"I don't understand you. You never want what's true. You want what you don't have and don't want what you already have, and so you suffer. It's so perplexing! Why not simply reverse it? Why not want what you have, and not want what you don't have? It's so simple! You can be happy; it's here for the taking. You want little things when you could have the entire universe and eternity." "Water doesn't care whether it is quenching thirst or not." "You think that the jnani is interested in you as a person, in your personal welfare. Nothing could be further from the truth. He actually aims for your total elimination from consciousness." "At the root of consciousness is the endless drive of desire and fear, of pursuit and flight, which is the urge to get some experiences and avoid others. Beyond all this turmoil centered on pleasure and pain is the hidden but real bliss of true awareness of being as the self beyond consciousness and its problems." "Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy." "Nothing of value can happen to a mind that knows exactly what it wants. For nothing the mind can visualise and want is of much value." "Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any." "Love says 'I am everything'. Wisdom says 'I am nothing'. Between the two, my life flows." "There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person." "There is nothing to practise. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking." "Pleasure puts you to sleep and pain wakes you up. If you don't want to suffer, don't go to sleep." "Very few are those who have the courage to trust the innocent and the simple." "You can know reality only when you are astonished." "I do not claim to know what you do not. In fact, I know much less than you do." "If you really want to help a person, keep away. If you are emotionally committed to helping, you will fail to help. You may be very busy and be very pleased with your charitable nature, but not much will be done. A man is really helped when he is no longer in need of any help. All else is futility." "The world is not objective and the sorrow of it is not avoidable. Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons." "All your discriminations and classifications are quite all right, but they do not exist in my case. As the description of a dream may be detailed and accurate, though without having any foundation, so does your pattern fit nothing but your own assumptions. You begin with an idea and you end with the same idea under a different garb." "Doubt - everything and absolutely." "To work in the world is hard. To refrain from all unnecessary work is even harder." "All states and conditions are of the mind." "You are confused because you believe that you are in the world, not the world in you." "Everyone lives in his own world." "On the verbal level everything is relative. Absolutes should be experienced, not discussed." "Freedom from desire means this. The compulsion to satisfy is absent." "Strive without seeking. Struggle without greed." "To nourish the ideas 'I am a sinner', 'I am not a sinner' is sin. To identify oneself with the particular is all the sin there is." "You people are rich with your ideas of possession, of quantity and quality. I am completely without ideas." "Be passionately dispassionate - that is all." "They know themselves to be as nothing, therefore nothing can resist them." "Everything is afraid of The Nothing, for when a thing touches Nothing, it becomes Nothing." "Work neither for yourself nor for others, but for the work's own sake. A thing worth doing is its own purpose and meaning. Make nothing a means to something else." "There is nothing wrong with duality as long as it does not create conflict. Multiplicity and variety without strife is joy." "Remember facts. Forget opinions." "All your discriminations and classifications are quite all right, but they do not exist in my case. As the description of a dream may be detailed and accurate, though without having any foundation, so does your pattern fit nothing but your own assumptions. You begin with an idea and you end up with the same idea under a different garb." "When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, what remains is all-embracing love. Get rid of all ideas about yourself, even of the idea that you are God. No self-definition is valid." "All ideas are false." "The beginningless begins forever. In the same way, I give eternally because I have nothing, to keep nothing for oneself is the greatest gift, the highest generosity." "All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated." "I am the insect. I am the poet - in dream. But in reality I am neither. I am beyond all dreams. I am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both inside and outside the dream. Just as a man suffering a headache knows the ache and also knows that he is not the ache, so do I know the dream, myself dreaming and myself not dreaming - all at the same time. I am what I am before, during and after the dream. But what I see in the dream, I am not." "There is no need of a way out. Don't you see that a way out is also part of the dream? All you have to do is see the dream as a dream." "The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not another." "Abandon all theories and systems and live by wisdom, intelligence and active love." "The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become." "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 not-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 part of living." "It is neither necessary, nor possible to change others. But if you can change yourself you will find that no other change is needed. To change the picture you merely change the film. You do not attack the cinema screen!" "Wisdom lies in never forgetting the self as the ever-present source of both the experiencer and his experience." "When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about." "To want nothing and do nothing - that is true creation! To watch the universe emerging and subsiding in one's heart is a wonder." "Don't be afraid, don't resist, don't delay. Be what you are. There is nothing to be afraid of. Trust and try. Experiment honestly. Give your real being a chance to shape your life. You will not regret it." "There is not such thing as peace of mind. Mind means disturbance. Restlessness itself is mind." "Being oneself is completely beyond all motivation. You cannot be yourself for some reason. You <i>are</i> yourself, and no reason is needed." "The only help worth giving is freeing from the need for further help. Repeated help is no help at all. Do not talk of helping another, unless you can put him beyond all need of help." "The body-mind is like a room. It is there, but I need not live in it all the time." "Self-knowledge is not a piece of property to be offered and accepted. It is a new dimension altogether, where there is nothing to give or take." "To the Self, the world is but a colourful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear he enjoys it, as it happens." "What I appear to be to you exists only in your mind. I am not concerned with it." "Looking for causes and results is but the pastime of the mind. What <i>is</i>, is lovable. Love is not a result, it is the very ground of being. Wherever you go, you will find being, consciousness and love. Why and what for make preferences?" "When you realise that your mind too is part of nature, the duality will cease." "Stop making use of your mind and see what happens." "In reality nothing is lacking and nothing is needed, all work is on the surface only. In the depths there is perfect peace. All your problems arise because you have defined and therefore limited yourself." "Fight with all the strength at your disposal against the idea that you are nameable and describable. You are not. Refuse to think of yourself in terms of this or that." "Reality is the ultimate destroyer. All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is false. All is one - this is the ultimate solution of every conflict." "In reality, time and space exist in you. You do not exist in them." "Truly all is me and by me. There is nothing else. The very idea of 'else' is a disaster and a calamity." "Think of yourself as momentary, without past and future, and your personality dissolves." "All knowledge flows from you, as all being and all joy. Realize that you are the eternal source and accept all as your own. Such acceptance is true love." "Do not try to understand!" "Even the idea of God as the Creator is false. Do I owe my being to any other being? Because I <i>am</i>, all is." "Increase and widen your desires until nothing but reality can fulfil them. It is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness." "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." "Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them." "No true teacher indulges in opinions." "The Self is near and the way to it is easy. All you need do is do nothing." "In nature nothing is at standstill, everything pulsates, appears and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking - birth and death - everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life." "Love is will - the will to share your happiness with all. Being happy, making happy, this is the rhythm of love." "There is no remedy - except one - the search for remedies must cease." "There are always moments when one feels empty and estranged. Such moments are most desirable for it means the soul has cast its moorings and is sailing for distant places." "Time is death. Who waits, dies. Life is <i>now</i> only. Do not talk to me about past and future - they exist only in your mind." "You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself." "Whatever you think you are, you take it to be true, the habit of imagining yourself perceivable and describable is very strong with you." "Everything happens as it does because the universe is as it is." "You will not admit that your conclusions bind nobody but you. Do see that the image you have of me may be altogether wrong. Your image of yourself is wrong too, but that is your problem. But you need not create problems for me and then ask me to solve them. I am neither creating problems nor solving them." "All happiness comes from awareness. The more we are conscious, the deeper the joy. Acceptance of pain, non-resistance, courage and endurance - these open deep and perennial sources of real happiness, true bliss." "Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutralizes the action. Everything happens, but there is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end, nothing happened." "There is nothing wrong with your world, it is your thinking yourself to be separate from it that creates disorder." "With some, realization comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable." "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." "Once you realise 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. 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." "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 after an everlasting personal bliss. The mind is a cheat. The more pious it seems, the worse the betrayal." "And thus it starts - fears, religions, prayers, sacrifices, all sorts of systems - all to protect and support the child-man, frightened out of his wits by monsters of his own making. Realise that what you are cannot be born or die and with the fear gone, all suffering ends." "Your own little body too is full of mysteries and dangers, yet you are not afraid of it, for you take it as your own. What you do not know is that the entire universe is your body and you need not be afraid of it." "If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and freedom from the false." "Helping others is mere imagination, however noble. In truth you do not help others because there are not others." "Abandon all self-concern, worry 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." "If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you <i>are</i>." "The old grooves must be erased in your brain, without forming new ones. You must realise yourself as the immovable, behind and beyond the movable, the silent witness of all that happens." "Believe me, you need nothing except to be what you are. You imagine you will increase your value by acquisition. It is like gold imagining that an addition of copper will improve it. Elimination and purification of all that is foreign to your nature is enough. All else is vanity." "Of course the self based on memory is momentary. But such self demands unbroken continuity behind it. You know from experience that there are gaps when your self is forgotten. What brings it back to life? What wakes you up in the morning? There must be some constant factor bridging the gaps in consciousness." "If you are earnest you will find that in the end you will get fed up with roaming and regret the waste of energy and time. To find yourself you need not take a single step." "You must unlearn everything." "What you appear to be you are not. <i>Karma</i> is only a word you have learnt to repeat. You have never been, nor shall you ever be a person." "Nothing compels. You are as you believe yourself to be. Stop believing." "Leave it all behind you. Forget it. Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs." "The legitimate function of the mind is to tell you what is not." "Liberation is never of the person, it is from the person." "Pleasure and pain are momentary. It is simpler and easier to disregard them than to act on them." "Of course if you have a chance to help somebody, by all means do it and promptly too, don't keep him waiting until you are perfect. But do not become a professional do-gooder." "As long as one is conscious, there will be pain and pleasure. You cannot fight pain and pleasure on the level of consciousness. To go beyond them you must go beyond consciousness." "It may seem to be an attitude of cold aloofness, but it is not really so. Once you are in it, you will find that you love what you see, whatever may be its nature. This choiceless love is the touchstone of awareness. If it is not there, you are merely interested - for some personal reasons." "In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the sufferings of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have - yourself" "Begin with the admission that you do not know and start from there." "There are people in the world who do more good than all the statesmen and philanthropists put together. They radiate light and peace with no intention or knowledge. When others tell them about the miracles they worked, they also are wonder struck. Yet, taking nothing as their own, they are neither proud, nor do they crave for reputation. They are just unable to desire anything for themselves, not even the joy of helping others." "The dissolution of personality is always followed by a sense of great relief, as if a heavy burden has fallen off." "Realise yourself as the source and not the river, that is all." "Conflict arises only when desire and fear refer to the same object." "Awareness is not limited to consciousness. It is of all that is. Consciousness is of duality. There is no duality in awareness. It is one single block of cognition." "Any thing, to change, must pass through death, through obscuration and dissolution. Gold jewellery must be melted down before it is cast into another shape. What refuses to die cannot be reborn." "It is the ever-greedy mind that creates idea of progress and evolution towards perfection. It disturbs and talks of order, destroys and seeks security." "Deny yourself nothing - give yourself Infinity and Eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond." "The ideas of 'me' and 'mine' are at the root of all conflict. Be free of them and you will be out of conflict." "You fight all the time for your survival as a separate body mind, a particular name and form. To live you must destroy. From the moment you were conceived you started a war with your environment - a merciless war of mutual extermination until death sets you free." "For our life is <i>now</i>, and the love of it is <i>now</i>. We love variety, the play of pain and pleasure, we are fascinated by contrasts. For this we need the opposites and their apparent separation. We enjoy them for a time and then get tired and crave for the peace and silence of pure Being. The cosmic heart beats ceaselessly. I am the witness and the heart too." "It is the instinct of exploration, the love of the unknown, that brings me into existence. It is in the nature of being to see adventure in becoming, as it is in the very nature of becoming to seek peace in being. This alternation of being and becoming is inevitable; but my home is beyond." "The self-styled Gurus talk of ripeness and effort, of merits and achievements, of destiny and grace; all these are mere mental formations, projections of an addicted mind. Instead of helping, they obstruct." "For the purpose of discussion you can arrange words and give them meaning, but the fact remains that all knowledge is a form of ignorance. The most accurate map is yet only paper." "Do understand that to <i>be</i>, reality need not be known. Ignorance and knowledge are in mind, not in the real." "Once you begin to experience the peace, love and happiness which need no outer causes, all your doubts will dissolve." "Distrust those who put a distance between you and your true being and offer themselves as a go-between." "Instead of struggling with the person to make it become what it is not, why not go beyond this personal life altogether? It does not mean the extinction of the person; it only means seeing it in the right perspective." "How can a person limited in time and space, a mere body-mind, a gasp of pain between birth and death, be happy? The very conditions of its arising make happiness impossible. Peace, power, happiness, these are never personal states, nobody can say 'my peace', 'my power' - because 'mine' implies exclusivity, which is fragile and insecure." "There will be many messengers, but the message is one: be what you are." "There is a way out within easy reach, not a conversion to another set of ideas, but a liberation from all ideas and patterns of living." "The task seems hopeless until suddenly all becomes clear and simple and so wonderfully easy. But, as long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown." "Identity is Reality. Reality is Identity. Reality is not a shapeless mass, a worldless chaos. It is powerful, aware, blissful; compared to it your life is like a candle to the sun." "You are responsible only for what you can change. All you can change is your attitude. There lies your responsibility." "To be a person is to be asleep." "Reality is common to all. Only the false is personal." "Liberation is not the result of some means skilfully applied, nor of circumstances. It is beyond the causal process. Nothing can compel it, nothing can prevent it." "Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, and remove what poisoned it - the idea of a separate and isolated person - you just leave it alone to do its work among things for which it is well suited. To keep the mind in its own place and on its own work is the liberation of the mind." "To lose entirely all interest in knowledge results in omniscience. It is but the gift of knowing what needs to be known at the right moment, for error-free action." "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." "When you are smaller than the point of a needle, then the needle cannot pierce you. You pierce the needle!" "By all means do feel lost. As long as you feel competent and confident, reality is beyond you." "I do not want meek and humble disciples, I want them to be powerful, as I am. I do not make disciples, I make Gurus. I want YOU to jump in the test tube in the process of this investigation." "What I appear to be to you exists only in your mind. I am a dream that can wake you up. You will have the proof of it in your very waking up." "Real happiness is not vulnerable, because it does not depend on circumstances." "There is no place for effort in reality." "Effort is a sign of a conflict between incompatible desires. They should be seen as they are - then only they dissolve." "By itself life is immensely creative. A seed, in course of time, becomes a forest." "You need not burn the house to get out of it. You just walk out. It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail." "Your desire just happens to you along with its fulfillment, or non-fulfillment. You can change neither. You may believe that you exert yourself, strive and struggle. Again, it all merely happens, including the fruits of the work. Nothing is by you and for you." "Freedom is freedom from worry. 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." "Your real being is love itself and your many loves are its reflections according to the situation at the moment." "Circumstance and conditions rule the ignorant. The knower of reality is not compelled. The only law he obeys is that of love." "It is like seeing the surface of the ocean and completely forgetting the immensity beneath. The world is but the surface of mind and the mind is infinite." "The world cannot give what it does not have; unreal to the core, it is of no use for real happiness." "True happiness is uncaused and this cannot disappear for lack of stimulation. It is not the opposite of sorrow, it includes all sorrow and suffering." "Pleasure depends on things. Happiness does not." "To see everything as imagination, born of desire, is necessary for self-realization." "Causes and results are infinite in number and variety. Every thing affects everything. In this universe, when one thing changes, everything changes. Hence the great power of man changing the world by changing himself." "As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity." "Abandon every attempt. Just <i>be</i>. Don't strive, don't struggle, let go." "Liberation is but the freedom to discover." "To meet all the vicissitudes of life is penance enough! You need not invent trouble. To meet cheerfully whatever life brings is all the austerity you need." "Do not imagine that you can change through effort." "Be nothing. Know nothing. Have nothing. This is the only life worth living, the only happiness worth having." "The mind obsessed by the idea of causality invents creation and then wonders 'who is the creator?'" "The mind and the world are not separate. Do understand that what you think to be the world is your own mind." "It happens entirely by itself. None of us can help it. What needs changing shall change anyhow; enough to know oneself as one is, here an now." "I know no bad people. I only know myself." "With the cessation of imagination and desire, becoming ceases and the being this or that merges into being, which is not describable, only experienceable." "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." "Was there ever a world without troubles? Your being a person depends on violence to others. Your very body is a battle field, full of the dead and the dying. Existence implies violence." "Do you realise that as long as you have a self to defend, you must be violent?" "To be selfish means to covet, acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part against the whole." "It is the person you imagine yourself to be that suffers, not you." "You can only know yourself by being yourself without any attempt at self-definition and self-description." "You create disharmony and then complain!" "Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, the courage to believe that you are already free and to act on it." "Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change." "There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost." "Developing attitudes is a sign of fear." "Love is boundless. What is limited to only a few cannot be called love." "I am talking of immovability, not immobility." "Primary is the infinite expanse of consciousness, the eternal possibility, the immeasurable potential of all that was, is, and will be." "Whatever an ignorant child or an accomplished sage says, both are correct." "If you have understood what 'you' really are, is there any necessity for spiritual pursuits?" "When you know the false as false, then you do not have to worship at all. Any idea of doership - that things happen because you do something - also goes away." "Ten days prior to your conception, what were you doing?" "The Absolute - the Witness - is not the beingness, the medium of witnessing, and is also not the manifest universe witnessed." "It took nine months to create this telescope - this beingness. Do you ever ponder this? With that telescope, all this is experienced and seen, but the Observer is not the telescope." "Through the telescope, that is the beingness, which is the expression of the Observer only, he witnesses the manifest world. But do you think the Observer has also disappeared when the telescope and field of observation are gone?" "In the Absolute state, one has no instrument with which to make a statement..... and to whom?" "The one who has understood and realized the beingness is not interested in the activities and happenings within the domain of beingness. In the world, who is really interested in such profound knowledge?" "Throw out all your talking, concepts and words! After all, what is the mind? It is just the noise that goes on inside." "Total loss of pride in individuality is my nirvana." "This perceptible universe is limitless and infinite. By preserving it what shall I gain?" "Right here and now, you are in the realized state. But you try to judge it through desires and mind concepts, hence your inability to apperceive it and abide in it." "I am the very sun of knowledge and look upon everybody as such." "For the one stabilized in the Self, nothing is important and significant. Such a one is not concerned with anything." "This primary cause is beyond explanation." "A jnani is not born and he does not die. But when the body of a jnani drops off, people around him may weep in sorrow, because they identify with their bodies. They therefore consider a jnani to be an embodied person, which, however, he is not." "In that original source, there is no feeling of my presence." "On the 'non-beingness', beingness has appeared; and in the beingness, thousands of births and life forms are created within a moment." "There is no creator and nobody created me." "When the 'non-being' turns into being, then only the mind appears and functions." "In the ocean of my manifestation, millions like you are crawling around, like waves and ripples." "You must identify with the manifest totality from the first moment of daybreak." "A person in deep sleep and the person fully awake are one and the same." "The Unmanifest and the manifest can never be together." "I, the Absolute, am not the state of being." "You want to keep your individuality at the body-mind level as well as experience and be in both the beingness and 'non-beingness' states, which is impossible." "Fear of death does not allow you to transcend into beingness." "The personal 'I' cannot tolerate the impersonal beingness and is afraid of death." "That which you want to sustain, nourish and maintain is not you. Since you identify with something unreal, there is the fear of death." "In short, you watch, nourish, protect and guard that which you are not in actuality." "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. A jnani consumes time continuously, while all others are being consumed by it. A jnani is beyond time, elements, attributes and emotions." "Even the dissollution of this manifest universe cannot destroy me. Prior to, during and after the dissolution, I, the Absolute, ever prevail, untouched, untainted and unchanged." "Die nobly and honourably. Before death, be the Highest, be the Infinite, the Absolute." "You talk so much of reforms: economic, social, political. Leave alone the reforms and mind the reformer." "When thought has no customers, thought vanishes." "Whatever you understand, you are not that. In non-understanding you understand yourself." "Is there anything left that you have not accomplished? And what do you mean by 'purpose'?" "Instantly the message 'I am' and this magnificent world materialized out of 'nothingness'. How amazing!" "It is a non-experiential state. Prior to experiencing, what was my state? Who was there to reply to this?" "How was I in the absence of the message 'I am' - that is, prior to beingness?" "Out of the Absolute non-being state, the beingness together with the manifest world emerged before me." "Who would have witnessed the message 'I am' if my priormost state of the 'non-beingness' was not?." "The creation is self-effulgent and spontaneous. There is no creator." "There are no experiences at all. It is the non-experiential state." "Why should I bother about others? Who else is there? In that state of 'Aloneness', 'I' only exist." "From where have you emerged and where are you proceeding to?" "At present you meekly accept whatever the mind dictates as your own. If the mind goes into silence, where and what are you?" "The blabberings of the mind can have no effect." "Consciousness is the manifest universal life force and cannot, therefore, be individualistic." "Even in the sublime state the mind refuses to believe it is a non-entity." "All paths lead to unreality. Paths are creations within the scope of knowledge. Therefore, paths and movements cannot transport you into Reality, because their function is to enmesh you within the dimension of knowledge, while the Reality prevails prior to it." "Those alone who understand that I, the Absolute, am beyond the states of being and non-being realize my true nature, and all others are fools." "Many acquire so-called knowledge, but whatever is acquired is not true knowledge." "There is no doer. There is no creator of this manifest world. There is no enjoyer; all is happening spontaneously." "Gradually you will realise that as the knower you have no identity with respect to place or form. All perceptible and tangible movements in the universe and world just happen, without any specific reason; that is, there is functioning, rotating, humming, without a purpose." "If I do any thinking at all, it relates to the manifestation and its natural play. I do not think of altering the course of manifestation." "When I concentrated my attention on the point of waking, the Vedas folded their palms in surrender and went into total silence." "He does not involve himself in the play of this beingness, and hence transcends it. He observes the sprouting, nourishing and disappearance of this principle, and knows he is not that principle. He is the witness and knower of that beingness." "Since 'I-am-ness' appears and disappears, I, the Absolute, cannot be that." "What identity of yours right from childhood until now has remained faithful to you? Which is your true identity? As a matter of fact, there is no evidence at all that you were born." "The mind persists as long as the body-identity is there. When this is gone, where is the mind?" "As long as the sense of being or the consciousness dwelling in the body does not realise its true nature, it is bound to identify with the body and all its actions by claiming doership. But as a result of this claim, it is subjected to intense suffering when the body goes into disintegration and approaches death." "Just as space is all-pervading, so the knowledge 'I am' is all-pervading, limitless and infinite. How strange, such a supreme principle is treated as though it is a body! All the sufferings are due to this mistaken identity." "Birth and death are heresays." "There is no question of consciousness needing to enter the body, since it is already everywhere." "If you happen to come across a sage who has realised his true nature, you will not be required to do anything in the way of spiritual disciplines. This is because through his teachings, he will reveal your true nature, as by placing a mirror before you." "In my true state I am everywhere." "If you imbibe fully whatever I have expounded, no more spiritual disciplines will be required of you." "Whatever spiritual and worldly activities are happening through you, they are merely entertainments for passing the time." "Please apprehend this clearly that You - the Absolute - bereft of any body identity, are complete, perfect and the Unborn." "Everything is most wonderfully inexplicable!" "If you get yourself involved in the flow, then you will come to misery. You understand what is the flow? All that maya, the activities. You try to derive pleasure from the activities: this is a product of the illness." "Take one sentence of what has been said here, and stay with it. That is enough: that will lead you to your source. My word, as knowledge, if planted in you, will remove all other words, all concepts." "Even if this body lasts for a thousand years, any experience with it that has come about during that period is necessarily based on this 'I-am-ness', which is based on time, for which I have no use at all." "To exist as a separate individual constitutes the entire problem." "Spirituality or what you call 'religion' is mainly to understand this: that you do not require anything." "Whatever I am telling you is not the truth. The fact is, I cannot describe reality to you, I cannot explain it, because it is beyond expression." "Recede. Recede." "Your beingness, from the Absolute standpoint, is ignorance only." "And what is the primary desire? To BE. When you stay put in beingness for some time, that desire also will drop off." "You are present only; there is not the slightest movement from you. It is winding up the show." "The consciousness is slowly extinguishing itself; knowingly it is disappearing. But nothing affects You, because that is the Absolute." "Maya comes up, subsides again; it goes in cycles, waxing and waning." "This amassing of knowledge is not going to help you, because it is in a dream. This dream will repeat itself." "Anybody coming here will be liquidated." "I assure you that you will attain nothing and you will realise that no attainment is required." "I very clearly see that which has been born. And I also know that I am not that which is born. And that is why I am totally fearless. I am entirely without any reaction to a disease that would otherwise be traumatic." "What remains is the Original, which is unconditioned, without attributes, and without identity: that on which this temporary state of the consciousness has come and gone. It is called Parabrahman, the Absolute." "Even the very principle behind the identities, that is the sense of your beingness, will prove illusory." "He does not even need a God or the knowledge of the Brahman. Once you realise that you are not the body and the mind, you have no needs and demands, then you are one with the manifest consciousness. In due course you are not even the consciousness, when you dwell in the Highest, thus ultimately also transcending the consciousness. Manifest consciousness is the Brahman. Once stabilized in the Brahman, there is no longer any use for knowledge of the Brahman - that is, knowledge of the Self. What can be the use of Brahman to the Brahman? There is no high or low, no real or unreal, no inside nor outside and no dimension of any kind." "The correct understanding will be when you realise that whatever you have understood so far, is invalid." "Whatever information I give is about the spark, the speck of consciousness, which has delivered the manifest universe. I the Absolute am not that speck. But I cannot give any information about Me, the Absolute." "In the domain of the Unborn, there is no place for the 'I am', nor for the sun, the moon, the starts, the cosmos etc." "Nothing is to be done. Then all your riddles will be solved and dissolved. The Primary Illusion - 'I am' - will release her stronghold on you and will get lost." "'I', the Absolute, am not the beingness, 'I am'." "Ignore the mind the way you disregard the crowd you encounter in the streets." "To refer to the sense of being as 'one' is not quite correct. Since in this state only the sense of being prevails, where is the need to say even 'one'? When one looks into one's self, that is when one abides in the self, then there is 'none'." "Do not try to become anything. Do nothing! Without thinking on any of your words, remain quiet. Once a word sprouts it creates a meaning and then you ride on it. You follow the meanings of your words and claim that you are in search of your self. So be wakeful to that state which is prior to the sprouting of words." "All your identities at the body-mind level have been changing continuously, and none of them has been constant and faithful to you. Why then are you attracted to any of these identities by stating 'I am like this' or 'I am like that'?" "Are you the one that grows in height and breadth?" "Yes, you, the Absolute are neither one nor two. But you are prior to both." "You think you are somebody, but you are nothing of the sort." "You will be relieved of all the 'comings and goings' of all your concepts; even your sense of 'I-am-ness' will be liquidated." "Words that are worthy of our true nature and describe our ultimate state are never available." "Go to the root of your beingness. In the process, the beingness will be transcended and the ultimate 'You' only remain, without the knowledge 'you are'. That ultimate state is known as <i>vishranti</i>, which means total rest, complete relaxation, utter quietude etc." "Whenever there is a sense of individuality, personality, or a separateness, you have so many wants. You want to see a movie, you want to hear music, you want to play, you want to have sex, you want to eat fancy foods, you want to consume intoxicant, but when that sense of separateness is not there, when you are one with the totality, these things are not desired. Spirituality or what you call 'religion' is mainly to understand this: that you don't require anything." "There are many persons who have a great attachment to their own individuality. They want first and foremost to remain as an individual and then search, for they are not prepared to lose that individuality. While retaining their identity, they want to find what is the truth. But this process involves getting rid of identity itself. You eventually see that you are not an individual." "First, I am not even conscious; I do not know that I exist, then this consciousness forces itself on that state of unawareness to an extent that we begin to feel that we are conscious. Finally, it forces itself into full consciousness, and I know that I exist, I am there. And that becomes a concept, from which starts the entire world of troubles. In that original state, when you are not aware, there is no trouble of any kind. But once this consciousness makes its presence felt, all the trouble starts. That is not mine, I know this is not mine, but it is forced upon me, and then also I begin to say that it is 'me' - that is the way that identification takes place." "One has to work in the world; naturally, carry on your worldly affairs, but understand that which has come about by itself - that is, this body, mind and consciousness - has appeared in spite of the fact that nobody has asked for it. I did not ask for it; it has come upon my original state which is timeless, spaceless and without attributes. So that whatever has happened is doing this business in the world. The life force and the mind are operating, but the mind will tempt you to believe that it is 'you'. Even if the mind tells you that you are the one who is acting, do not believe the mind." "You think you don't know. That is correct. And whatever you think you know, that is not correct. Whatever you understand is not correct. And whatever you do not understand is correct. The former has a beginning and an end. Whatever you do not understand has no beginning and so no end." "You are not the mind. So whether the mind is quiet or unsteady, how are you concerned?." "As a child, you began gathering knowledge and when you became very old, you forgot everything. So all that objective knowledge was of no use. Now, I am asking, what are you at the moment? Whatever you have gathered as your identity or your form, you are in the process of losing. So what then is your real identity?" "When you will understand what this childhood is, then that is liberation. Paradoxically, you will realise that you are already liberated." "Nirvana means no sample. Nirguna means beyond consciousness." "Small and big you can compare when there is something as a standard. But if what is to be designated as big or small is the only existing entity, how can you compare?." "I take you to the source of the spring. There, water is coming out in a trickle now. This trickle subsequently becomes a river, an estuary, and finally the sea. I take you to the source again and again. Once you arrive at the source, you come to know that actually there is no water." "My word, as knowledge, if planted in you, will remove all other words and concepts." "The knowledge 'I am' itself is a cheat. When the beingness appears, that love for existence is the result of the primary illusion. Once you come to know that you exist, you feel like enduring eternally. You always want to be, to exist, to survive. And so the struggle begins." "The sun has arisen, and there is daylight. Have you put yourself out to do any witnessing? Or do you see effortlessly; therefore, witnessing simply takes place. There is nothing that what you call 'the witness' has to do; witnessing simply happens purely by itself." "Understand a simple fact and that is that any kind of experience can only come upon the consciousness that is there. And you are separate from both that consciousness and the experiences which come on that consciousness." "I am not concerned with taking care of anything. The world has been in existence for millions of years. There have been thousands of avatars and great men, and important personalities. Has a single one of them been able to do anything to change the natural course of events in the world?" "The original state is timeless and spaceless and that is one whole, a Wholeness. Not really one, because if you say 'one' there are immediately two." "What you think you have understood is just a movement in your consciousness. And you are separate from that consciousness. So as far as you are concerned, there is no question of understanding or not understanding." Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj