Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Quotes

Contemplate life as infinite, undivided, ever present, ever active, until you realize yourself as one with it. It is not even very difficult, for you will be returning only to your own natural condition.

All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one.

Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image.

How can an unsteady mind make itself steady? Of course it cannot. It is the nature of the mind to roam about. All you can do is to shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind.

Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.

The personal needs a base, a body to identify oneself with, just as a colour needs a surface to appear on.

Pure knowledge is not imparted by another; it comes unmasked. It is the one that is listening: it is your own true nature.

To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature; to know that you need nothing to be happy, except Self-knowledge, is wisdom.

It is the mind that tells you that the mind is there. Don't be deceived. All the endless arguments about the mind are produced by the mind itself, for its own protection, continuation and expansion. It is the blank refusal to consider the convolutions and convulsions of the mind that can take you beyond it.

You take yourself to be limited, but you are not. Discover this. Stay silent and attentive. Be earnest about it. Just be aware of your being here and now. Reality will find you.

Believe me, there is no goal, nor a way to reach it. You are the way and the goal, there is nothing else to reach except yourself.

When I look inside and see that I'm nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I'm everything, that's love. And between these two, my life turns.

Forget the known, don't be all the time immersed in your experiences.

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part

You want to know yourself. For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.

The only thing required of you is to allow all your raging desires to relax into preferences. Then everything will be done through you and for you, not by you.

You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream.

Who are you?”, my answer would be: “Nothing in particular. Yet, I am.

In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any. The sight of a flower is as marvelous as the vision of God. Let them be. Why remember them and then make memory into a problem? Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient. Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens.

You need not know what you are. Enough to know what you are not. What you are you will never know, for every discovery reveals new dimensions to conquer. The unknown has no limits.

Do what you believe in and believe in what you do. The rest is a waste of time and energy.

I ask you only to stop imagining that you were born, have parents, are a body, will die and so on. Just try, make a beginning-it is not as hard as you think.

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become.

Don't rely on your mind for liberation. It is the mind that brought you into bondage. Go beyond it altogether.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is, and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously.

Meet you own self. Be with your own self, listen to it, obey it, cherish it, keep it in mind ceaselessly. You need no other guide.

To go beyond the mind, you must be silent and quiet. Peace and silence, silence and peace - this is the way beyond. Stop asking questions.

The world does not yield to changing. By its very nature it is painful and transient. See it as it is and divest yourself of all desire and fear. When the world does not hold and bind you, it becomes an abode of joy and beauty. You can be happy in the world only when you are free of it.

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

Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation.

When all names and forms have been given up, the real is with you. You need not seek it.

Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. That is enough.

The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.

You are not the body. You are the immensity and infinity of consciousness.

Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought 'I am'. The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally, without any interference on your part.

The mind is what it thinks. To make it true, think true.

To know that you are neither the body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.

Whatever can be understood or perceived can never be the eternal Truth. The Unknown is the Truth.

Everybody does the same mistake: refusing the means, but wanting the ends. You want peace and harmony in the world, but refuse to have them in yourself.

One who is afraid of time becomes a prey of time. But time itself becomes a prey of that one who is not afraid of it.

If you are angry or in pain, separate yourself from anger and pain and watch them. Externalization is the first step to liberation.

To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something [the Reality] beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of Pure Awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time.

We miss the real by lack of attention, and create the unreal by excess of imagination.

Laugh with people laughing, cry with people crying, but don't fall into the river of world illusion. Stay on the banks.

Imagine a dense forest full of tigers and you in a strong steel cage. Knowing that you are well protected by the cage, you watch the tigers fearlessly. Next, you find the tigers in the cage and yourself roaming about in the jungle. Last, the cage disappears and you ride the tigers!

We are slaves of what we don't know;of what we know we are masters.Whatever vice or weakness in ourselves we discoverand understand its cause and workings,we overcome it by the very knowing.The primary purpose of meditation is to become more consciousand familiar with our inner life.The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.