Quotes from Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are concerned with your own happiness and I am telling you that there is no such thing. Happiness is never your own, it is where the 'I' is not.

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 and trust it and express it in the daily sacrifice of desire and fear.

When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one's past, present and future, with one's physical and spiritual security and standing, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty; then the guru is not important, for the disciple has broken the shell of self-defense. Complete self-surrender is liberation by itself.

Questioner: We were told about karma and reincarnation, evolution and Yoga, masters and disciples. What are we to do with all this knowledge? Maharaj: Leave it all behind you. Forget it. 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. Q: I must begin with some absolute truth. Is there any? M: Yes, there is, the feeling: 'I am'. Begin with that.

The world is full of contradictions; hence your search for harmony and peace. These you cannot find in the world, for the world is the child of chaos. To find order you must search within.

Increase and widen your desires until nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means, be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well.

If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed; it must come from within.

Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek or find, for there is nothing lost. Relax and watch the "I am." Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet, keep silent; it will emerge or, rather, it will take you in.

Don't try to reform yourself; just see the futility of all change. The changeful keeps on changing while the changeless is waiting.

Study the prison you have inadvertently built around yourself.

When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

It is only when you are satiated with the changeable and long for the unchangeable that you are ready for turning around and stepping into what can be described (when seen from the level of the mind) as emptiness and darkness.

You cannot be alive, for you are life itself.

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

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.

Desire by itself is not wrong. It is life itself, the urge to grow in knowledge and experience. It is the choices you make that are wrong. To imagine that some little thing - food, sex, power, fame - will make you happy is to deceive yourself. Only something as vast and deep as your real self can make you truly and lastingly happy.

When you love the Self and nothing else, you go beyond the selfish and the unselfish. All distinctions lose their meaning. Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love, go deeper and deeper into it, investigate yourself and love the investigation, and you will solve not only your own problems but also the problems of humanity. You will know what to do.

Self-realization definitely comes first. The mind cannot go beyond itself by itself. It must explode.