Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.Collection: Spiritual
No particular thought can be mind's natural state, only silence. Not the idea of silence, but silence itself. When the mind is in its natural state, it reverts to silence spontaneously after every experience, or, rather, every experience happens against the background of silence.Collection: Ideas
Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause.Collection: Mind
Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity.Collection: Ocean
How can an unsteady mind make itself steady? Of course it cannot. It is the nature of the mind to roam about. All you can do is to shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind.Collection: Focus
You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable.Collection: Letting Go
Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world.Collection: People
Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. When the centre of selfishness is no longer, all desires for pleasure and fear of pain cease; one is no longer interested in being happy; beyond happiness there is pure intensity, inexhaustible energy, the ecstasy of giving from a perennial source.Collection: Pain
Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it.Collection: Reality
You want to know yourself. For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.Collection: Ignorance
The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Set your mind right and all will be right. When you know that the world is one, that humanity is one, you will act accordingly. But first of all you must attend to the way you feel, think and live. Unless there is order in yourself, there can be no order in the world.Collection: Inspirational
When I say 'I am', I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus, I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is known. I have nothing to desire for I am complete foreverCollection: Ocean
To know that you are neither the body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.Collection: Spiritual
Deepen and broaden your awareness of yourself and all the blessings will flow. You need not seek anything, all will come to you most naturally and effortlessly.Collection: Blessing
You know that you are. Don't burden yourself with names, just be. Any name or shape you give yourself obscures your real nature.Collection: Real
All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one.Collection: Kind
The mind exists in two states: as water and as honey. The water vibrates at the least disturbance, while the honey, however disturbed, returns quickly to immobility.Collection: Spiritual
There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.Collection: Being Yourself
By being with yourself, the 'I am', by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface, and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies.Collection: Acceptance
Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular.Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Light and love are impersonal.When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.Collection: Thinking
My stand is clear; produce to distribute, feed before you eat, give before you take, think of others before you think of yourself. Only a selfless society based on sharing can be stable and happy. This is the only practical solution. If you do not want it, then - fight.Collection: Fighting
The world does not yield to changing. By its very nature it is painful and transient. See it as it is and divest yourself of all desire and fear. When the world does not hold and bind you, it becomes an abode of joy and beauty. You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it.Collection: Yield
To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net [the matrix]. It is not hard to do so, as the net is full of holes. Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love and happiness, and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and you overeat. You want friendship and you exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them - your very seeing them will make them go away.Collection: Pain
The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself.Collection: World
To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature; to know that you need nothing to be happy, except Self-knowledge, is wisdom.Collection: Believe
Give all your attention to the question: 'What is it that makes me conscious?', until your mind becomes the question itself and cannot think of anything else.Collection: Thinking
What has been attained may again be lost. Only when you realise the true peace, the peace you have never lost, that peace will remain with you for it was never away. 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, to That there is no birth nor death. That Immovable state, which is not affected by the birth and death of a body or a mind, that state you must perceive.Collection: Mind
If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. Its your restlessness that causes chaos.Collection: Beautiful
You have projected onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires and fears, and you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free.Collection: Memories
When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognise it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again; the unruly mind may break its peace and obliterate its vision; but it is bound to return, provided the effort is sustained; until the day when all bonds are broken, delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present.Collection: Spiritual
Even faith in God is only a stage on the way. Ultimately you abandon all, for you come to something so simple that there are no words to express it.Collection: Simple
Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it. You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself.Collection: Believe
The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become.Collection: Limitless
Real happiness is not vulnerable, because it does not depend on circumstances.Collection: Happiness
The real you is timeless and beyond life and death.Collection: Real
Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. (...) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret.Collection: Art
Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.Collection: Imagining Yourself
There is in the body, a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body. Discover that current and stay with it.Collection: Energy
Learn to look without imagination, to listen without distortion: that is all. Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought, expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.Collection: Reality
You are not what you think yourself to be, I assure you. The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental.Collection: Memories
If you imagine yourself as separate from the the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear.Collection: Desire
When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, both become just experience - painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.Collection: Pain
I found myself desiring and knowing less and less, until I could say in utter astonishment: "I know nothing, I want nothing." Earlier I was sure of so many things, now I am sure of nothing. But I feel I have lost nothing by not knowing, because all my knowledge was false. My not knowing was in itself knowledge of the fact that all my knowledge is ignorance, that "I do not know" is the only true statement the mind can make....I do not claim to know what you do not. In fact, I know much less than you do.Collection: Ignorance
I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future.Collection: Fear
When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment.Collection: Life
To see the unreal is wisdom. Beyond this lies the inexpressible.Collection: Lying
Whatever you may have to do, watch your mind. Also you must have moments of complete inner peace and quiet, when your mind is absolutely still. If you miss it, you miss the entire thing. If you do not, the silence of the mind will dissolve and absorb all else.Collection: Inspiration
The only thing required of you is to allow all your raging desires to relax into preferences. Then everything will be done through you and for you, not by you.Collection: Desire
When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is, and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously.Collection: Spiritual