Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

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.

Meet your own self. Be with your own self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly. You need no other guide. As long as your urge for truth affects your daily life, all is well with you. Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and will take you speedily to your goal. This is what I call nisarga yoga, the Natural Yoga. It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless.

You must know your own true being as indomitable, fearless, ever victorious. Once you know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble you but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone.

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it.

The world is full of contradictions; hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within.

Don’t try to reform yourself; just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting.

(…) To the Self the world is but a colourful 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 have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it. In fact, demolition is easy, for the false dissolves when it is discovered.

Exactly as the shadow appears when light is intercepted by the body, so does the person arise when pure self-awareness is obstructed by the “I am the body” idea. And as the shadow changes shape and position according to the lay of the land, so does the person appear to rejoice and suffer, rest and toil, find and lose, according to the pattern of destiny.

You are confused, because you believe that you are in the world, not the world in you. Who came first – you or your parents? You imagine that you were born at a certain time and place, that you have a father and a mother, a body and a name. This is your sin and your calamity! (...)

(...) All you can do is to grasp the central point, that reality is not an event and does not happen and whatever happens, whatever comes and goes, is not reality. (…).

Whatever happens, happens to you by you, through you; you are the creator, enjoyer and destroyer of all you perceive.

Study the prison you have inadvertently built around yourself.

(…) Spiritual practice is will asserted and re-asserted. Who has not daring will not accept the real even when offered. Unwillingness born out of fear is the only obstacle.

Consciousness is spotless, formless and prior to intellect.