Mooji Quotes

Namaste. Good day to you. Today, this morning, I would like to introduce you to a very simple guided meditation which can be for everyone, or anyone. Wherever you are, it is a good time now, because many, many people around the world, most people around the world, are compelled to be at home for some time. We are calling it a ‘global quarantine’, but I would like to introduce another word, which is a ‘retreat’. A retreat, for me, means to be with yourself.

The search for Truth is not about running away from the things of this world but about understanding their ephemeral nature. And more than that, it is about discovering our true nature as an inherent stillness from where even the subtlest movements of phenomena are being perceived.

The greater Truth is that you are the awareness within which the idea of yourself living a life and having awareness is appearing. In other words, the ‘person’ we take ourselves to be is an idea emerging in consciousness as an expression of consciousness.

We are all living in time-bodies. From the birth of this body, each of us is like a candle that has been lit and is burning down throughout the course of our lives. And at some point, the flame of the body will go out. But you are not essentially the body, the senses, or the mind, because they all report to something that observes them.

After a powerful experience with a Christian mystic in 1987, my life underwent many changes, inwardly and outwardly, which culminated with my giving up teaching art at the local college. One day I was drawn to enter a spiritual bookshop in central London. I was not accustomed to reading books, but I was instantly attracted to a picture of Sri Ramana Maharshi on the cover of one book. His face radiated a warmth and light that immediately touched my heart. However, when I opened the book, my reaction was, Whoa! What is this?! His words felt very intellectual and noisy to me – so much so that I actually thought the printer must have made a mistake and put the wrong cover on the book. The picture emanated such profound serenity, silence, and peace, but the concise instructions of self-inquiry within couldn’t enter my being back then. So I closed Sri Ramana’s book and put it aside. Instead, I found another book in the same shop entitled The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, which spoke to me immediately.

I often say to my students, when they first come and they begin to feel the infiniteness, the joy and the deep peace, and they feel very happy, I say to them, Don’t just joy ride. Be quiet. Be one with this. Know that this is beyond belief. This is direct experience. But because this is taking place in you, a storm is coming. And this storm is the storm of ego! The storm of ego is going to come to crush what you have discovered, to bring fear in you, to make you feel that you are making a mistake, to bring in states of confusion. And some of you may give in to that and run away, and feel, ‘No, I must not do this anymore!’ But I want to encourage you. This exercise, this ‘meditation’, you may call it, comes from the very core of your Self. It comes from the God-place in you. And this tendency to run comes from the negativity, the toxicity that we have picked up in life. That is going to come up as though it wants to ruin your Garden of Eden inside your heart. I am telling you ahead of time that all beings who awakened to their true nature experienced these types of resistance, this type of aggression from the mind.

Truth can never be merely a holy cluster of concepts, conditioning, or beliefs. It is not an event, nor is it an object apart from you in some sacred vault. For Truth to be Truth, it must be unchanging, immutable, ever present – yet it is beyond characteristics and conditions. It cannot be anything that comes and goes, for everything changeful arises from it and comes and goes in it.

Truth is what we are. It is our essential nature and Being. It is the pure Self, the limitless one, the ultimate reality – it is awareness itself.

You don’t have to go even a fraction of an inch away from where you are right now to find the silence and stillness of your Being. And from here you can observe the energetic streams that are pulling your attention to go out into the field of noise and personhood, where beings are suffering from person-poison, from the toxicity of ego.

All we ever need is to be found in the Self. All that we seek in this world that is truly lasting – true happiness, joy, peace, light, space – are inside of us. They are ever present, but for a while we don’t see them because we search for fulfilment in the field of the ephemeral, the changeful. Only at the eleventh hour do we turn to the Self. Such procrastination is not wise, though it is common.

Although I grew up in a Christian tradition, the wisdom of the Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna was so universal that it touched and conquered my heart. His every word resonated deeply inside my being and was perfectly timed, as I had been waiting to find a voice that would confirm the profound experiences I had been having at the time. What I learned later was that Sri Ramakrishna was not only a great devotee – a bhakti saint – but also a completely liberated sage from the perspective and experience of the non-dual jnana path – the path of pure self-knowledge.

The world encourages us to look from the limited sense of personhood – a very unstable standpoint from which we are always trying to find balance on very shaky ground. But you must learn to look from your source Being. Your Being is vaster than sky, greater than space – and it is already here. Look from your stillness, not from your agitation.

Satsang comes in innumerable forms – sitting in the physical presence of a master, following the guidance offered in a book such as this, working in the garden, playing with your children. Once you have the eyes to see it, every movement of life itself is satsang, calling you home to your limitless Being.Welcome to satsang.

Regardless of whether the object of perception is physical and can thus be measured for colour, shape, and size, or whether what is being perceived is something more subtle like thought, feeling, and sensation, all are phenomena.

We have become unaware of the magnificence of our true nature on account of our upbringing, conditioning, and education, all of which paint a very different picture of who we are – and all of which we believe.