Sri Nisargadatta Quotes & Sayings

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Know yourself to be the changeless witness of the changeful mind. That is enough. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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

Whatever you come across- go beyond — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Give up the idea of being a person, that is all. You need not become what you are anyhow. There is the identity of what you are and there is the person superimposed on it. All you know is the person, the identity - which is not a person - you do not know, for you never doubted, never asked yourself the crucial question: 'Who am I?' — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Punishment is but legalized crime. In a society built on prevention, rather than retaliation, there would be very little crime. The few exceptions will be treated medically, as of unsound mind and body. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The essence of saintliness is total acceptance of the present moment,
harmony with things as they happen. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In my world love is the only law. I do not ask for love, I give it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

We are the creators and creatures of each other,
causing and bearing each other's burden. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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

The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Earnestness is the most important thing. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The first steps in self-acceptance are not at all pleasant, for what one sees is not a happy sight. One needs all the courage to go further. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nothing perceivable is real.Your attachment is your bondage. You cannot control the future.There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage.You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The root of fear is the feeling of not being what you are. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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 or 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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are so used to the support of concepts that when your concepts leave you, although it is your true state, you get frightened and try to cling to them again. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The innermost light, shining peacefully and timelessly in the heart, is the real Guru. All others merely show the way. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When you go beyond awareness, there is a state of nonduality, in which there is no cognition, only pure being. In the state of nonduality, all separation ceases. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All is a play in consciousness. All divisions are illusory. You can know the false only. The true you must yourself be. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Come to the conclusion: I am unborn, I was unborn and I shall remain unborn — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn on you. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

It is just like your tape-recorder. It records, it reproduces - all by itself. You only listen. Similarly, I watch all that happens, including my talking to you. It is not me who talks, the words appear in my mind and then I hear them said. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to pierce into the higher states of consciousness and finally go beyond it. The art of meditation is the art of shifting the focus of attention to ever subtler levels, without losing one's grip on the levels left behind. ( ... ) Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind had built around you. Believe me, you will not regret. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You cannot change the course of events, but you can change your
attitude, and what really matters is the attitude and not the mere event. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All will come through, not a single soul (jiva) shall be lost. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Surrender to your own self, of which everything is an expression. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Do not neglect this body. This is the house of God; take care of it, only in this body can God be realized. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The sum and substance of my teaching is this: Don't be dishonest to your vital breath; worship that only, abide in that only, accept it as yourself. And when you worship in this manner, it can lead you anywhere, to any heights- this is the quintessence of my talks. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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

It is your restlessness that causes chaos. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

To see the unreal is wisdom. Beyond this lies the inexpressible. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Whatever can be understood or perceived can never be the eternal Truth. The Unknown is the Truth. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There is only one meditation - the rigorous refusal to harbor thoughts. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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, which is between and beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on imagining itself to be something: 'I am this, I am that', continues, but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the witness snaps. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Refuse to think in terms of this or that. All pain needs investigation. The mind is nothing else but the self. Assumption obscures reality without destroying it. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false..Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time.The mind creates time and space and takes its own creations for reality. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The world is an illusion. Why is it unreal? Because none of the knowledge is going to remain permanent, as real knowledge. I had a number of identities; I was a child, I was a boy, I was a teenager, I was a middle-aged man, I was an old man. Like other identities I thought would remain constant, they never remained so. Finally, I became very old ... So which identity remained honest with me? — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Do not try to know the truth, for knowledge by the mind is not true knowledge. But you can know what is not true-which is enough to liberate you from the false. The idea that you know what is true is dangerous, for it keeps you imprisoned in the mind. It is when you do not know, that you are free to investigate. And there can be no salvation, without investigation, because non investigation is the main cause of bondage. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Increase and widen your desires till 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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are already perfect, only you don't know it. Learn to know yourself and you will discover wonders. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The old grooves must be erased in your brain, without forming new ones. You must realize yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When you desire the common good, the whole world desires with you. Make humanity's desire your own and work for it. There you cannot fail. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You merely dream that you roam about. In a few years your stay in India will appear as a dream to you. You will dream some other dream at that time. 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-that is the absolute truth. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The relinquishing of the lesser is the gaining of the greater. Give up all and you gain all. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Our usual attitude is of 'I am this'. Separate consistently and perseveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what is means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that'. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The only difference between us is that I am aware of my natural state, while you are bemused ... We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Between the banks of pleasure and pain flows the river of life. If you spend much time on either bank you will miss out on life. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are not what you think yourself to be, I assure you. The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and is purely accidental. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Words can bring you only up to their own limit; to go beyond, you must abandon them. Remain as the silent witness only. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There is no such thing as unconsciousness for it is not experienceable. We infer unconsciousness when there is a lapse in memory or communication. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

If you want to sin, sin wholeheartedly and openly. Sins too have their lessons to teach the earnest sinner, as virtues the earnest saint. It is the mixing up of the two that is so disastrous. Nothing can block you so effectively as compromise, for it shows lack of earnestness, without which nothing can be done. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular.Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Light and love are impersonal.When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

To find reality you must be real in the smallest daily action; there can be no deceit in the search for truth. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Having realized that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desires and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them the nourishment of interest and attention ... — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

In reality there are no others, and -helping yourself you help everybody else. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Reality is neither subjective nor objective, neither mind nor matter, neither time nor space. These divisions need somebody to happen to, a conscious separate center. But reality is all and nothing, the totality and the exclusion, the fullness and the emptiness, fully consistent, absolutely paradoxical. You cannot speak about it, you can only lose yourself in it. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Multiplicity without strife is joy. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

As long as the mind is there, your body and your world are there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind, fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The mind exists in two states: as water and as honey. The water vibrates at the least disturbance, while the honey, however disturbed, returns quickly to immobility. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Love.. is seeing the unity under the imaginary diversity. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The world is like a sheet of paper on which something is typed. The reading and the meaning will vary with the reader, but the paper is the common factor, always present, rarely perceived. When the ribbon is removed, typing leaves no trace on the paper. So is my mind - the impressions keep on coming, but no trace is left. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Nature is neither pleasant nor painful. It is all intelligence and beauty. Pain and pleasure are in the mind. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are not the body. You are the immensity and infinity of consciousness. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world. In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you. See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the supreme state will come to you uninvited and unexpected. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Instead of searching for what you do not have, find out what it is that you have never lost. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

With self-awareness you grow more intelligent. In awareness you learn, in self-awareness you learn about yourself. Of course, you can only learn what you are not. To know what you are, you must go beyond the mind. 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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

When I say 'I am', I do not mean a separate entity with a body as its nucleus, I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is known. I have nothing to desire for I am complete forever — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Suffering is primarily a
call for attention, which itself is a movement of love. More than
happiness, love wants growth, the widening and deepening of awareness and consciousness and being. Whatever prevents that, becomes a cause of pain, and love does not shirk from pain. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You will get to your maturity quickly if you stay in the nothingness. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Awareness neither dies nor is re-born. It is the changeless reality itself. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I am timeless being. I am free of desire or fear, because I do not remember the past or imagine the future. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Set your mind right and all will be right. When you know that the world is one, that humanity is one, you will act accordingly. But first of all you must attend to the way you feel, think and live. Unless there is order in yourself, there can be no order in the world. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Devotion to your goal makes you live a clean and orderly life , given to search for truthand to helping people, and realization makes noble virtue easy and spontaneous, by removing for good the obstacles in the shape of desires and fears and wrong ideas . — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

You are really in search of yourself, without knowing it. You are love-longing for the love-worthy, the perfect 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. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of 'I' — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The ultimate point of view is that there is nothing to understand, so when we try to understand, we are only indulging in acrobatics of the mind. Whatever you have understood, you are not. Why are you getting lost in concepts? You are not what you know, you are the knower. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj