Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity and that is love.

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.

The interval between the beginning of 'I am' (birth or waking) and when you lose it again (death or deep sleep) is called 'time.

Cooperate with your destiny, don't go against it, don't thwart it. Allow it to fulfill itself.

Nisargadatta: You can have for the asking all the peace you want.

Questioner: I am asking.

Nisargadatta: You must ask with an undivided heart and live an integrated life.

Questioner: How?

Nisargadatta: Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it.

Questioner: Surely everybody deserves peace

Nisargadatta: Those only deserve it, who don't disturb it.

Questioner: In what way do I disturb peace?

Nisargadatta: By being a slave to your desires and fears.

Questioner: Even when they are justified?

Nisargadatta: Emotional reactions, born of ignorance or inadvertence, are never justified.

Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace.

There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. You think you know yourself when you know what you are. But you never know who you are. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot. See that you are not what you believe yourself to be. Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that. There is no other way out of misery, which you have created for yourself through blind acceptance without investigation. Suffering is a call for enquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don't be too lazy to think.

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all.

What is religion? A cloud in the sky. I live in the sky, not in the clouds, which are so many words held together. Remove the verbiage and what remains? Truth remains.

I cannot but see you as myself.
It is in the very nature of love to see no difference.

As you watch your mind, you discover your self as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is dark, unknown is the source of knowledge. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there.
"I Am That" - pg 188

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet it is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self, the world is but a colorful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear, he enjoys it, as it happens.

You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.

Have your being outside this body of birth and death and all your problems will be solved. They exist because you believe yourself born to die. Undeceive yourself and be free. You are not a person.

Q: Yet, I cannot see how can anything come to be without a cause.

M: When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it can be with-out a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; But you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form. The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or con-ceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind's ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.

Q: What do you mean by holes? And how to find them?

M: Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them -- *your very seeing them will make them go*

Truth is not a reward for good behaviour, nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about. It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your own ... Stand still, be quiet.

Love says 'I am everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life flows.

Question: You seem to advise me to be self-centered to the point of
egoism. Must I not yield even to my interest in other people?

Maharaj: Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self-
oriented. You are not interested in others as persons, but only
as far as they enrich, or enoble your own image of yourself.
And the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection,
preservation and multiplication of one's own body. By body I
mean all that is related to your name and shape--- your family,
tribe, country, race, etc. To be attached to one's name and
shape is selfishness. A man who knows that he is neither body
nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for.
Or, you may say, he is equally 'selfish' on behalf of everybody
he meets; everybody's welfare is his own. The feeling 'I am the
world, the world is myself' becomes quite natural; once it is es-
tablished, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfish
means to covet, to acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part
against the whole.

I Am That

Nisargadatta Maharaj

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.

The man who carries a parcel is anxious not to lose it -- he is parcel-conscious. The man who cherishes the feeling 'I am' is self-conscious. The jnani holds on to nothing and cannot be said to be conscious. And yet he is not unconscious. He is the very heart of awareness. We call him digambara clothed in space, the Naked One, beyond all appearance. There is no name and shape under which he may be said to exist, yet he is the only one that truly is.

Your High opinion of me is your opinion only. Any moment you may change it. Why attach importance to opinions, even your own ?

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

Absolute perfection is here and now, not in some future, near or far.
The secret is in action - here and now.
It is your behavior that blinds you to yourself.
Disregard whatever you think yourself to be and act as if you were absolutely perfect
- whatever your idea of perfection may be.
All you need is courage.

Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.

When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute.

Happiness is never your own; it is where the 'I' is not. It is beyond your reach; you have only to reach out beyond yourself and you will find it.

Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind has built around you.

It has nothing to do with effort. Just turn away, look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts. When you happen to walk in a crowd, you do not fight every man you meet, you just find your way between. When you fight, you invite a fight. But when you do not resist, you meet no resistance. When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

As long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, you seem short-lived and vulnerable, and of course you will feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond space and time you will be afraid no longer.

All I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect

The way back to yourself is through refusal and rejection.

Consciousness is power. Be aware of what needs be done and it will be done. Only keep alert – and quiet. Once you reach your destination and know your real nature, your existence becomes a blessing to all. You may not know, nor will the world know; yet the help radiates.

Don't try to understand! It's enough if you do not misunderstand.

All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well ... desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing-food, sex, power, fame-will make you happy is to decieve oneself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.

Love tells me, i am everything.
Wisdom tells me, i am nothing.
And in between flows my life.

Q: No purposeful action is then possible?

M: All I say is that consciousness contains all. In consciousness all is possible. You can have causes if you want them, in your world. Another may be content with a single cause - God's will. The root cause is one: the sense 'I am'.