Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

When the shadow is seen to be only a shadow, you stop following it. You turn around and discover the sun which was there all the time - behind your back!

The innermost light, shining peacefully and timelessly in the heart, is the real guru. All others merely show the way.

It does not matter much what happens, for ultimately the return to balance and harmony is inevitable. The heart of things is at peace.

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.

Know yourself as beyond space and time - in contact with them only at the point of here and now, otherwise all-pervading and all-containing, unapproachable, unassailable, invulnerable - you will be afraid no longer. Know yourself as you are - against fear there is no other remedy.

Matter is the shape, mind is the name. Together they make the world. Pervading and transcending is Reality, pure being/awareness/bliss, your very essence.

Leave alone your desires and fears and give your entire attention to the subject, to he who is behind the experience of desire and fear. Ask: who desires? Let each desire bring you back to yourself.

You love yourself and you want yourself to be secure and happy. Don’t be ashamed of it; don’t deny it. It is natural and good to love oneself. Only, you should know exactly what it is that you love. It is not the body that you love, it is Life: perceiving, feeling, thinking, doing, loving, striving, creating. It is that Life you love, which is you, which is all. Realize it in its totality, beyond all divisions and limitations, and all your desires will merge in it, for the greater contains the smaller. Therefore find yourself, for in finding that you find all. Everybody is glad to be. But few know the fullness of it. You come to know by dwelling in your mind on “I am,” “I know,” “I love” - with the will of reaching the deepest meaning of these words.

See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being. You will find that in that light there is love and infinite energy.

The light which you see outside arises from your own light. The light of the sun and the moon cannot be compared to the light of your Self.

It may seem arduous, but it is easy if you are earnest, and quite impossible if you are not. Everything yields to earnestness.

Without my sense of being, what is the value of the world?

I cried when I was born and I shall die laughing.

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.

Sri Maharaj Nisargadatta. (1994). The Ultimate Medicine. Canada: Blue Dove Printing. .