then had no "God," and then I was my own cause. I wanted nothing, I longed for nothing, for I was an empty being, and the only truth in which I rejoiced was in the knowledge of myself. Then it was myself I wanted and nothing else. What I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted; and so I stood, empty of God and of everything4. But when I went out from my own free will and received my created being, then I had a "God," for before there were any creatures, God was not "God" but he was what he was. But when creatures came to be and received their created being, then God was not "God" in himself, but he was "God" in the creatures5.
Now I say that God, so far as he is "God," is not the perfect end of created beings6. The least of these beings possesses in God as much as he possesses. If it could be that a fly had reason and could with its reason seek out the eternal depths of the divine being from which it issued, I say that God, with all that he has as he is "God," could not fulfill or satisfy the fly. So therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of "God," and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal there where I was established, where I wanted what I was and was what I wanted. So I say: If a man is to become poor in his will, he must want and desire as little as he wanted and desired when he did not exist. And in this way a man is poor who wants nothing.
Next, a man is poor who knows nothing. Sometimes I have said that a man ought to live so that he did not live for himself or for the truth or for God. But now I say something different and something more, that a man who would possess this poverty ought to live as if he does not even know that he is not in any way living for himself or for the truth or for God. Rather, he should be so free of all knowing that he does not know or experience or grasp that God lives in him7. For when man was established in God's everlasting being, there was no different life in him. What was living there was himself8. So I say that a man should be set as free of his own knowing as he was when he was not. Let God perform what he will, and let man be free.
Everything that ever came from God is directed into pure activity. Now the actions proper to a man are loving and knowing. The question is: In which of these does blessedness most consist? Some authorities have said that it consists in knowing, others say that it consists in loving; others that it consists in knowing and loving, and what they say is better. But I say that it does not consist in either knowing or loving, but that there is that in the soul from which knowing and loving flow; that something does not know or love as do the powers of the soul9. Whoever knows this knows in what blessedness consists10. That something has neither before nor after, and it is not waiting for anything that is to come11, for it can neither gain nor lose. So it is deprived of the knowledge that God is acting in it12; but it is itself the very thing that rejoices in itself as God does in himself. So I say that a man ought to be established, free and empty, not knowing or perceiving that God is acting in him; and so a man may possess poverty. The authorities say that God is a being, and a rational one, and that he knows all things. I say that God is neither being nor rational, and that he does not know this or that13. Therefore God is free of all things, and therefore he is all things. Whoever will be poor in spirit, he must be poor of all his own knowledge, so that he knows nothing, not God or created things or himself. Therefore it is necessary for a man to long not to be able to know or perceive God's works. In this way a man can be poor of his own knowledge.
Third, a man is poor who has nothing. Many people have said that it is perfection when one possesses no material, earthly things, and in one sense this is indeed true, if a man does this voluntarily. But this is not the sense in which I mean it.
I have said just now that a man is poor who does not want to fulfill God's will, but who lives so that he may be free both of his own will and of God's will, as he was when he was not. About this poverty I say that it is the highest poverty. Second, I say that a man is poor who knows nothing of God's works in him. A man who is so established is as free of knowing and perceiving as God is free of all things, and this is the purest poverty. But a third form is the most intimate poverty, on which I now want to speak; and this is when a man has nothing.
Now pay great attention and give heed! I have often said, and great authorities say, that a man should be so free of all things and of all works, both interior and exterior, that he might become a place only for God, in which God could work. Now I say otherwise. If it be the case that man is free of all created things and of God and of himself, and if it also be that God may find place in him in which to work, then I say that so long as that is in man, he is not poor with the most intimate poverty. For it is not God's intention in his works that man should have in himself a place for God to work in. Poverty of spirit is for a man to keep so free of God and of all his works that if God wishes to work in the soul, he himself is the place in which he wants to work; and that he will gladly do. For if he finds a man so poor as this, then God performs his own work, and the man is in this way suffering God to work, and God is his own place to work in, and so God is his own worker in himself. Thus in this poverty man pursues that everlasting being which he was and which he is now and which he will evermore remain.
It is Saint Paul who says: "All that I am, I am by God's grace" (1 Co. 15:10). But if what I say transcends grace and being and understanding and will and longing, how then can Paul's words be true? People show that what Paul said is true in this way. That the grace of God was in him was necessarily so, for it was God's grace working in him that brought what was accidental to the perfection of the essential. When grace had finished and had perfected its work, then Paul remained what he was.
So I say that man should be so poor that he should not be or have any place in which God could work. When man clings to place, he clings to distinction. Therefore I pray to God that he may make me free of "God," for my real being is above God14 if we take "God" to be the beginning of created things. For in the same being of God where God is above being and above distinction15, there I myself was, there I willed myself and committed myself to create this man. Therefore I am the cause of myself in the order of my being, which is eternal, and not in the order of my becoming, which is temporal16. And therefore I am unborn17, and in the manner in which I am unborn I can never die18. In my unborn manner I have been eternally, and am now, and shall eternally remain19. What I am in the order of having been born, that will die and perish, for it is mortal, and so it must in time suffer corruption. In my birth all things were born and I was the cause of myself and of all things20; and if I would have wished it, I would not be nor would all other things be. And if I did not exist, "God" would also not exist. That God is "God," of that I am a cause; if I did not exist, God too would not be "God."21 There is no need to understand this.
A great authority says that his breaking through is nobler than his flowing out; and that is true. When I flowed our from God, all things said: "God is." And this cannot make me blessed, for with this I acknowledge that I am a creature. But in the breaking-through, when I come to be free of will of myself and of God's will and of all his works and of God himself, then I am above all created things, and I am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and what I shall remain, now and eternally. Then I received an impulse that will bring me up above all the angels. Together with this impulse, I receive such riches that God, as he is "God," and as he performs all his divine works, cannot suffice me22; for in this breaking-through I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things. Here God finds no place in man, for with this poverty man achieves what he has been eternally and will evermore remain. Here God is one with the spirit, and that is the most intimate poverty one can find.
Whoever does not understand what I have said, let him not burden his heart with it; for as long as a man is not equal to this truth23, he will not understand these words, for this is a truth beyond speculation that has come immediately from the heart of God. May God help us so to live that we may find it eternally. Amen.
1 (Maharaj, N. 13) You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be.
2 (Maharaj, N. 98) Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self-oriented.
3 (Maharaj, N. 63) No ambition is spiritual [...] A man's desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal.
4 (Maharaj, N. 15) What is mine is mine and was mine even when God was not. Of course, it is a very tiny little thing, a speck - the sense 'I am', the fact of being. This is my own place, nobody gave it to me. The earth is mine; what grows on it is God's.
5 (Maharaj, N. 56) Of course, where there is a universe, there will also be its counterpart, which is God. But I am beyond both.
6 (Maharaj, N. 92) You are beyond God, beyond being and not-being.
7 (Maharaj, N. 12) To me it is 'a body', not 'my body', 'a mind', not 'my mind'. The mind looks after the body all right, I need not interfere. What needs be done is being done, in the normal and natural way. You may not be conscious of your physiological functions, but when it comes to thoughts and feelings, desires and fears, you become acutely self-conscious. To me these too are largely unconscious. I find myself talking to people, or doing things quite correctly and appropriately, without being very much conscious of them. It looks as if I live my physical, waking life automatically, reacting spontaneously and accurately.
8 (Maharaj, N. 48) I am pure Consciousness itself, un-broken awareness of all that is.
9 (Maharaj, N. 76) In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine. Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling. Unthinkable, it causes thought. Non-being, it gives birth to being. It is the immovable background of motion. Once you are there you are at home everywhere.
10 (Maharaj, N. 78) Freedom from self-identification with a set of memories and habits, the state of wonder at the infinite reaches of the being, its inexhaustible creativity and total trascendence, the absolute fearlessness born from the realization of the illusoriness and transiency of every mode of consciousness - flow from a deep and inexhaustible source. To know the source as source and appearance as appearance, and oneself as the source only is self-realization.
11 (Maharaj, N. 78) It is like a man saying: "I have done my work, there is nothing left to do".
12 (Maharaj, N. 24) Just as my body moves by my mere thinking of the movement, so do things happen as I think of them. Mind you, I do nothing. I just see them happen.
13 (Maharaj, N. 14) You think God knows you? Even the world He does not know.
14 (Maharaj, N. 67) I cannot say that I am in God or I am God; God is the universal light and love, the universal witness: I am beyond the universal even.
15 (Maharaj, N. 24) I take my stand where no difference exists, where things are not, nor the minds that create them. There I am at home.
16 (Maharaj, N. 42) The essence of slavery is to imagine yourself to be a process, to have past and future, to have history. In fact, we have no history, we are not a process, we do not develop, nor decay; also see all as a dream and stay out of it.
17 (Maharaj, N. 25) Bodies come and go in consciousness and consciousness itself has its roots in me. I am life and mine are mind and body.
18 (Maharaj, N. 56) The gnani [i.e. the knower] does not die because he was never born.
(Maharaj, N. 5) What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless.
19 (Maharaj, N. 34) Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what is it that you have never lost. That which is there before the beginning and after the ending of everything; that to which there is no birth, nor death.
20 (Maharaj, N. 42) I am nothing, have nothing, can do nothing. Yet all comes out of me - the source is me; the root, the origin is me.
(Maharaj, N. 7) In pure being consciousness arises; in consciousness the world appears and disappears. All there is is me, all there is is mine. Before all beginnings, after all endings - I am. All has its being in me, in the 'I am', that shines in every living being.
(Maharaj, N. 73) The moment you say: 'I am', the entire universe comes into being along with its creator.
21 (Maharaj, N. 45) Who knows the Creator? He alone who was before the Creator, your own real being, the source of all the worlds with their creators.
22 (Maharaj, N. 58) As you realize yourself in manifestation, you keep on discovering that you are ever more than what you have imagined.
23 (Maharaj, N. 16) To know is to be.