Quotes from Nisargadatta Maharaj

Truth is simple and available to all: why do you complicate? Truth is loving and lovable. It includes all, accepts all, purifies all. It is untruth that is difficult and a source of trouble. It always wants, expects, demands. Being false, it is empty, always in search of confirmation and reassurance. It is afraid of and avoids inquiry. It identifies itself with any support, however weak and momentary. Whatever it gets, it loses and asks for more.

Q: No purposeful action is then possible? M: All I say is that consciousness contains all. In consciousness all is possible. You can have causes if you want them, in your world. Another may be content with a single cause — God's will. The root cause is one: the sense 'I am'.

To be is to suffer. The narrower the circle of my self-identification, the more acute the suffering caused by desire and fear.

To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor non-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror; it becomes a part of living.

You do not tidy up a dark room. You open the windows first. Letting in the light makes everything easy. So, let us wait to improve others until we have seen ourselves as we are - and have changed.

Our only hope is to stop, to look, to understand, and to get out of the traps of memory. For memory feeds imagination and imagination generates desire and fear.

Things are as they are and nobody in particular is responsible. The idea of personal responsibility comes from the illusion of agency.

In reality, nothing happens. Onto the screen of the mind, destiny forever projects its pictures, memories of former projections, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go - light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the picture.

Merely assuaging fears and satisfying desires will not remove this sense of emptiness you are trying to escape from; only self-knowledge can help you.

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.

The experience of being empty, uncluttered by memories and expectations; it is like the happiness of open spaces, of being young, of having all the time and energy for doing things, for discovery, for adventure.

Freedom means letting go. People just do not care to let go of everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality. Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The giving up is the first step. But the real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own.

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.

The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. The "I am" is the door. Stay at it until it opens … It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail. I move in and out of consciousness easily and naturally and therefore to me, the world is a home, not a prison.

What is in the world cannot save the world; if you really care to help the world, you must step out of it.

Our minds are just waves on the ocean of consciousness. As waves, they come and go. As ocean, they are infinite and eternal. Know yourself as the ocean of being, the womb of all existence.

In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realization, the person ceases.

By focusing the mind on "I am," on the sense of being, "I am so-and-so" dissolves; "I am a witness only" remains and that too submerges in "I am all." Then the all becomes the One and the One - yourself

Awareness is ever there. It need not be realized. Open the shutter of the mind and it will be flooded with light.

What refuses to die cannot be reborn.

The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours. Make your hooks straight and nothing can hold you.

It is this clash between desire and fear that causes anger, which is the great destroyer of sanity in life. When pain is accepted for what it is, a lesson and a warning, and deeply looked into and heeded, the separation between pain and pleasure breaks down, and both become experience - painful when resisted, joyful when accepted.

What problems can there be which the mind did not create? Life and death do not create problems; pains and pleasures come and go, experienced and forgotten. It is memory and anticipation that create problems of attainment or avoidance, colored by like and dislike. Truth and love are man's real nature, and mind and heart are the means of its expression.

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience, "I am the world, the world is myself," you are free from desire and fear on one hand and become totally responsible for the world on the other.