Changeless

To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity. Nisargadatta Maharaj.

The Buddha continued: "I will now show you the (self-) nature which is beyond birth and death. Great King, how old were you when you first saw the Ganges?" The King replied: "When I was three my mother took me to worship the deva Jiva. As we crossed the river, I knew it was the Ganges. The Buddha asked: "Great King, as you just said, you were older at twenty than at ten; and until you were sixty, as days, months and years succeeded one another, your (body) changed in every moment of thought. When you saw the Ganges at three, was its water (the same as it was) when you were thirteen?" The King replied: "It was the same when I was three and thirteen, and still is now that I am sixty two." The Buddha said: "As you now notice your white hair and wrinkled face, there must be many more wrinkles than when you were a child. Today when you see the Ganges, do you notice that your seeing is 'old' now while it was 'young' then?" The King replied: "It has always been the same, World Honoured One." The Buddha said: "Great King, though your face is wrinkled, the nature of this essence of your seeing is not. Therefore, that which is wrinkled changes and that which is free from wrinkles is unchanging."  Extract from "The Surangama Sutra" (translated by Lu K'an Yu, BI Publications 1978, p.26).

   Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at - that light for example.
   It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness.
   Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity.
   All of this [her thoughts] danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net - danced up and down in Lily's mind, in and about the branches of the pear tree.
   There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby.  Virginia Woolf, "To The Lighthouse"

I am without change, without any form, free from all blemish and decay. I am not subject to any disease, I am beyond all comprehension, free from all alternatives and all-pervading. I am without any attribute or activity. I am eternal, ever free and imperishable. I am free from all impurity, I am immovable, unlimited, holy, undecaying and immortal. Shankara.

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