Nisargadatta Maharaj
What is the root of pain? Ignorance of yourself. What is the root of desire? The urge to find yourself. All creation toils for its self and will not rest until it returns to it.
Call it silence, or void, or abeyance, the fact is that the three
— experiencer, experiencing, experience — are not. In witnes-
sing, in awareness, self-consciousness, the sense of being this
or that, is not. Unidentified being remains.
Look to yourself for the permanent. Dive deep within and find what is real in you.
Death is considered to be a traumatic experience, but understand what happens. That which has been born, the knowledge ‘I am’, will end. That knowledge, which was limited by this body, will then become unlimited, so what is to be feared?
The sun is always there, there is no night to it; the mind blinded by the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea spins out endlessly its thread of illusion.
Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world. It never happened otherwise. The few whose impact was long lasting were all knowers of reality. Reach their level and then only talk of helping the world.
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy — truth liberates.
There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivabes, nor the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind — just be.
It is only your self-identification with your mind that makes you happy or unhappy. Rebel against your slavery to your mind, see your bonds as self-created and break the chains of attachment and revulsion. Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one’s own, to be used!
Ignorance causes sorrow. Happiness follows understanding.
You must watch yourself continuously particularly your mind, moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self.
You must come to know yourself — both what you appear to be and what you are. Clarity and charity go together.
Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have you succeeded?
What you must witness is not your thoughts but the consciousness ‘I am’.
We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated.
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.
If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. The real is inconceivable.
Merely giving up a thing to secure a better one is not true relinquishment. Give it up because you see its valuelessness. As you keep on giving up, you will find that you grow spontaneously in intelligence and power and inexhaustible love and joy.
It is by The Guru’s grace that your mind is engaged in search for truth and it is by his grace that you will find it. It works unwaringly towards your ultimate good. And it is for all.
Desire is, of course, a state of mind. But the realization of unity is beyond mind.
Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace.
While looking with the mind, you cannot go beyond it. To go beyond, you must look away from the mind and its contents.
Establish yourself firmly in the awareness of ‘I am’. This is the beginning and also the end of all endeavour.
Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change. Pleasure and pain are mere disturbances of the senses; treat them equally and there will be only bliss. And the world is, what you make it; by all means make it happy. Only contentment can make you happy — desires fulfilled breed more desires. Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state a precondition to the state of fulness.
There can be progress only in the preparation (sadhana). Realization is sudden. The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return.
As water remains water regardless of the vessels, as light remains itself regardless of the colours it brings out, so does the real remain real, regardless of conditions in which it is reflected.
Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality. In awareness you seek not what pleases, but what is true.
Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The Absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don’t be half-hearted.
Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss consciously.
If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.
To realize the Eternal is to become the Eternal.
To find a living Guru is a rare opportunity and a great responsibility. One should not treat these matters lightly. You people are out to buy yourself the heaven and you imagine that the Guru will supply it for a price. You seek to strike a bargain by offering little but asking much. You cheat nobody except yourselves.
The mind is changing anyhow all the time. Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it and just be. If you give it rest, it will settle down and recover its purity and strength. Constant thinking makes it decay.
You suffer because you have alienated yourself from reality and now you seek an escape from this alienation. You cannot escape from your own obsessions. You can only cease nursing them.
To know that consciousness and its content are but reflections, changeful and transient, is the focussing of the real. The refusal to see the snake in the rope is the necessary condition for seeing the rope.
Humility and silence are essential for a sadhaka (Spiritual Seeker), however advanced.
To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.
You are really in search of yourself, without knowing it. You are love-longing for the love-worthy, the perfectly lovable. Due to ignorance you are looking for it in the world of opposites and contradictions. When you find it within, your search will be over.
As you are now, the personality is only an obstacle. Self-identification with the body may be good for an infant, but true growing up depends on getting the body out of the way. Normally, one should outgrow body-based desires early in life.
Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
Changes are inevitable in the changeful, but you are not subject to them. You are the changeless background, against which changes are perceived.
If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illumines consciousness and its infinite content. Realize this and live accordingly. If you do not believe me, then go within, enquiring ‘What am I’? or, focus your mind on ‘I am’, which is pure and simple being.
All these sufferings are man-made and it is within man’s power to put an end to them. God helps by facing man with the results of his actions and demanding that the balance should be restored. Karma is the law that works for righteousness; it is the healing hand of God.
All these questions arise from your believing yourself to be a person. Go beyond the personal and see.
You know you are sitting here. Be attentive to that knowledge only. Just be in your Beingness. That knowingness ‘I am’ has created the entire universe. Hold on to that; nothing has to be done. Once you recognize that principle it becomes tranquil. Become one with that and all your needs will be satisfied.
Discrimination and dispassion practised now will yield their fruits at the proper time. If the roots are healthy and well-watered, the fruits are sure to be sweet. Be pure, be alert, keep ready.
A life of constraint and suppression is not Yoga. Mind must be free of desires and relaxed. It comes with understanding, not with determination, which is but another form of memory. An understanding mind is free of desires and fears.
Most of the bhaktas (devotees) trust their Guru only as long as all is well with them. When troubles come, they feel let down and go out in search of another Guru.
Go within and discover what you are not. Nothing else matters.
When you desire the common good, the whole world desires with you. Make humanity’s desire your own and work for it.
Be what you are: conscious being and don’t stray away from yourself.
Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought ‘I am’ is the polishing cloth. Use it.
The sense of ‘I am’ is always there; only when it identifies with the body it is called the ego.
Moods are in the mind and do not matter. Go within, go beyond. Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind’s surface-play affects you very little.
Desirelessness and fearlessness will take you there.
Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it.
Whether you plan or don’t, life goes on. But in life itself a little
whorl arises in the mind, which indulges in fantasies and imagines itself dominating and controlling life. Life itself is desireless. But the false self wants to continue pleasantly. Therefore it is always engaged in ensuring one’s continuity. Life is unafraid and free. As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.
Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting, that, truly, by losing all you gain all.
The Guru is basically without desire. He sees what happens, but feels no urge to interfere. He makes no choices, takes no decisions. As pure witness, he watches what is going on and remains unaffected.
It is enough to know that there is suffering, that the world suffers. By themselves neither pleasure nor pain enlighten: Only understanding does. Once you have grasped the truth that the world is full of suffering, that to be born is a calamity, you will find the urge and the energy to go beyond it. Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you do not want to suffer, don’t go to sleep. You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature.
You are a man because you identify with the body. If you do not identify with the body, what sex are you? After leaving the body, the vital breath and the ‘I am’ merge into the substratum. Then where is man or woman?
To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility.
When you know that you are neither body nor mind, you will not be swayed by them. You will follow truth, wherever it takes you, and do what needs be done, whatever the price to pay.
What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless. Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I’.
When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness.
It is enough if you do not imagine yourself to be the body. It is the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.
Beyond pain and pleasure there is bliss.
After deep sleep, as soon as consciousness dawns on you of ‘I am’ – that is the witness. Before that moment you did not know that you are, there was no witness, no knowledge of ‘I am’.
Absolute should be experienced, not discussed.
Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. ‘I am’ you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.
Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, don’t go against it, don’t thwart it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give atention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind.
Realize yourself as the ocean of consciousness in which all happens. This is not difficult. A little of attentiveness, of close observation of oneself, and you will see that no event is outside your consciousness.
You are the Self, here and now. Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature.
Generally speaking, there are two ways: external and internal. Either
you live with somebody who knows the Truth and submit yourself entirely to his guiding and moulding influence, or you seek the inner guide and follow the inner light wherever it takes you. In both cases your personal desires and fears must be disregarded. You learn either by proximity or by investigation, the passive or the active way. You either let yourself be carried by the river of life and love represented by your Guru, or you make your own efforts, guided by your inner star. In both cases you must move on, you must be earnest.
Seek within. Your own self is your best friend.
The realized man is egoless; he has lost the capacity of identifying himself with anything. He is without location, place-less, beyond space and time, beyond the world. Beyond words and thoughts is he.
It is the mind that creates illusion and it is the mind that gets free of it.
Once you realize that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realization you identify yourself with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.
However long a life may be, it is but a moment and a dream.
The sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it — body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take
yourself to be what you are not.
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible.
Learning words is not enough. You may know the theory, but without the actual experience of yourself as the impersonal and unqualified centre of being, love and bliss, mere verbal knowledge is sterile.
Do realize that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being — this is the absolute truth.
Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I’? After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ‘I am’ is certain. The ‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
The unreal may look real, but it is transient. The real is not afraid of time.
We shall suffer as long as our thoughts and actions are prompted by desires and fears. See their futility and the danger and chaos they create will subside. Don’t try to reform yourself, just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting. Do not expect the changeful, to take you to the changeless — it can never happen. Only when the very idea of changing is seen as false and abandoned, the changeless can come into its own.
Meditation is a sattvic (harmonious) activity and aims at complete elimination of tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony) is perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.
Everybody is aware of himself. The deepening and broadening of self-awareness is the royal way. Call it mindfulness, or witnessing, or just attention — it is for all. None is unripe for it and none can fail.
The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.
You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success.
Purify yourself by a well-ordered and useful life. Watch over your thoughts, feelings, words and actions. This will clear your vision.
Desires are just waves in the mind. You know a wave when you see one. A desire is just a thing among many. I feel no urge to satisfy it, no action needs be taken on it. Freedom from desire means this: the compulsion to satisfy is absent.
Stupidity and selfishness are the only evil.
To receive communication, you must be receptive.
No ambition is spiritual. All ambitions are for the sake of the ‘I am’. If you want to make real progress you must give up all idea of personal attainment. The ambitions of the so-called Yogis are preposterous. A man’s desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal.
The false self must be abandoned before the real self can be found.
To find the Guru and also the trust in him is rare luck. It does not happen often.
You are what you are, timelessly, but of what use is it to you unless you know it and act on it? Your begging bowl may be of pure gold, but as long as you do not know it, you are a pauper. You must know your inner worth
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.
As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water, you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings.
It is your self-identification with the body, which, of course, is limited in space and time, that gives you the feeling of finiteness. In reality you are infinite and eternal.
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.
Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.
Turn within and you will come to trust yourself. In everything else confidence comes with experience.
Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.
Find out. Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being.
Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable,
unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual.
Transiency is the best proof of unreality. What is limited in time, and space and applicable to one person only, is not real. The real is for all and forever.
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.
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.
Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.
All desires must be given up, because by desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state.
Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined.
The Gnani (Self-Realized Soul) is not afraid because his mind is dead already. He does not think: ‘I live’. He knows: ‘There is life’. There is no change in it and no death. Death appears to be a change in time and space. Where there is neither time nor space, how can there be death? The gnani is already dead to name and shape. How can their loss affect him? The man in the train travels from place to place, but the man off the train goes nowhere, for he is not bound for a destination. He has nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to become. Those who make plans will be born to carry them out. Those who make no plans need not be born.
I am neither the body, nor the mind, nor the mental faculties. I am beyond all these.
You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.
Silence knows itself. It is the silence of the silent mind, when passions and desires are silenced.
The main point is to be fully aware that neither you nor the man in front of you are mere bodies; if your awareness is clear and full, a mistake is less probable.
Relinquish your habits and addictions, live a simple and sober life, don’t hurt a living being; this is the foundation of Yoga. To find reality you must be real in the smallest daily action; there can be no deceit in the search for truth.
The entire universe strives to fulfil a desire born of compassion.
The undisturbed state of being is bliss; the disturbed state is what appears as the world. In non-duality there is bliss; in duality experience. What comes and goes is experience with its duality of pain and pleasure. Bliss is not to be known. One is always bliss, but never blissful. Bliss is not an attribute.
If you do not have the wisdom and the strength to give up, just look at your possessions. Your mere looking will burn them up. If you can stand outside your mind, you will soon find that total renunciation of possessions and desires is the most obviously reasonable thing to do.
The Gnani (Self-Realized Soul) belongs to all. He gives himself tirelessly and completely to whoever comes to him. If he is not a giver, he is not a gnani. Whatever he has, he shares.
The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. And the body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long. A full life is better than a long life.
You see people suffer and you seek the best way of helping them. The answer is obvious — first put yourself beyond the need of help. Be sure your attitude is of pure goodwill, free of expectation of any kind.
Evil is the shadow of inattention. In the light of self-awareness it will wither and fall off.
Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. The Pandits and the Yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere knowledge when the self is not known? It will be certainly misused. Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no peace.
His (Self-Realized Soul) state is not so desolate. It tastes of the pure, uncaused, undiluted bliss. He is happy and fully aware that happiness is his very nature and that he need not do anything, nor strive for anything to secure it. It follows him, more real than the body, nearer than the mind itself. You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me dependence on anything for happiness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused, independent, unassailable.
Find him who was present at your birth and will witness your death.
Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing.
Sensations as such, however strong, do not cause suffering. It is the mind, bewildered by wrong ideas, addicted to thinking: ‘I am this’. ‘I am that’, that fears loss and craves gain and suffers when frustrated.
No need of any acts of renunciation. Just turn your mind away, that is all. Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out of its groove by denying it attention.
All division is in the mind (chitta); there is none in reality (chit). Movement and rest are states of mind and cannot be without their opposites.
Names and shapes change incessantly. Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind.
As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realize fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found.
To take appearance for reality is a grievous sin and the cause of all calamities. You are the all-pervading, eternal and infinitely creative awareness — consciousness. All else is local and temporary. Don’t forget what you are.
You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember, you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.
Realization is but the opposite of ignorance. To take the world as real and one’s self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy.
What is perceived in pure awareness, unaffected by desire and fear is fact.
All change affects the mind only. To be what you are, you must go beyond the mind, into your own being. It is immaterial what is the mind that you leave behind, provided you leave it behind for good. This again is not possible without self-realization.
Desirelessness is the highest bliss.
Awareness is not of time. Time exists in consciousness only. Beyond consciousness where are time and space?
Why desire at all? Desiring a state of freedom from desire will not set you free. Nothing can set you free, because you are free. See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all.
The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search.
Nothing stops you but preoccupation with the outer which prevents you from focussing the inner. It cannot be helped, you cannot skip your sadhana (Spiritual practice). You have to turn away from the world and go within, until the inner and the outer merge and you can go beyond the conditioned, whether inner or outer.
What is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself.
You may leave your home and give trouble to your family, but attachments are in the mind and will not leave you until you know your mind in and out. First thing first - know yourself, all else will come with it.
What you are, you already are. By knowing what you are not, you are free of it and remain in your own natural state.
By all means help the world. You will not help much, but the effort will make you grow. There is nothing wrong in trying to help the world.
God gives the body and the mind and the Guru shows the way to use them. But returning to the source is your own task.
All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.
Desire is the memory of pleasure and fear is the memory of pain. Both make the mind restless. Moments of pleasure are merely gaps in the stream of pain. How can the mind be happy?
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.
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.
Change your ways of feeling and thinking, take stock of them and examine them closely. You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates.
When the time comes for the world to be helped, some people are given the will, the wisdom and the power to cause great changes.
Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.
In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness
does not, reality does not.
The very search for pleasure is the cause of pain.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change.
It is the homing instinct, which makes the bird return to its nest and the fish to the mountain stream where it was born. The seed returns to the earth, when the fruit is ripe. Ripeness is all.
Habit and passion blind and mislead. Compassionate awareness heals and redeems.
True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away. Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably. Happiness comes from the self and can be found in the self only. Find your real self (swarupa) and all else will come with it.
To live without self-concern. For this you must know your own true being (swarupa) 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.
Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
With ignorance coming to an end all comes to an end. Things are then seen as they are and they are good.
Stay beyond all thoughts, in silent being-awareness. It is not progress, for what you come to is already there in you, waiting for you.
Understand first that you are not the person you believe yourself to be. What you think yourself to be is mere suggestion or imagination. You have no parents, you were not born; nor will you die. Either trust me when I tell you so, or arrive to it by study and investigation. The way of total faith is quick, the other is slow but steady. Both must be tested in action. Act on what you think is true — this is the way to truth.
Were you not present at your birth? Will you not be present at your death? Find him who is always present.
The mind that projects the world, colours it its own way. When you meet a man, he is a stranger. When you marry him, he becomes your own self. When you quarrel, he becomes your enemy. It is your mind’s attitude that determines what he is to you.
You must come to a firm decision. You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. Just be. When you stabilize in that beingness it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you.
As you dive deep into yourself in search of your true nature, you will discover that only your body is small and only your memory is short; while the vast ocean of life is yours.
What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and be very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time bound is momentary and has no reality.
The witness merely registers the presence or absence of experience. It is not an experience by itself, but it becomes an experience when the thought: ‘I am the witness’ arises.
In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor mind.
Freedom from desires is bliss.
These ideas of movement, of restlessness, of pleasure and pain are all in the mind. The Self stands beyond the mind, aware, but unconcerned.
Unselfish action, free from all concern with the body and its interests will carry you into the very heart of Reality.
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 it 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.
Before pain was, you were. After pain had gone, you remained. Pain is transient, you are not.
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.
It is not your real being that is restless, but its reflection in the mind appears restless because the mind is restless. It is just like the reflection of the moon in the water stirred by the wind.
Call it silence, or void, or abeyance, the fact is that the three
— experiencer, experiencing, experience — are not. In witnes-
sing, in awareness, self-consciousness, the sense of being this
or that, is not. Unidentified being remains.
Look to yourself for the permanent. Dive deep within and find what is real in you.
Death is considered to be a traumatic experience, but understand what happens. That which has been born, the knowledge ‘I am’, will end. That knowledge, which was limited by this body, will then become unlimited, so what is to be feared?
The sun is always there, there is no night to it; the mind blinded by the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea spins out endlessly its thread of illusion.
Only the people who have gone beyond the world can change the world. It never happened otherwise. The few whose impact was long lasting were all knowers of reality. Reach their level and then only talk of helping the world.
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy — truth liberates.
There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivabes, nor the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind — just be.
It is only your self-identification with your mind that makes you happy or unhappy. Rebel against your slavery to your mind, see your bonds as self-created and break the chains of attachment and revulsion. Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one’s own, to be used!
Ignorance causes sorrow. Happiness follows understanding.
You must watch yourself continuously particularly your mind, moment by moment, missing nothing. This witnessing is essential for the separation of the self from the not-self.
You must come to know yourself — both what you appear to be and what you are. Clarity and charity go together.
Guided by memory you have been pursuing the pleasant and shunning the unpleasant. Have you succeeded?
What you must witness is not your thoughts but the consciousness ‘I am’.
We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness.
All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated.
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.
If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being man or woman, or even human, should be discarded. The ocean of life contains all, not only humans. So, first of all abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual, abandon every desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.
Whatever is conceived by the mind must be false, for it is bound to be relative and limited. The real is inconceivable.
Merely giving up a thing to secure a better one is not true relinquishment. Give it up because you see its valuelessness. As you keep on giving up, you will find that you grow spontaneously in intelligence and power and inexhaustible love and joy.
It is by The Guru’s grace that your mind is engaged in search for truth and it is by his grace that you will find it. It works unwaringly towards your ultimate good. And it is for all.
Desire is, of course, a state of mind. But the realization of unity is beyond mind.
Seek a clear mind and a clean heart. All you need is to keep quietly alert, enquiring into the real nature of yourself. This is the only way to peace.
While looking with the mind, you cannot go beyond it. To go beyond, you must look away from the mind and its contents.
Establish yourself firmly in the awareness of ‘I am’. This is the beginning and also the end of all endeavour.
Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. Change your scale of values and all will change. Pleasure and pain are mere disturbances of the senses; treat them equally and there will be only bliss. And the world is, what you make it; by all means make it happy. Only contentment can make you happy — desires fulfilled breed more desires. Keeping away from all desires and contentment in what comes by itself is a very fruitful state a precondition to the state of fulness.
There can be progress only in the preparation (sadhana). Realization is sudden. The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly and without return.
As water remains water regardless of the vessels, as light remains itself regardless of the colours it brings out, so does the real remain real, regardless of conditions in which it is reflected.
Awareness is the point at which the mind reaches out beyond itself into reality. In awareness you seek not what pleases, but what is true.
Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs. Abandon all verbal structures, all relative truth, all tangible objectives. The Absolute can be reached by absolute devotion only. Don’t be half-hearted.
Be fully aware of your own being and you will be in bliss consciously.
If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.
To realize the Eternal is to become the Eternal.
To find a living Guru is a rare opportunity and a great responsibility. One should not treat these matters lightly. You people are out to buy yourself the heaven and you imagine that the Guru will supply it for a price. You seek to strike a bargain by offering little but asking much. You cheat nobody except yourselves.
The mind is changing anyhow all the time. Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it and just be. If you give it rest, it will settle down and recover its purity and strength. Constant thinking makes it decay.
You suffer because you have alienated yourself from reality and now you seek an escape from this alienation. You cannot escape from your own obsessions. You can only cease nursing them.
To know that consciousness and its content are but reflections, changeful and transient, is the focussing of the real. The refusal to see the snake in the rope is the necessary condition for seeing the rope.
Humility and silence are essential for a sadhaka (Spiritual Seeker), however advanced.
To go beyond yourself, you must know yourself.
You are really in search of yourself, without knowing it. You are love-longing for the love-worthy, the perfectly lovable. Due to ignorance you are looking for it in the world of opposites and contradictions. When you find it within, your search will be over.
As you are now, the personality is only an obstacle. Self-identification with the body may be good for an infant, but true growing up depends on getting the body out of the way. Normally, one should outgrow body-based desires early in life.
Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
Changes are inevitable in the changeful, but you are not subject to them. You are the changeless background, against which changes are perceived.
If you trust me, believe when I tell you that you are the pure awareness that illumines consciousness and its infinite content. Realize this and live accordingly. If you do not believe me, then go within, enquiring ‘What am I’? or, focus your mind on ‘I am’, which is pure and simple being.
All these sufferings are man-made and it is within man’s power to put an end to them. God helps by facing man with the results of his actions and demanding that the balance should be restored. Karma is the law that works for righteousness; it is the healing hand of God.
All these questions arise from your believing yourself to be a person. Go beyond the personal and see.
You know you are sitting here. Be attentive to that knowledge only. Just be in your Beingness. That knowingness ‘I am’ has created the entire universe. Hold on to that; nothing has to be done. Once you recognize that principle it becomes tranquil. Become one with that and all your needs will be satisfied.
Discrimination and dispassion practised now will yield their fruits at the proper time. If the roots are healthy and well-watered, the fruits are sure to be sweet. Be pure, be alert, keep ready.
A life of constraint and suppression is not Yoga. Mind must be free of desires and relaxed. It comes with understanding, not with determination, which is but another form of memory. An understanding mind is free of desires and fears.
Most of the bhaktas (devotees) trust their Guru only as long as all is well with them. When troubles come, they feel let down and go out in search of another Guru.
Go within and discover what you are not. Nothing else matters.
When you desire the common good, the whole world desires with you. Make humanity’s desire your own and work for it.
Be what you are: conscious being and don’t stray away from yourself.
Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought ‘I am’ is the polishing cloth. Use it.
The sense of ‘I am’ is always there; only when it identifies with the body it is called the ego.
Moods are in the mind and do not matter. Go within, go beyond. Cease being fascinated by the content of your consciousness. When you reach the deep layers of your true being, you will find that the mind’s surface-play affects you very little.
Desirelessness and fearlessness will take you there.
Detach yourself from all that makes your mind restless. Renounce all that disturbs its peace. If you want peace, deserve it.
Whether you plan or don’t, life goes on. But in life itself a little
whorl arises in the mind, which indulges in fantasies and imagines itself dominating and controlling life. Life itself is desireless. But the false self wants to continue pleasantly. Therefore it is always engaged in ensuring one’s continuity. Life is unafraid and free. As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage.
Do not be afraid of freedom from desire and fear. It enables you to live a life so different from all you know, so much more intense and interesting, that, truly, by losing all you gain all.
The Guru is basically without desire. He sees what happens, but feels no urge to interfere. He makes no choices, takes no decisions. As pure witness, he watches what is going on and remains unaffected.
It is enough to know that there is suffering, that the world suffers. By themselves neither pleasure nor pain enlighten: Only understanding does. Once you have grasped the truth that the world is full of suffering, that to be born is a calamity, you will find the urge and the energy to go beyond it. Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you do not want to suffer, don’t go to sleep. You cannot know yourself through bliss alone, for bliss is your very nature.
You are a man because you identify with the body. If you do not identify with the body, what sex are you? After leaving the body, the vital breath and the ‘I am’ merge into the substratum. Then where is man or woman?
To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility.
When you know that you are neither body nor mind, you will not be swayed by them. You will follow truth, wherever it takes you, and do what needs be done, whatever the price to pay.
What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless. Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I’.
When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure witness. We withdraw from the experience and its experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness.
It is enough if you do not imagine yourself to be the body. It is the ‘I-am-the-body’ idea that is so calamitous. It blinds you completely to your real nature. Even for a moment do not think that you are the body. Give yourself no name, no shape. In the darkness and the silence reality is found.
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.
Beyond pain and pleasure there is bliss.
After deep sleep, as soon as consciousness dawns on you of ‘I am’ – that is the witness. Before that moment you did not know that you are, there was no witness, no knowledge of ‘I am’.
Absolute should be experienced, not discussed.
Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. ‘I am’ you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.
Do understand that you are destined for enlightenment. Co-operate with your destiny, don’t go against it, don’t thwart it. Allow it to fulfil itself. All you have to do is to give atention to the obstacles created by the foolish mind.
Realize yourself as the ocean of consciousness in which all happens. This is not difficult. A little of attentiveness, of close observation of oneself, and you will see that no event is outside your consciousness.
You are the Self, here and now. Leave the mind alone, stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature.
Generally speaking, there are two ways: external and internal. Either
you live with somebody who knows the Truth and submit yourself entirely to his guiding and moulding influence, or you seek the inner guide and follow the inner light wherever it takes you. In both cases your personal desires and fears must be disregarded. You learn either by proximity or by investigation, the passive or the active way. You either let yourself be carried by the river of life and love represented by your Guru, or you make your own efforts, guided by your inner star. In both cases you must move on, you must be earnest.
Seek within. Your own self is your best friend.
The realized man is egoless; he has lost the capacity of identifying himself with anything. He is without location, place-less, beyond space and time, beyond the world. Beyond words and thoughts is he.
It is the mind that creates illusion and it is the mind that gets free of it.
Once you realize that all comes from within, that the world in which you live has not been projected onto you but by you, your fear comes to an end. Without this realization you identify yourself with the externals, like the body, mind, society, nation, humanity, even God or the Absolute. But these are all escapes from fear. It is only when you fully accept your responsibility for the little world in which you live and watch the process of its creation, preservation and destruction, that you may be free from your imaginary bondage.
However long a life may be, it is but a moment and a dream.
The sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it — body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take
yourself to be what you are not.
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible.
Learning words is not enough. You may know the theory, but without the actual experience of yourself as the impersonal and unqualified centre of being, love and bliss, mere verbal knowledge is sterile.
Do realize that it is not you who moves from dream to dream, but the dreams flow before you and you are the immutable witness. No happening affects your real being — this is the absolute truth.
Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I’? After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The ‘I am’ is certain. The ‘I am this’ is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality.
The unreal may look real, but it is transient. The real is not afraid of time.
We shall suffer as long as our thoughts and actions are prompted by desires and fears. See their futility and the danger and chaos they create will subside. Don’t try to reform yourself, just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting. Do not expect the changeful, to take you to the changeless — it can never happen. Only when the very idea of changing is seen as false and abandoned, the changeless can come into its own.
Meditation is a sattvic (harmonious) activity and aims at complete elimination of tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony) is perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.
Everybody is aware of himself. The deepening and broadening of self-awareness is the royal way. Call it mindfulness, or witnessing, or just attention — it is for all. None is unripe for it and none can fail.
The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.
You just keep on trying until you succeed. If you persevere, there can be no failure. What matters supremely is sincerity, earnestness; you must really have had surfeit of being the person you are, now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits. This steady resistance against the unnecessary is the secret of success.
Purify yourself by a well-ordered and useful life. Watch over your thoughts, feelings, words and actions. This will clear your vision.
Desires are just waves in the mind. You know a wave when you see one. A desire is just a thing among many. I feel no urge to satisfy it, no action needs be taken on it. Freedom from desire means this: the compulsion to satisfy is absent.
Stupidity and selfishness are the only evil.
To receive communication, you must be receptive.
No ambition is spiritual. All ambitions are for the sake of the ‘I am’. If you want to make real progress you must give up all idea of personal attainment. The ambitions of the so-called Yogis are preposterous. A man’s desire for a woman is innocence itself compared to the lusting for an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal.
The false self must be abandoned before the real self can be found.
To find the Guru and also the trust in him is rare luck. It does not happen often.
You are what you are, timelessly, but of what use is it to you unless you know it and act on it? Your begging bowl may be of pure gold, but as long as you do not know it, you are a pauper. You must know your inner worth
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.
As long as you have all sorts of ideas about yourself, you know yourself through the mist of these ideas; to know yourself as you are, give up all ideas. You cannot imagine the taste of pure water, you can only discover it by abandoning all flavourings.
It is your self-identification with the body, which, of course, is limited in space and time, that gives you the feeling of finiteness. In reality you are infinite and eternal.
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.
Meditation will help you to find your bonds, loosen them, untie them and cast your moorings. When you are no longer attached to anything, you have done your share. The rest will be done for you.
Turn within and you will come to trust yourself. In everything else confidence comes with experience.
Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.
Find out. Even if I tell you that you are the witness, the silent watcher, it will mean nothing to you, unless you find the way to your own being.
Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable,
unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual.
Transiency is the best proof of unreality. What is limited in time, and space and applicable to one person only, is not real. The real is for all and forever.
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.
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.
Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.
All desires must be given up, because by desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state.
Live in tune with things as they are and not as they are imagined.
The Gnani (Self-Realized Soul) is not afraid because his mind is dead already. He does not think: ‘I live’. He knows: ‘There is life’. There is no change in it and no death. Death appears to be a change in time and space. Where there is neither time nor space, how can there be death? The gnani is already dead to name and shape. How can their loss affect him? The man in the train travels from place to place, but the man off the train goes nowhere, for he is not bound for a destination. He has nowhere to go, nothing to do, nothing to become. Those who make plans will be born to carry them out. Those who make no plans need not be born.
I am neither the body, nor the mind, nor the mental faculties. I am beyond all these.
You are neither the body nor in the body — there is no such thing as body. You have grievously misunderstood yourself; to understand rightly — investigate.
Silence knows itself. It is the silence of the silent mind, when passions and desires are silenced.
The main point is to be fully aware that neither you nor the man in front of you are mere bodies; if your awareness is clear and full, a mistake is less probable.
Relinquish your habits and addictions, live a simple and sober life, don’t hurt a living being; this is the foundation of Yoga. To find reality you must be real in the smallest daily action; there can be no deceit in the search for truth.
The entire universe strives to fulfil a desire born of compassion.
The undisturbed state of being is bliss; the disturbed state is what appears as the world. In non-duality there is bliss; in duality experience. What comes and goes is experience with its duality of pain and pleasure. Bliss is not to be known. One is always bliss, but never blissful. Bliss is not an attribute.
If you do not have the wisdom and the strength to give up, just look at your possessions. Your mere looking will burn them up. If you can stand outside your mind, you will soon find that total renunciation of possessions and desires is the most obviously reasonable thing to do.
The Gnani (Self-Realized Soul) belongs to all. He gives himself tirelessly and completely to whoever comes to him. If he is not a giver, he is not a gnani. Whatever he has, he shares.
The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. And the body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long. A full life is better than a long life.
You see people suffer and you seek the best way of helping them. The answer is obvious — first put yourself beyond the need of help. Be sure your attitude is of pure goodwill, free of expectation of any kind.
Evil is the shadow of inattention. In the light of self-awareness it will wither and fall off.
Mere knowledge is not enough; the knower must be known. The Pandits and the Yogis may know many things, but of what use is mere knowledge when the self is not known? It will be certainly misused. Without the knowledge of the knower there can be no peace.
His (Self-Realized Soul) state is not so desolate. It tastes of the pure, uncaused, undiluted bliss. He is happy and fully aware that happiness is his very nature and that he need not do anything, nor strive for anything to secure it. It follows him, more real than the body, nearer than the mind itself. You imagine that without cause there can be no happiness. To me dependence on anything for happiness is utter misery. Pleasure and pain have causes, while my state is my own, totally uncaused, independent, unassailable.
Find him who was present at your birth and will witness your death.
Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing.
Sensations as such, however strong, do not cause suffering. It is the mind, bewildered by wrong ideas, addicted to thinking: ‘I am this’. ‘I am that’, that fears loss and craves gain and suffers when frustrated.
No need of any acts of renunciation. Just turn your mind away, that is all. Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Get it out of its groove by denying it attention.
All division is in the mind (chitta); there is none in reality (chit). Movement and rest are states of mind and cannot be without their opposites.
Names and shapes change incessantly. Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind.
As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will not abandon it. Discovery cannot come as long as you cling to the familiar. It is only when you realize fully the immense sorrow of your life and revolt against it, that a way out can be found.
To take appearance for reality is a grievous sin and the cause of all calamities. You are the all-pervading, eternal and infinitely creative awareness — consciousness. All else is local and temporary. Don’t forget what you are.
You must realize first of all that you are the proof of everything, including yourself. None can prove your existence, because his existence must be confirmed by you first. Your being and knowing you owe nobody. Remember, you are entirely on your own. You do not come from somewhere, you do not go anywhere. You are timeless being and awareness.
Realization is but the opposite of ignorance. To take the world as real and one’s self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy.
What is perceived in pure awareness, unaffected by desire and fear is fact.
All change affects the mind only. To be what you are, you must go beyond the mind, into your own being. It is immaterial what is the mind that you leave behind, provided you leave it behind for good. This again is not possible without self-realization.
Desirelessness is the highest bliss.
Awareness is not of time. Time exists in consciousness only. Beyond consciousness where are time and space?
Why desire at all? Desiring a state of freedom from desire will not set you free. Nothing can set you free, because you are free. See yourself with desireless clarity, that is all.
The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search.
Nothing stops you but preoccupation with the outer which prevents you from focussing the inner. It cannot be helped, you cannot skip your sadhana (Spiritual practice). You have to turn away from the world and go within, until the inner and the outer merge and you can go beyond the conditioned, whether inner or outer.
What is liberation after all? To know that you are beyond birth and death. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature, you created so much trouble for yourself.
You may leave your home and give trouble to your family, but attachments are in the mind and will not leave you until you know your mind in and out. First thing first - know yourself, all else will come with it.
What you are, you already are. By knowing what you are not, you are free of it and remain in your own natural state.
By all means help the world. You will not help much, but the effort will make you grow. There is nothing wrong in trying to help the world.
God gives the body and the mind and the Guru shows the way to use them. But returning to the source is your own task.
All desires are bad, but some are worse than others. Pursue any desire, it will always give you trouble.
Desire is the memory of pleasure and fear is the memory of pain. Both make the mind restless. Moments of pleasure are merely gaps in the stream of pain. How can the mind be happy?
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.
The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.
Change your ways of feeling and thinking, take stock of them and examine them closely. You are in bondage by inadvertence. Attention liberates.
When the time comes for the world to be helped, some people are given the will, the wisdom and the power to cause great changes.
Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused.
In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness
does not, reality does not.
The very search for pleasure is the cause of pain.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state, beginningless, endless, uncaused, unsupported, without parts, without change.
It is the homing instinct, which makes the bird return to its nest and the fish to the mountain stream where it was born. The seed returns to the earth, when the fruit is ripe. Ripeness is all.
Habit and passion blind and mislead. Compassionate awareness heals and redeems.
True happiness cannot be found in things that change and pass away. Pleasure and pain alternate inexorably. Happiness comes from the self and can be found in the self only. Find your real self (swarupa) and all else will come with it.
To live without self-concern. For this you must know your own true being (swarupa) 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.
Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.
With ignorance coming to an end all comes to an end. Things are then seen as they are and they are good.
Stay beyond all thoughts, in silent being-awareness. It is not progress, for what you come to is already there in you, waiting for you.
Understand first that you are not the person you believe yourself to be. What you think yourself to be is mere suggestion or imagination. You have no parents, you were not born; nor will you die. Either trust me when I tell you so, or arrive to it by study and investigation. The way of total faith is quick, the other is slow but steady. Both must be tested in action. Act on what you think is true — this is the way to truth.
Were you not present at your birth? Will you not be present at your death? Find him who is always present.
The mind that projects the world, colours it its own way. When you meet a man, he is a stranger. When you marry him, he becomes your own self. When you quarrel, he becomes your enemy. It is your mind’s attitude that determines what he is to you.
You must come to a firm decision. You must forget the thought that you are the body and be only the knowledge ‘I am’, which has no form, no name. Just be. When you stabilize in that beingness it will give all the knowledge and all the secrets to you.
As you dive deep into yourself in search of your true nature, you will discover that only your body is small and only your memory is short; while the vast ocean of life is yours.
What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear, but not to be. The appearance may last very long on some scale of time, and be very short on another, but ultimately it comes to the same. Whatever is time bound is momentary and has no reality.
The witness merely registers the presence or absence of experience. It is not an experience by itself, but it becomes an experience when the thought: ‘I am the witness’ arises.
In seeking you discover that you are neither the body nor mind.
Freedom from desires is bliss.
These ideas of movement, of restlessness, of pleasure and pain are all in the mind. The Self stands beyond the mind, aware, but unconcerned.
Unselfish action, free from all concern with the body and its interests will carry you into the very heart of Reality.
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 it 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.
Before pain was, you were. After pain had gone, you remained. Pain is transient, you are not.
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.
It is not your real being that is restless, but its reflection in the mind appears restless because the mind is restless. It is just like the reflection of the moon in the water stirred by the wind.
