Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

In marriage you are neither the husband nor the wife; you are the love between two.

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.

Past and future are in the mind only - I am now.

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.

When all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you. You need not seek it.

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.

The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.

Whatever you come across- go beyond

We grow through investigation, and to investigate we need experience. We tend to repeat what we have not understood. If we are sensitive and intelligent, we need not suffer. Pain is a call for attention and the penalty of carelessness. Intelligent and compassionate action is the only remedy.

It does not matter much what happens.

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.

Knowing that you are nothing is Wisdom,
Knowing that you are everything is Love.

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 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 inquiry, all pain needs investigation. Don't be lazy to think.

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.

All you need is to stop searching outside for what can be found only within. Set your vision right before you operate. You are suffering from acute misapprehension . Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life - this is the quickest way to a change in your world.

Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn on you.

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become.

The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a colour needs a surface to appear on.

Once you say 'I want to find Truth', all your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits, feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a most radical transformation.

The world has only as much power over you as you give it. Rebel. Go beyond duality.

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.

It is not what you do, but what you stop doing that matters.

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'.

There is no question of going anywhere, arriving anywhere, or doing anything; you are there already.

The problem is not yours - it is your mind's only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours.

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.

Your burden is of false self-identifications - abandon them all.

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.

Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret it.

Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind, and it will be flooded with light.

In the mirror of your mind all kinds of pictures appear and disappear. Knowing that they are entirely your own creations, watch them silently come and go. Be alert, but not perturbed. This attitude of silent observation is the very foundation of yoga. You see the picture, but you are not the picture.

For me the moment of death will be a moment of jubilation, not of fear. I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.

With self-awareness you grow more intelligent. In awareness you learn, in self-awareness you learn about yourself. Of course, you can only learn what you are not. To know what you are, you must go beyond the mind. Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality. In awareness you seek not what pleases, but what is true.

To know that you are a prisoner of your mind is the dawn of wisdom.

Leave greatness to others. Become so small that no one can see you. This conviction results from growing devotion to the supreme reality.

To see Reality is as simple as to see one's face in a mirror. Only, the mirror must be clear and true. A quiet mind, undistorted by desires and fears, free from ideas and opinions, clear on all the levels, is needed to reflect the Reality. Be clear and quiet; alert and detached, all else will happen by itself.

Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

You are not in the world ... the world is in you," what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world," that is, there is no "you" that is real or in any world. "The world is in you" means that the world is in your "mind" and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]

Come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn

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.

You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is because the universe is as it is.

When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining itself to be something: 'I am this, I am that', continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps.

By all means be selfish; the right way. Wish yourself well, labour at what is good for you. Destroy all that stands between you and happiness. Be all; love all; be happy; make happy. No happiness is greater.

Truth gives no advantage. It gives no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and freedom from the false.

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.

Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind.

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases.

The world is an illusion. Why is it unreal? Because none of the knowledge is going to remain permanent, as real knowledge. I had a number of identities; I was a child, I was a boy, I was a teenager, I was a middle-aged man, I was an old man. Like other identities I thought would remain constant, they never remained so. Finally, I became very old ... So which identity remained honest with me?

All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one ...

Who was born first, you or the world? As long as you give first place to the world, you are bound by it; once you realize, beyond all trace of doubt, that the world is in you and not you in the world, you are out of it. Of course your body remains in the world and of the world, but you are not deluded by it.

The mind is what it thinks. To make it true, think true.

All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss.

Nobody ever fails in Yoga ... It is slow in the beginning and rapid in the end.
When one is fully matured, realization is explosive.

When you desire the common good, the whole world desires with you. Make humanity's desire your own and work for it. There you cannot fail.

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.

The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment,
harmony with things as they happen.

Stay open and quiet, that is all. What you seek is so near you that there is no place for a way.

What kind of Yoga do you want to practice, the Yoga of getting or the Yoga of giving? ... One enslaves, the other liberates.

How do you go about finding anything?
By keeping your mind and heart on it.
Interest there must be and steady remembrance.
To remember what needs to be remembered
is the secret of success.
You come to it through earnestness

Words can bring you only up to their own limit; to go beyond, you must abandon them. Remain as the silent witness only.

All that a guru can tell you is:
'My dear Sir, you are quite mistaken about yourself.
You are not the person you take yourself to be.'

Surely the memory of an event cannot pass for the event itself. Nor can the anticipation. There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. There is livingness about it, an actuality; it stands out as if illumined. There is the "stamp of reality" on the actual, which the past and future do not have.

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?'

Why do you enjoy finding fault with others? Is there not a better way to feel good? Such

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.

Concentration, Full Confidence, Pure Will. With these 3, what cannot be accomplished?

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.

Forget the known, don't be all the time immersed in your experiences.

You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it quiet. Don't get bored with peace, be in it, go deeper into it.

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.

All that happens is the cause of all that happens. Causes are numberless; the idea of a sole cause is an illusion.

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.

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.

Your first task is to see the sorrow in you and around you; your next, to long intensely for liberation. The very intensity of longing will guide you; you need no other guide.

Leave your mind alone, that is all. Do not go along with it. After all, there is no such thing as mind apart from thoughts which come and go obeying their own laws, not yours. They dominate you only because you are interested in them.

Devotion to your goal makes you live a clean and orderly life , given to search for truthand to helping people, and realization makes noble virtue easy and spontaneous, by removing for good the obstacles in the shape of desires and fears and wrong ideas .

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.

The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.

When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, what remains is all-embracing love.

All will happen as you want it, provided you really want it.

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.

What is beautiful? Whatever is perceived joyfully is beautiful. Bliss is the essence of beauty.

Love.. is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity.

Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.

Until we can look at fear and accept it as the shadow of personal existence, as persons we are bound to be afraid.

Unless you know yourself, what else can you know?

You are not the mind. If you know you are not the mind, then what difference does it make if it's busy or quiet? You are not the mind.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am - unbound.

I am that by which I know 'I am'

Imagine a dense forest full of tigers and you in a strong steel cage. Knowing that you are well protected by the cage, you watch the tigers fearlessly. Next, you find the tigers in the cage and yourself roaming about in the jungle. Last, the cage disappears and you ride the tigers!

Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation.

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.

The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself.

There is no need of a way out! Don't you see that a way out is also part of the dream All you have to do is see the dream as dream ... Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.

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.

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.

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.

The sum and substance of my teaching is this: Don't be dishonest to your vital breath; worship that only, abide in that only, accept it as yourself. And when you worship in this manner, it can lead you anywhere, to any heights- this is the quintessence of my talks.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

Nothing perceivable is real.Your attachment is your bondage. You cannot control the future.There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage.You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.