Mooji Quotes

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.

Spirituality is the search for perfect understanding, for Self-discovery, for Truth, and it must take place right where you are. The Truth that you are searching for must already be right here, for it is timelessly present.

Amongst all the activities that we do, we rarely give enough time to sit quietly by ourselves. I would like to introduce to you not just to sit alone, but to guide you into your inner Being. What you truly are is not merely what we think we are, not merely what we have been brought up to believe we are. Actually, surprisingly, beautifully, we discover a level of peace and natural well-being-ness, joy, and silence. And right here, in the depth of our Self, you will discover a great calmness. And I want you to know that, this, that we are going to find today, you will see that it is always here. And the most wonderful thing about this is that you are about to discover that which has always been here. It has never left you!

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.

The Absolute is not revealed through human effort. At the appointed time, presence simply begins merging in it. If you try to force this, you will bring the mind and person in again. It will seem as though the mind has accomplished something tremendous, but it will be a fake realisation, a mere mental state.

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.

All that we refer to as being ours – our body, our mind, our emotions – is not what we are, essentially.

Apply yourself fully to the introspection offered here. It is good for all seekers... This self-inquiry is your internal work. Internal work – eternal satisfaction. Internal work revealing timeless Self.

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.

Destiny’s path brought me to meet my master, Sri H. W. L. Poonja, lovingly known as Papaji. And only through the grace and presence of Papaji, who is a direct disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi, was I somehow able to read and to understand Sri Ramana’s teachings inside my heart. What I came quickly to see and understand was that self-inquiry is the most direct approach to Truth. And it had to be direct, because I have a very short attention span and am only attracted to what is straightforward, immediate, and simple.

Identification with the body is a state that consciousness needs to experience for a while. But eventually, grace will compel consciousness to transcend this severe limitation and guide it home to its original nature.

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.

Remember, the presence ‘I am’ is the Godly principle. ‘I am’ is the Christ light, the Shiva being, the Krishna consciousness. It cannot be dispelled as mere illusion. It is the active God-Self, the dynamic expression of absolute awareness. Without it, there can be no experiencing, nor can there be the realisation of the Self.

Here you are invited into the direct experience of that timeless reality through the method of self-inquiry, which forms the essence of this book.