Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

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

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.

(…) everything is inter-linked. And therefore everything has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is because the world is as it is. (…)

The talk is in your world. In mine – there is eternal silence. My silence sings, my emptiness is full. I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there.

That which sees all this, and the nothing too, is the inner teacher. He alone is, all else appears to be. He is your own self (swarupa), your hope and assurance of freedom, find him and cling to him and you will be saved and safe.

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.

Since time immemorial the dust of events has been covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that you could see only memories. Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers, until the true nature of your mind is discovered… Dispassion, detachment, freedom from desire and fear, from all self-concern, mere awareness - free from memory and expectation - this is the state of mind in which discovery can happen. After all, liberation is but the freedom to discover.

(…) Devotion to your goal makes you live a clean and orderly life, given to search for truth and 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.

There is a vastness beyond the farthest reaches of the mind. That vastness is my home; that vastness is myself. And that vastness is also love.

Whatever you forget, is not the truth, always remember that.

Humanity's problem lies in the misuse of the mind only.
All the treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly.

(…) Desire what is worth desiring and desire it well. Just like you pick your way in a crowd, passing between people, so you find your way between events, without missing your general direction. It is easy, if you are earnest.

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.

All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated. How can the sense of unity be frustrated? (…) Love is a state of being. Sex is energy. Love is wise, sex is blind. Once the true nature of love and sex is understood there will be no conflict or confusion.

"(…) There is something exceptional, unique, about the present event, which the previous, or the coming do not have. (…) What makes the present so different? Obviously, my presence. I am real for I am always now, in the present, and what is with me now shares in my reality.