Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false..Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time.The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality.Collection: Pain
I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared -- myself, my Guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained and unfathomable silence.Collection: Teacher
Having realized that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them the nourishment of interest and attention.Collection: Giving
Give up the idea of being a person, that is all. You need not become what you are anyhow. There is the identity of what you are and there is the person superimposed on it. All you know is the person, the identity - which is not a person - you do not know, for you never doubted, never asked yourself the crucial question: 'Who am I?'Collection: Giving Up
Life is worthy of the name only when it reflects Reality in action. No university will teach you how to live so that when the time of dying comes, you can say: I lived well I do not need to live again. Most of us die wishing we could live again. So many mistakes committed, so much left undone. Most of the people vegetate, but do not live. They merely gather experience and enrich their memory. But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both.Collection: Spiritual
The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a colour needs a surface to appear on.Collection: Spiritual
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.Collection: Ocean
Would people know that nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen, they would achieve much more with less expenditure of energy.Collection: Inspirational
Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom.Collection: Real
Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image.Collection: Giving Up
I do not suffer; I cannot suffer because I am not an object. Of course there is suffering. But do you realize what this suffering is? I am the suffering. Whatever is manifested, I am the functioning. Whatever is perceptible I am the perceiving of it. Whatever is done I am the doing of it; I am the doer of it, and, understand this, I am also that which is done. In fact, I am the total functioning.Collection: Suffering
Our usual attitude is of 'I am this'. Separate consistently and perseveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what is means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that'.Collection: Attitude
"I AM" itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither body nor mind, but the love of the self in you for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity, and that is love.Collection: Self
You are so used to the support of concepts that when your concepts leave you, although it is your true state, you get frightened and try to cling to them again.Collection: Support
Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.Collection: Spiritual
As long as the mind is there, your body and your world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory.Collection: Memories
Let the dream unroll itself to its very end. You cannot help it. But you can look at the dream as a dream, refuse it the stamp of reality.Collection: Dream
You're free. You've taken this burden of being a human being on yourself. You're free.Collection: Taken
To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal with people, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you need nothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away from yourself.Collection: People
Consciousness is an attribute while awareness is not; one can be aware of being conscious, but not conscious of awareness. God is the totality of consciousness, but awareness is beyond all--being as well as not-being.Collection: Consciousness
You take yourself to be limited, but you are not. Discover this. Stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it. Just be aware of your being here and now. Reality will find you.Collection: Reality
You are already perfect, only you don't know it. Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders.Collection: Perfect
You merely dream that you roam about. In a few years your stay in India will appear as a dream to you. You will dream some other dream at that time. Do realize that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being-that is the absolute truth.Collection: Dream
In reality there are no others, and -helping yourself you help everybody else.Collection: Reality
All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for your self, all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect. Deny yourself nothing -- glue your self infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them; you are beyond.Collection: Pain
The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.... We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.Collection: Discovery
Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it. By being a slave to your desires and fears, you disturb peace.Collection: Inspiration
Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be are expressions of your longing for happiness.Collection: Buddhist
Multiplicity without strife is joy.Collection: Joy
These moments of inner quiet will burn out all obstacles without fail. Don't doubt its efficacy. Try it.Collection: Doubt
The mind is what it thinks. To make it true, think true.Collection: Thinking
If you believe in God, work with Him. If you do not, become one.Collection: Believe
Unless you know yourself, what else can you know?Collection: Know Yourself
It is your restlessness that causes chaos.Collection: Causes
The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further.Collection: Inspiration
By all means attend to your duties. Action, in which you are not emotionally involved and which is beneficial and does not cause suffering will not bind you. You may be engaged in several directions and work with enormous zest, yet remain inwardly free and quiet, with a mirror like mind, which reflects all, without being affected.Collection: Freedom
The real does not die, the unreal never lived.Collection: Real
Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all.Collection: Self
To find reality you must be real in the smallest daily action; there can be no deceit in the search for truth.Collection: Real
If you want to sin, sin wholeheartedly and openly. Sins too have their lessons to teach the earnest sinner, as virtues the earnest saint. It is the mixing up of the two that is so disastrous. Nothing can block you so effectively as compromise, for it shows lack of earnestness, without which nothing can be done.Collection: Buddhist
When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, what remains is all-embracing love.Collection: Self
Past and future are in the mind only - I am now.Collection: Positive
It is just like your tape-recorder. It records, it reproduces - all by itself. You only listen. Similarly, I watch all that happens, including my talking to you. It is not me who talks, the words appear in my mind and then I hear them said.Collection: Talking
To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy. It is all very simple. Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought 'I am' is the polishing cloth. Use it.Collection: Simple
Punishment is but legalized crime. In a society built on prevention, rather than retaliation, there would be very little crime. The few exceptions will be treated medically, as of unsound mind and body.Collection: Punishment
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.Collection: Self