Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

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.

Q: Yet, I cannot see how can anything come to be without a cause.

M: When I say a thing is without a cause, I mean it can be with-out a particular cause. Your own mother was needed to give you birth; But you could not have been born without the sun and the earth. Even these could not have caused your birth without your own desire to be born. It is desire that gives birth, that gives name and form. The desirable is imagined and wanted and manifests itself as something tangible or con-ceivable. Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind's ken; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes.

Q: What do you mean by holes? And how to find them?

M: Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them — *your very seeing them will make them go*

The way back to yourself is through refusal and rejection.

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

An infant knows its body, but not the body-based distinctions. It is just conscious and happy. After
all, that was the purpose for which it was born. The pleasure to be is the simplest form of self-love, which later grows into love of the self. Be like an infant with nothing standing between the body and the self. The constant noise of the psychic life is absent. In deep silence the self contemplates the body. It is like the white paper on which nothing is written yet. Be like that infant, instead of trying to be this or that, be happy to be.

And spirituality or what you call “religion” is mainly to understand this: that you don’t require anything, you are a part of the totality, or reality.

Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance — letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.

If you have contact with pure consciousness even for a moment, you are liberated.

When you go deep inside nothing is all there is. There is no 'I am'. The 'I am' merges in the Absolute.

Each pleasure is wrapped in pain. You soon discover that you cannot have one without the other … Real happiness is not vulnerable, because it does not depend on circumstances … Real happiness flows from within.

To work in the world is hard, to refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder.

The unexpected and unpredictable is real.

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.

We shall suffer as long as our thoughts and actions are prompted by desires and fears.

The very desire to live is the messenger of death, as the longing to be happy is the outline of sorrow. The world is an ocean of pain and fear, anxiety and despair. Pleasures are like the fishes, few and swift, coming rarely, quickly gone.